The List of Trump's Forbidden Words That Will Get Your Paper Flagged at NSF
It's fascism, plain and simple.
Where are all those free speech absolutists that were so noisy the last several years?
(The question is rhetorical; we know where they are)
I’m still waiting for them to say “this is literally 1984… something something instruction manual”
um right here. Do you think folks like me like this? Do you think free speech absolutists voted for trump because if they do I don't think they are really free speech absolutists. Like musk called himself one but that does not make him one. You can't pick and choose.
activism
activists
advocacy
advocate
advocates
barrier
barriers
biased
biased toward
biases
biases towards
bipoc
black and latinx
community diversity
community equity
cultural differences
cultural heritage
culturally responsive
disabilities
disability
discriminated
discrimination
discriminatory
diverse backgrounds
diverse communities
diverse community
diverse group
diverse groups
diversified
diversify
diversifying
diversity and inclusion
diversity equity
enhance the diversity
enhancing diversity
equal opportunity
equality
equitable
equity
ethnicity
excluded
female
females
fostering inclusivity
gender
gender diversity
genders
hate speech
excluded
female
females
fostering inclusivity
gender
gender diversity
genders
hate speech
hispanic minority
historically
implicit bias
implicit biases
inclusion
inclusive
inclusiveness
inclusivity
increase diversity
increase the diversity
indigenous community
inequalities
inequality
inequitable
inequities
institutional
Igbt
marginalize
marginalized
minorities
minority
multicultural
polarization
political
prejudice
privileges
promoting diversity
race and ethnicity
racial
racial diversity
racial inequality
racial justice
racially
racism
sense of belonging
sexual preferences
social justice
sociocultural
socioeconomic
status
stereotypes
systemic
trauma
under appreciated
under represented
under served
underrepresentation
underrepresented
underserved
undervalued
victim
women
women and underrepresented
Lmao..."status"?
"trauma"???
This is ridiculous
So long forensic studies of blunt force trauma!
Can't say "female", but "male" is fine. I wonder
Ah, double plus un-male.
🏁 🏁 🏁 🏁 🏁
"Detection of light polarization of rock inclusions thanks to a grating barrier"
🏁 🏁 🏁 🏁 🏁
Trump and his fellow fascists use terms like DEI to describe anything they don’t like, which means that the word “women” is on the forbidden list while “men” doesn’t initiate a review.
Straight white men are seen through the MAGA worldview as the default human and thus wouldn’t be suspicious and in need of a review. Any other type of identity is inherently suspect.
It’s still not clear what happens on the other side of all this. But when they’re flagging words like “women” and “trauma,” less than three weeks in, it can’t be good.
They're flagging words that have scientific applications that have nothing to do with anything divisive but are also used with things they find divisive. You can't use "barrier" or "historically" or fucking "polarization."
I thought gender was a strange word to ban
THEY ARE PROHIBITING THE USE OF THE WORD "BIASED"
How else do you get rid of all of the biased papers?
Fucking hell, I ain’t allowed to be disabled anymore?
You're allowed to be invisible. That's what they want you to be. That or dead. (I'm sorry, I was disabled for years myself.)
No sir, you’re cured by edict of the government.
Hope you don’t need accommodations or assistance, because if you do, RFK might ship you off to a slave labor camp until your disability is no longer an issue.
They’re gonna be reading a lot of medical papers just from banning the word “trauma,” to say nothing of common words like “female” and “black.”
I'm thinking "black" is kind of an important word in a lot of scientific applications that have nothing to do with medicine or biology.
Publish in German and other languages.
Here's a quick off-the-cuff list of neuroscience domains, not part of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, that will be impacted by this censorship. This is not an exhaustive list, it's just what I thought of after thinking critically for 10 minutes.
It goes without saying this practice is evil and reprehensible. No academic domain should be politically targeted. But it reaches more than their targets. It is dangerous. It is unscientific. It is book-burning. Contact your representatives. Take action. Donate to good causes.
Patient advocacy for people who have had a stroke, or have dementia, or have any number of disabilities, hereditary or acquired.
Any research about the blood brain barrier, including development of drugs that can cross it more efficiently.
Any research about the placental barrier, including development of safe medications for birthing people.
Research into cognitive bias.
Development of statistics (including Bayesian, the hot frontier), machine learning (that's AI for anyone who prefers that term), where the term bias is used to talk about parameters and model performance.
Basic visual and auditory science, where we talk about visual and auditory discrimination.
Sex differences research- this isn't just a social issue, we don't understand how differences in metabolism impact drug metabolism. Can't have female mice anymore, apparently.
Basic research in the function of neurons, which polarize, depolarize, hyperpolarize, etc.
Concussion research and, again, stroke research. The field is broadly known as traumatic brain injury.
Basic research in the function of neurons, which polarize, depolarize, htperpolarize, etc.
This is the one that gets me the most.
Not just neurons- Any research into electromagnetism.
One of the fundamental forces? Too bad. You aren't allowed to talk about that.
Sunglasses with polarized lenses? Worrying about eye cancer is too woke.
I can't imagine that flags will get awards automatically cancelled. Any human (f)MRI work is going to describe its participant inclusion or exclusion criteria, because you can't put people with any risk of metal in their bodies within an MRI machine. Republicans tend to like brain research because the military really likes it. Additionally, virtually all NSF broader impacts will contain at least some speculative verbiage like, "this could help to increase representation." My guess is that flags return an AI or actual person review, which then makes a decision. Some folks at my university have been told that their awards have been cancelled. My awards that have some of these words haven't been cancelled.
The article describes the review process - you're right, these words just flag a paper for further review. I wonder if it's an automatic flagging system like you suggested.
However, it took me almost a decade of rigorous training to understand my research. I sure as hell don't trust an elected or appointed official with a political vendetta to critically read my grants. Leave politics out of peer review.
This is still an emergency situation, IMHO. Like you said, people's grants are being canceled. I see this as a direct attack against higher education.
ETA: It's also a waste of taxpayer money. These grants are already competing for meager funds. Why should we siphon away any resources to "investigate" them?
something something Tiananmen Square
Further proof that the people making the rules have no clue what they’re regulating.
Anybody who has read an academic/science paper knows that the authors go all out with their $5 and $10 words. Make no mistake, they can find some of the best alternatives to any word, and will have no problem sidestepping this blacklist.
That's going to be harder when they have to dance around technical terms like bias in statistics or machine learning
