from the if-you-can’t-do-it-well,-do-it-hard dept
Trump’s second term has elevated a bunch of people who have no idea what they’re doing to positions of power where every blunder is just considered to be the acceptable outcome for an administration that likes breaking things even more than it likes moving fast.
The Department of Government Efficiency still isn’t an official government agency. And it’s headed by a billionaire who’s being encouraged to destroy the things he hates while funneling as many federal tax dollars into his own pocket as is (sub)humanly possible during this re-run of Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride.
The administration’s determination to destroy “DEI” and anything else it considers “woke” means nothing matters — not even massive collateral damage — so long as it’s able to put a few heads on stakes to satiate the bloodlust of its voting bloc.
Capitalizing on the worst aspects of everything — the “looking busy” aspects of bureaucracy with the desire to appease the sitting despot — Trump’s acolytes are doing more harm than cognizable good, and that’s even if you choose to define “good” as “targeted takedowns of things Trump doesn’t like.”
And so we get things like this: Ted Cruz — who has managed to leverage the insults Trump lobbed at his wife into a “useful idiots” position in the second Trump administration — declaring he’s uncovered tons of “woke” wastefulness in the $2 billion in science-related grants handed out by the Biden Administration. While it’s almost certain Cruz and his wife no longer sleep in the same bed (or, possibly, even the same time zone), it’s just as certain Cruz couldn’t be bothered to do anything more than direct some staffer or intern to run a blanket search on terms Cruz imagines might lead him to discover wasteful “woke” science.
How do we know this? Because the journalists at ProPublica performed their own sloppy, AI-enabled search on the database of “woke” grants released by Sen. Cruz.
When Cruz released the database of this allegedly “woke” research earlier this month, we decided to run our own experiment. We asked one of the models powering ChatGPT, which can sift through large amounts of data, to evaluate all 3,500 grant descriptions in the database as if it were an investigative journalist looking for Marxist propaganda, “woke ideology,” or diversity, equity and inclusion. The model tried to give us descriptions of how each project might fit those themes. We were particularly interested in the grants where it came up blank. We then read through the researchers’ full summaries of those and many other grants, including each one described in this story, looking for references to some of the keywords on the list.
Two wrongs don’t make a right, as they say. But pitting one lazy effort against another is extremely revealing. As ProPublica points out, this AI v. AI deathwatch resulted in the discovery of many projects which were determined to be “woke” simply because they referenced or acknowledged social inequalities or latent bias. While those would logically be some of the stuff the Trump administration would consider to be “woke” — you know, the acknowledgement of this nation’s often-racist history — the other stuff ProPublica found caught in Cruz’s anti-woke dragnet is pure science that likely only got flagged by Cruz’s sloppy search just because the research used terms idiots like Cruz apparently think only refer to DEI/”woke” agitating.
The mint plant mentioned in ProPublica’s headline is pulled from a $470,000 grant Cruz claims is “woke” because it uses the word “diversify” in its scientific sense (the biodiversity of the plant itself). It may have also been flagged because the research project expressed its support of any female scientist who joined the team.
Equally ridiculous are these projects, which were all declared woke AF by Cruz and the search results his staff never bothered to vet before posting the database on main.
- Developing a device that could treat severe bleeding. It seems to have caught the committee’s attention for using the words “victims” — as in gunshot victims — and “trauma.”
- Creating biosensors to detect infectious diseases. The grant appears to have been tagged for the repeated use of “POC,” an acronym often used for “people of color” but in this context meaning “point of care” — that is, the place where people receive medical treatment — and “barrier,” referring to a part of the biosensor itself.
- Designing eye-tracking technology for diagnosing and treating concussions. It appears to have gotten flagged for referencing “traumatic” brain injuries and the “status,” meaning the condition, of patients.
There’s nothing “woke” or “DEI” about these efforts. And yet, they ended up in Cruz’s public database — one that’s headlined by Cruz’s assertion of facts not in evidence: “$2 Billion in Woke DEI Grants.” In Cruz’s hurry to supplicate The Boss (lest the boss start insulting him and his loved ones again), he couldn’t be bothered to ensure his publicly-accessible database wasn’t filled with false positives produced by the careless separation of search terms from their context.
Making things worse, this supposed deep dive was performed by staffers with zero scientific expertise, nor the attention span to review everything caught in the anti-woke dragnet.
Evaluating the merits of these awards would require a deep understanding of dozens of scientific fields, from gravitational waves to DNA methylation. But the report describes a crude approach; while staffers did attempt to account for the different ways their keywords can be used, they did not manually review all grants. The report also failed to acknowledge that the NSF has a legal mandate to make science more inclusive of women, racial minorities and disabled people.
Not that any of that matters to Trump or most members of the Republican party. As they have so often stated, “Our feelings don’t care about your facts.” Doing something right doesn’t matter. All that really matters is that something is being done. The bulls are running the china shop. NSF funding has already been shut down by the administration. A court order has blocked the denial of funding, but that’s only good news if we wish to pretend Trump and his buddies will comply with court orders they disagree with. And, so far, we’ve seen absolutely nothing that indicates they will.
Filed Under: censorship, dei, donald trump, fascism, ted cruz, war on woke
