My guess is this will garner attention for use of AI — that's where my attention went as well initially. But there's another layer to this, which is whether a grant should be terminated just because it pertains to DEI, regardless of AI being involved or not.
My guess is you couldn't get a roomful of experts to agree on what "DEI" means; I doubt AI could do better, and even if it could, I'm not sure I'd want that to be the determining factor about whether it would get funded. To the extent it was, I'm not sure it would be a bad thing.
> But there's another layer to this, which is whether a grant should be terminated just because it pertains to DEI, regardless of AI being involved or not.
Another layer?
I think it's the same level of stupidity/shadiness.
I remember (the one time I snuck into NIPS) a buuunch of papers on "fairness", and it was basically: "We have decided that this input should not affect the outcome. Does it? If so, how?"
So that seems like a pretty good actual "what's DEI?" - Does race/gender/sexuality/etc affect some outcome? Should it? If it does affect it and shouldn't, what we can we do about it?
That said... yeah, not gonna get a room full of anyone to agree on that. Starting with that "should".
If you can use a criteria to finance academia [1] you can use the reverse to define what DEI is. Every major corporation had DEI departments and yet it doesn't exist, it's a ghost.
I really hope the backlash to this bullshit finally reaches europe.
Same song and dance for 14 years straight, there is no SJW you're just imagining them, it's just called being a decent human being, they say as they kick me repeatedly in the face.
DEI has nothing to do with experts or any legitimate analysis. It’s in the same basket as woke, CRT, SJW, BLM, and so on -- thought-terminating keywords that the right deploys to focus the ire of their base. If one starts losing its mindshare, a new one gets introduced and propagated. But they all point to the same liberal boogeyman.
>My guess is you couldn't get a roomful of experts to agree on what "DEI" means;
You don't need to, it's clearly defined within existing legal frameworks.
A lot of people including the current administration seem to believe it means "racism against white men," but those people are simply wrong.
> My guess is you couldn't get a roomful of experts to agree on what "DEI" means
let's not pretend that anyone involved cares one bit