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+--- Thread: How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences (/thread-5755.html)
How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences - C C - Jul 17, 2018
https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-identity-politics-harming-sciences-15826.html
EXCERPT: Identity politics has engulfed the humanities and social sciences on American campuses; now it is taking over the hard sciences. The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are under attack for being insufficiently “diverse.”
The pressure to increase the representation of females, blacks, and Hispanics comes from the federal government, university administrators, and scientific societies themselves. That pressure is changing how science is taught and how scientific qualifications are evaluated. The results will be disastrous for scientific innovation and for American competitiveness.
A scientist at UCLA reports: “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by ‘changing’ (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?” Mathematical problem-solving is being deemphasized in favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind.
The National Science Foundation (NSF), a federal agency that funds university research, is consumed by diversity ideology. Progress in science, it argues, requires a “diverse STEM workforce.” Programs to boost diversity in STEM pour forth from its coffers in wild abundance. The NSF jump-started the implicit-bias industry in the 1990s by underwriting the development of the implicit association test (IAT). (The IAT purports to reveal a subject’s unconscious biases by measuring the speed with which he associates minority faces with positive or negative words; see “Are We All Unconscious Racists?,” Autumn 2017.) Since then, the NSF has continued to dump millions of dollars into implicit-bias activism. In July 2017, it awarded $1 million to the University of New Hampshire and two other institutions to develop a “bias-awareness intervention tool.” Another $2 million that same month went to the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University to “remediate microaggressions and implicit biases” in engineering classrooms.
The tortuously named “Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science” (INCLUDES) bankrolls “fundamental research in the science of broadening participation.” There is no such “science,” just an enormous expenditure of resources that ducks the fundamental problems of basic skills and attitudes toward academic achievement. A typical INCLUDES grant from October 2017 directs $300,000 toward increasing Native American math involvement by incorporating “indigenous knowledge systems” into Navajo Nation Math Circles.
The INCLUDES initiative has already generated its own parasitic endeavor, Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER). The purpose of EAGER funding is to evaluate INCLUDES grants and to pressure actual science grantees to incorporate diversity considerations into their research. The ultimate goal of such programs is to change the culture of STEM so that “inclusion and equity” are at its very core.
Somehow, NSF-backed scientists managed to rack up more than 200 Nobel Prizes before the agency realized that scientific progress depends on “diversity.” Those “un-diverse” scientists discovered the fundamental particles of matter and unlocked the genetics of viruses. Now that academic victimology has established a beachhead at the agency, however, it remains to be seen whether the pace of such breakthroughs will continue.
The NSF is conducting a half-million-dollar study of “intersectionality” in the STEM fields. “Intersectionality” refers to the increased oppression allegedly experienced by individuals who can check off several categories of victimhood—being female, black, and trans, say. The NSF study’s theory is that such intersectionality lies behind the lack of diversity in STEM. Two sociologists are polling more than 10,000 scientists and engineers in nine professional organizations about the “social and cultural variables” that produce “disadvantage and marginalization” in STEM workplaces.
One of the study’s directors is a University of Michigan sociologist specializing in gender and sexuality. Erin Cech has received multiple NSF grants; her latest publication is “Rugged Meritocrats: The Role of Overt Bias and the Meritocratic Ideology in Trump Supporters’ Opposition to Social Justice Efforts.” The other lead researcher, Tom Waidzunas, is a sociologist at Temple University; he studies the “dynamics of gender and sexuality” within STEM, as well as how “scientists come to know, and hence constitute, sexuality and sexual desire.” Such politically constituted social-justice research was not likely envisioned by Congress in 1950 when it created the NSF to “promote the progress of science.”
MORE: https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-identity-politics-harming-sciences-15826.html
RE: How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences - Yazata - Jul 17, 2018
(Jul 17, 2018 04:26 AM)C C Wrote: (NSF), a federal agency that funds university research, is consumed by diversity ideology. Progress in science, it argues, requires a “diverse STEM workforce.”
I wonder what kind of argument they could produce to defend that idea. It's obviously false if the word 'requires' is taken literally, since it would imply that no scientific progress could possibly have occurred prior to implementing their inclusion agenda. (Too bad for the Scientific Revolution, for Newton, Darwin and Einstein.) It might make a bit more sense if 'requires' is replaced by - Scientific progress 'is improved and facilitated by' a "diverse STEM workforce".
Obviously a powerful argument can be made that there's lots of female (or black) talent out there that probably could be doing scientific work, and that adding additional talent to the mix would be good for science. That makes excellent sense.
Except that we're more than a generation into the 'inclusion' program, and it doesn't seem to have had any noticeable effect on the rate of "progress in science". If anything, the rate of scientific progress between 1950 and 2018 seems noticeably slower than the rate of scientific progress between 1882 and 1950. (Despite there never having been more scientists at work.)
History doesn't seem to confirm the NSF's thesis. We don't seem to be entering into an uprecedented new scientific Golden Age.
I think that there are lots of reasons why particular research areas advance or alternatively wither. (That's an interesting subject for the history and philosophy of science and I'm sure that there's an abundant literature on it.) But I don't think that having males and females working together (or blacks and whites) speeds up the rate of progress or ensures that any science that results will be better science.
Giving everyone a fair shot might be more fair and more equitable, and hence desirable for that reason. But it isn't necessarily better science.
RE: How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences - Syne - Jul 17, 2018
Lower standards will never produce better science. Just what someone somehow thinks is a more virtuous process, i.e. virtue-signalling.
RE: How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences - Magical Realist - Jul 17, 2018
(Jul 17, 2018 09:03 PM)Syne Wrote: Lower standards will never produce better science. Just what someone somehow thinks is a more virtuous process, i.e. virtue-signalling.
Sounds like an alt right dog whistle...
RE: How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences - Syne - Jul 17, 2018
LOL! So, what, you think lower standards will improve science?
RE: How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences - confused2 - Jul 18, 2018
Freecad is an open source drawing program - very technical, very mathematical and a lot of heavy-duty programming. There is no reward other than being included in the list of credits. The overwhelming majority of names in the credits seem to identify as male (not sure about pinkpony). My name doesn't appear in the credits because I'm a piss poor programmer and an even worse mathematician - it isn't lack of altruism - I'm just not good enough. I use their program to check mine is working properly (it isn't). This is a level playing field - so - why no 50-50 boy/girl balance in the credits? Absence of altruism or lack of ability or 'something else'?
Freecad credits:-
In memoriam: Roland Frank (r-frank) 1970-2017
This version of FreeCAD is dedicated to our friend Roland, who left us in 2017. Roland was one of the pillars of the FreeCAD community. His video tutorials have helped and will still help many people to get started with FreeCAD.
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RE: How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences - RainbowUnicorn - Jul 18, 2018
(Jul 17, 2018 09:03 PM)Syne Wrote: Lower standards will never produce better science. Just what someone somehow thinks is a more virtuous process, i.e. virtue-signalling.
advocating for greater government regulations ?
tax exemption for religous groups that do not directly and finacially evidentially provide secular community support for instance.
all those TV envangelist multi millionaires paying no tax. its as evil as it comes.
RE: How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences - Syne - Jul 18, 2018
(Jul 18, 2018 12:57 AM)confused2 Wrote: Freecad is an open source drawing program - very technical, very mathematical and a lot of heavy-duty programming. There is no reward other than being included in the list of credits. The overwhelming majority of names in the credits seem to identify as male (not sure about pinkpony). My name doesn't appear in the credits because I'm a piss poor programmer and an even worse mathematician - it isn't lack of altruism - I'm just not good enough. I use their program to check mine is working properly (it isn't). This is a level playing field - so - why no 50-50 boy/girl balance in the credits? Absence of altruism or lack of ability or 'something else'?
Thanks for bringing Freecad to my attention. I had been wondering if there was a good, free Cad program out there.
Since high programming and mathematics skill is even fairly rare in men, I would say it's primarily aptitude, followed closely by ability.
(Jul 18, 2018 02:25 AM)RainbowUnicorn Wrote:(Jul 17, 2018 09:03 PM)Syne Wrote: Lower standards will never produce better science. Just what someone somehow thinks is a more virtuous process, i.e. virtue-signalling.
advocating for greater government regulations ?
tax exemption for religous groups that do not directly and finacially evidentially provide secular community support for instance.
all those TV envangelist multi millionaires paying no tax. its as evil as it comes.
Government regulation is only needed to enforce diversity quotas...the opposite of what I want.
Religious groups do support society, just not in any way you are prepared or willing to understand.