Scott analyzes Ted Cruz's database of 'woke' NSF grants and finds that only 40% were actually woke, with many regular science grants included simply for having a mandatory diversity statement.
Longer summary
Scott Alexander analyzes Ted Cruz's database of supposedly 'woke' NSF grants, sampling 100 grants at random. He finds that only 40% were actually woke, with another 20% borderline cases, and 40% completely unrelated to wokeness. Most non-woke grants appeared in the database because they included a seemingly mandatory sentence about helping minorities or women, likely added to satisfy grant requirements. Of the genuinely woke grants, only 10-20% were egregiously bad, while others were mostly benign STEM outreach programs. Scott argues that sorting genuine woke grants from regular science would be easy, taking only a week of work, and criticizes both the Biden administration for requiring diversity statements and Republicans for targeting legitimate research.
Shorter summary