Starting in fiscal 2023, which began Oct. 1, every proposal responding to a solicitation from the Office of Science is required to include a PIER plan, which stands for Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research, to “describe the activities and strategies of the applicant to promote equity and inclusion as an intrinsic element to advancing scientific excellence.” In the words of the announcement, “The complexity and detail of a PIER Plan is expected to increase with the size of the research team and the number of personnel to be supported.”
When I read this new requirement, I went back to the last grant proposal from our group—which involved exploring gravitational waves, the early universe, Higgs boson physics, neutrino cosmology, dark-matter detection, supersymmetry and black-hole physics. What does any of this have to do with diversity and inclusion? Nothing.
I had to stop watching due to nausea. This neatly encapsulates the reasons Marxism always fails and sets a society at each others’ throats. Buzzword, buzzword, blah, blah, blah ad nauseam - literally.
Yeah, but they will put 10 illegal aliens in each $400/night room – only $40 per head. Hey, that room is still going to be a lot more comfortable than the shipping container in which the illegals travelled.
My theory is that the winners of WW1/WW2 did that primarily by being able to build a larger coalition that still acted cohesively. In many ways, American culture has fundamentally been better at integrating outsiders and forming effective communities.
Unfortunately, this practice has turned from a pragmatic strategic tenet into a cargo cult that’s being actively gamed by outside groups, who are often self-interested nationalists, straight-out exclusionary racists, or even genocidal maniacs.
Maybe this has to do with the senescence of organizations or religions, as Salthe describes it:
Based in the formal identity of Boltzmann’s interpretation of physical entropy (as disorder) and the Shannon / Wiener formulation of information carrying capacity (as variety), my own version of it advances the plausible inference (supported by data from many different fields) that the number of informational constraints necessarily increases during the development of dissipative structures as they mature and senesce. Thermodynamically, development of individual dissipative structures follows a canonical pattern of mass-specific energy dissipation increase followed by a decrease into senescence, as systems appear to become entrained by the minimum entropy production principle of Ilya Prigogine (A.I. Zotin, and of Sven Jørgensen as well). I postulate this decline to result from an increased rigidity imposed upon systems by information overload, thus interpreting senescence fundamentally as a general constraint of materiality.
I’d summarize it with the following maxim: More civilizations collapse from indigestion than from starvation.
On schools, infra-structure, the whole lobbyist scene, the problem isn’t too few laws and regulations but too many. We can’t build infrastructure projects without allowing lawyers to wet their beaks, not just instantly but for years and years. The nuclear industry in the United States is paralyzed by circling legal buzzards. We all know the schools are broken, but there is no possible way to fix the situation, and any attempt is met by frantic opposition. We can’t fire incompetent teachers or promote good ones. After a while we stop trying.
We live in an era in which that government of the government, by the government, and for the government apparently can never vanish from the Earth, but instead will continue to grow. Possony and I were working on The Strategy of Progress, an attempt to look at what conditions actually bring real progress to human affairs. Our initial conclusions weren’t terribly encouraging. Human history consists of a strong and unrestrained pressure to convert output into structure.
The structure may at first be useful, but eventually it merely exists for its own sake, and after a while grows far beyond necessity, even beyond endurance. The Iron Law always prevails. Sometimes there are such rapid gains in output that the structure can’t stifle them; but slowly it continues to increase, to regulate, and to control. Examples are the various Industrial Revolutions. The most recent was the Computer Revolution in which the various computer related industries – Silicon Valley, Silicon Sagebrush, the Massachusetts Corridor – were able to leap ahead. It’s also one of the most discouraging because it shows just how quickly the structure can gain control over a vigorous industry.
Shame they never got to write The Strategy of Progress.
The US is like a startup that has built too high a cost of operations into its systems. When they need to pivot, they cannot change the things that need to change. We need to elect an outsider (like Trump), a non-career-politician (like Trump), who doesn’t have any friends in government (like Trump), who is self-supporting (like Trump), who can abolish federal agencies right and left (like Trump, the loser, who couldn’t bring himself to piss off people on the way to Making America Great Again, spit).
