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Can the ideological emphasis on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) slow down the progress of science? 

Our guest today is Anna Krylov, professor of chemistry at the University of Southern California and an advocate for maintaining meritocracy in scientific funding and evaluation. She joins John Tomasi to discuss critical tensions in today's scientific landscape.

Krylov addresses the potential social costs of slower scientific progress due to ideological influences, particularly DEI, which she argues undermines public trust in scientific institutions. This episode delves into the fraught terrain of funding in academia and the impact of DEI mandates, examining how these changes may contribute to public mistrust and the erosion of merit-based systems.

In This Episode:

• The effects of DEI mandates on scientific funding

• The importance of merit-based funding in academia

• The rise of "citation justice" and its impact on scholarly recognition

• Gender quotas and their potential implications for scientific standards

• Critical social justice influences on scientific practices

About Anna:

Anna Krylov is a Professor of Chemistry at USC and a leading figure in theoretical and computational quantum chemistry. Born in Ukraine, she earned her degrees from Moscow State University and the Hebrew University. Krylov's research focuses on methods for electronic excited species and has led to over 300 publications. She has received numerous awards, including the Dirac Medal, and is a Fellow of various scientific societies. An advocate for gender equality in STEM, she also promotes academic freedom and authored the impactful paper "The Peril of Politicizing Science."

Links:

Censorship in the Sciences Conference: https://dornsife.usc.edu/cesr/censorship-in-the-sciences-interdisciplinary-perspectives/

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Anna Krylov, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Anna Krylov: Thanks for having me.

John Tomasi: I want to begin just by introducing you to our audience and inviting you to say a few things about yourself. You're the USC Associates Chair in Natural Sciences and Professor of Chemistry at USC. You are what I think of as a really rare three-tool athlete, rare in the academy. On the one hand, you're a scientific superstar. You're well-known, I think best known for the spin-flip method. I took a year of college chemistry. I don't know what the spin-flip method is. I tried to do some studying on it the last few days. I was like, oh yeah, this is why I was not very good at chemistry, did not become a chemist. But you're a very distinguished scientist. You were elected to the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, I think last year, two years ago maybe. You're also, on your second tool, you're also a popularizer of science, bringing it to people, showing the importance of science to young people and just the general population. You've made, I think, at least two films that I know of, and you're also a strong and courageous defender of open inquiry. So we're going to talk about the politicization of science and DEI and the threats to scientific method. I wonder if we could begin our conversation now by just talking a bit about what science is. And, you know, I've read a number of your articles, you very eloquently describe what science is. And one of the things you talk about is, or a couple of things you talk about, you talk about liberal epistemology. And you sometimes talk about the Mertonian method and Mertonian norms, Robert K. Merton, who is a sociologist of science. Can you just tell us, tell our listeners, you know, what is science, what is, and do it any way you like. If you want to talk about Mertonian norms, that would be great. If you want to talk about liberal epistemology, just, you know, what is science? How does it, what are the, what are the assumptions behind it? What makes it work? Why is it, why should we care?

Anna Krylov: Yeah, it's, I should say with full disclosure that until a few years ago, I wasn't concerned about this fundamental questions about how science works. Because I'm, as many other people, is practicing scientists and practicing scientists. And most people just learn science, practice of science by doing it. And things like epistemology and all these principles, it's, we kind of get it by following our mentors and getting immersed in the reality-based community. But we do not think much.

John Tomasi: The, the, sorry, use the phrase, getting immersed in the reality-based, the reality-based community.

Anna Krylov: Yeah, I like this term, you know, Jonathan Rauch wrote his wonderful book, The Constitution of Knowledge, where he describes exactly these concepts in a way that anyone, including a simple nerdy physicist, can understand.

John Tomasi: I, I should, I should, I should, I should tell you that when, when Jonathan's book came out, Jon Haidt and I both read it and we were spending a lot of time just talking about the book. And for a while, we, John and I would joke that it was like, we should make a shrine to Jonathan Rauch and his book in HxA because we'd burn candles and incense because it's, it's, it's remarkable.

Anna Krylov: Yeah, I would be the first to come to, you know.

John Tomasi: So, so, so, so tell us.

Anna Krylov: So, so it explains very nicely about how science is actually done, how we get to agree, how do we can, how we come to discover truth. And if I can't distill the main principles, there are not that many, so the one which, again, taken by granted by practicing scientists is that objective reality exists. It's there, right? It exists and therefore it can be studied. The second principle is that the truth exists and it can be discovered and understood. And that claims to truth are open to scrutiny that comes to the reality-based community. And only those claims that withstands the scrutiny of these communities, they become accepted as provisional truths. And that no one has a last word. So everyone can scrutinize claims to truth, revisit the existing paradigms, and that's how science moving along.

John Tomasi: And Merton refers to that as organized skepticism.

Anna Krylov: Correct, yeah. Merton is also a great, great intellectual who explains also very clearly what the important principles are. You mentioned them. They go by the acronym CUDOS, C for communalism, that we share our findings and values, and that's very clearly seen in among practicing scientists, you know, despite the competition, despite the ambition, people share their findings and results, and that's one of the very important principles that scientists follow. U is for universalism, that the identity of a scientist doesn't matter. So the claims are evaluated by their merit, by how well they describe objective reality, and not by the identity of the scientist, be it identity in terms of prestige, of seniority, or identity in, you know, identity politics sense, gender race, and so on. So D stands for disinterestness, disinterestness, disinterestness, that scientists do not benefit from their findings. And again, some people contested now and say, well, what about the patents, what about royalties that some scientists get? Well, what about salaries that we get?

John Tomasi: Sure.

Anna Krylov: So that's all true, but I think it still stands because ultimately scientists do science because they are driven by the desire to understand how the world's world. So that's really major drive and major motivation. So, and then, yeah, O for organized skepticism and that, or, and yes, and that is exactly that, that all ideas are open for scrutiny. There are no ideas that are accepted as sacred truths and beyond criticism. So, and these principles, again, as I said, we do not study them usually in some class or anything like that, but we absorb them and we just follow them as we, as we become scientists.

John Tomasi: Anna, can I, can I, can I, may I just, may I just add that what you just described, that process of lack of study on the foundational questions of what science is. You, you jump into science, you do your chemistry lab and you're, when you're a sixth grade kid reading your, your textbook and then experimenting, then you just find out you're actually good at it. And you get, you go to Hebrew University and you're recognized as being really good at it. And then you go to Berkeley and they say, yeah, you're even better than we thought. You're, you're, you know, you're a start. That's a path that most academics kind of experience. And most of us across fields, and this isn't true in the humanities and in the sciences, we don't study open inquiry. We don't study viewpoint diversity. We don't study constructive disagreement or the methods of these things. We just sort of do them because we love them and we're curious and we are, we're good enough at them to have a career in it. But it's kind of interesting at a certain point in our careers, many of us at HxA and, you know, you, of course, as a member, we started thinking, wait a minute, what's this thing we're doing? What's this, what's the process itself? I want to mention something too, just to our audience, but also just to you. Before we came on the air, I mentioned to you this, this, this essay by Michael Polanyi, the Republic of Science, which I, is one of my all time favorite articles. It may be my favorite article anywhere. I'm not a scientist, but that essay picks up some of those Mertonian points that you were mentioning. Especially, I think, perhaps the communalism and the universalism. You may remember, you mentioned you haven't spent a while since you looked at that, that, that article, but he has this analogy in there. He talks about what scientists do is like a group of people making a puzzle together in full view of each other. And if you think about people making a puzzle spread on a table, looking at each other, how they're working on it, by watching what you do over there, some scientist or some philosopher, someone working in your discipline, whatever it might be, I can see better what I can do where I am here. And I'm learning from you and you're learning from me. We're all doing this in full view of each other, which is a fundamental condition. It doesn't matter now what your status is, you know, who your, whatever your identity is. It's such, you're, can you put pieces together? Are you making, are you solving something that interests me? And that affects the things that I'm going to solve too. I just, I just wanted to mention that essay to our, to our listeners. Again, it's called The Republic of, The Republic of Science by Michael Polanyi. It's a great read and it's a really nice way to get into these more foundational, more foundational issues. Is there more you want to say about liberal epistemology? I think to start talking about some of the challenges to that, that, that approach. Should we shift to that now?

Anna Krylov: Yeah. Well, maybe like one more thing about liberal epistemology. I think an important principle, which sounds for many people as something so trivial that it doesn't even worth mentioning. But as we will move towards attacks on liberal epistemology, we will see that it's also contested by the other side. And this maxim is that knowledge is power. Knowledge is a good thing and we should strive to attain it. Knowledge fundamentally benefits the humanity and drives the technological progress, increases quality of life for everyone. And also ultimately increases emphasis and improves humanity and contributes to rise of humanistic ideas, tolerance, and cooperation. So, and as you already forewarned, yeah. So, now we see that all these principles of liberal epistemology, of Mertonian norms in science are being challenged. And that, what was very shocking for me as a practicing scientist, to see how these ideas actually gain traction. Because to us, it sounds like a complete nonsense and gibberish. And, you know, here, I just, I will have to read it because, yeah, I do not want to spoil it. So, here are some, yeah. So, some statements that, it's not actually paraphrase, it's something that I took notes by listening to a distinguished philosopher of science who is presenting a postmodern view on what science is. And she said, knowledge is not power. Those in power control knowledge. And knowledge is used to perpetuate power. So, another statement is that there is no objective reality. It just doesn't exist. There are multiple narratives. You tell your narrative, I tell my narrative, and there is no way to say that the one is correct or not. And the biggest part of this is that they say that claims to truth are to be evaluated based on identity of the scientist. So, and we see this, so, again, you know, when I heard for the first time this sort of statements, I thought, okay, it's something so crazy. And only people in some philosophy departments can come up with these crazy ideas and they will never gain traction outside of this little intellectual echo chambers.

John Tomasi: I have to defend philosophy for a moment. I think it began in English departments, just for the, I just need to say that. And also, I also want to add, you know, we talked a minute ago about liberal epistemology. And what you're now describing, those quotations that you read are sometimes described as standpoint epistemology. That, in fact, what we know depends on what our narrative is from what we see it from our own perspective. And there are many different perspectives, so there's many different realities. That's kind of the background, I think, to some of the points you were just making. But please go on.

Anna Krylov: Yeah, which is like, you know, for a physicist or chemist, it's a crazy idea. Because, you know, if you go on the rooftop of one of these nice tall buildings that I see in the background, and you jump off, you know exactly what happens with you. And it doesn't matter about, you know, your gender identity, your racial background, your social status. You know, the reality is there, and it will take care of it. But, yeah, so these ideas, unfortunately, are now not only found their way into science, but some of them are shaping practice of science. And, you know, we can talk about examples of that. So, I think it's a very dangerous trend, and it's a big threat to the integrity of science, to the ability of science to do what it's supposed to do. And that worries me a lot. That's what ultimately led me to write these papers that you mentioned that try to...

John Tomasi: May I have one of the... You know, I think the first essay of yours that I can remember reading was The Peril of Politicizing Science, 2021, maybe, which is just a fat... I think it was a soloed-authored piece, as I remember. And then you also have your sort of epic, you and your group of co-authors, an amazing group of co-authors, this essay in defense of merit in science. I think there were 29 or 30 super distinguished colleagues, two Nobel Prize winners, also sort of a who's who of HxA, people like Dorian Abbot and Jerry Coyne and Lee Jussim, Glenn Loury, others, but an incredible who's who. Let me just put a label on something. So you were quoting some postmodern conceptions. And sometimes people describe that critique, that school of thought, which means to be challenging liberal epistemology. They describe it as critical social justice. That's going to be now... So critical social justice is making its way from English departments, I believe, into other departments, and now sort of leaping across the two cultures on university campuses into the scientific community. Can you tell us a little bit about how does critical social justice, how has it jumped into science, and where do we see it? What domains of science is critical justice theory influencing?

Anna Krylov: Yeah, so for me, this critical social justice feels like almost nostalgic, like a deja vu, because it reminds me it's very closely related to the Marxism and all these ideas that were forcibly educated and schooled at our time at Moscow State University. So, and I really, you know, I could go and pull out my old notebooks and refresh my memories about the basic concepts of that. But, yeah, so it's a mixture of postmodern and Marxist ideas, and it's slightly dusted over, and some terms have changed. But, you know, I can summarize its tenets in the context of science as following. So, basically, they say everything, including science, is racist, sexist, and colonial. And we heard it in Soviet times that everything is, you know, bourgeois and oppressed. So, the existing social inequalities and unequal representations are due to systemic racism and sexism in the present. So, that's another tenet, another postulary. So, everything they say, including academia, is about power struggle between oppressors and oppressed. So, again, we were taught about it since grade school in Russia, that everything is about struggle of proletariat and bourgeois. So, everything, so practical now, now we are coming to practical consequences, this idea is, again, following Marx, who was, I think, you probably can correct me because I do not remember the quote verbatim, who said that the job of philosophers used to be to understand the world. But now, he says, it's time to put it in practice and change the world. That's right. So, critical social justice, that's the justice part. This tries to change the world. And in the context of science, they say that everything, including science, science education, should be dismantled and rebuilt to ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion, in quotation marks, because, you know, we can talk about what it actually means. And another important practical aspect of this critical social justice is the idea that those who are not with us are against us. And therefore, you know, they must be punished, suppressed, and, you know, like, we cannot have conversation with them. They are the enemies, and we should dish out, you know, punishment and ultimately get rid of them. So, this is a set of ideas of critical social justice, how they manifest themselves in science. And now, unfortunately, we see how these ideas made their way into practice of science, into science policies, and shape such critical domains as scientific publishing. So, that's one of the pillars of this constitution of knowledge, scientific publishing. And now, we see how it's taken over and severely compromised by these critical social justice ideas. Science funding, again, another critical component of successful scientific enterprise, now taken by these ideas, and that are antithetical to the merit-based approach. And that has a huge effect in practice of science and what is happening now. And also, such important domains like hiring and promoting of scientists and awards and recognition and so on. So, I think it's a very dangerous trend, and unless it can be reversed, we will see serious consequences. We already see some of the consequences, I would say, that American science is dropping behind by many metrics behind China and losing its preeminence. And I think it's important due to this change and how it's done.

John Tomasi: I want to talk about what the consequences are, but let's just pause for a minute, for a little bit longer and talk about what exactly. So, you sort of listed, there are sort of three buckets, I think, or areas. There's, we could say, research, and there's funding, which, you know, these are connected areas, of course. And then there's citations. Can we just say a little bit about, let's say a little bit more, if we can, about those three denominators, like with publishing. I sometimes people hear, I sometimes increasingly hear people talk about citation justice. What is citation justice in the STEM, in the world of STEM? Has citation justice affected, can you tell us what it is and how, do you see it in the world of STEM, in your world?

Anna Krylov: Yeah, that's because most kind of clear-cut example of how this ideology is averse science. So, when they write scientific paper, you, they, a typical chemistry paper will have quite a number of references, citations. Like, you know, my papers could have easily like 200 citations, because first you need to, when you write a paper, you need to introduce the topic and explain what is the current state of knowledge. So, you cite important original papers of what people achieved in this field, and then also some influential reviews in this field that give a reader a good introduction and background to the field. Then, when you make certain claims about your results, you compare it with what other people were doing. So, you cite relevant work, saying that, you know, this experiment or this calculation came to this conclusion with this data, and here are our data. And they agree, disagree, you know, put additional dimension on it. So, there is this aspect. And basically, citations are very important, and they have very specific role, you know, to provide background, to give credit to previous work, and to support new results and claims, and put them in the context of what is known and where open questions are. Now, citation justice, like, in the same mindset of critical social justice, it says that, okay, we do not really have pursuit of knowledge, we have power struggle, and knowledge is, you know, scientific practice is a way to perpetuate the oppression and power structures and so on. So, they came with this idea that citations are unfair, and that there are excluded, epistemologically excluded groups that are not cited with sufficient frequency, and that's our role as scientists is to do justice. And by what they understand justice, it means that not to cite white men, but cite women, racial minorities, gender minorities, and so on. So, for example, if I write a paper on quantum mechanics, and quantum mechanics was put forward, you know, in the 19th century, and obviously most quantum people who developed quantum mechanics were men, with a couple of exceptions, with Marie Curie and Lise Meitner. So, basically, these people would say, no, no, no, no, your paper is not gender balanced, you need to go over your citations and find some minoritized, that's their terms, colors, and replace citations. And, you know, John, what is funny is that there are even software tools for that. And some journals recommend authors voluntarily, completely voluntarily, to run your paper through these automatic tools that will assess gender balance. And they say, well, Anna, your paper is not gender balanced, it doesn't have 50% citation to women, you know, do something.

John Tomasi: But let me, let me, let me, let me, let me just ask on this, ask you on this now. So, you're a woman who came through a very traditionally male field. You don't disagree that there's been some injustice in the past, that there's been exclusion of certain people based on race and gender, for example. Our elite universities in the U.S. have only recently become open to minorities and women, even. So, you don't, you don't dispute the claim that there's been a history of oppression or exclusion.

Anna Krylov: Absolutely, yeah.

John Tomasi: But, but, but tell us how you think about that and, and, and how this is a different, this is a different, this is something different than that.

Anna Krylov: Yeah, the world was very different quite a short time ago. So, and I'm, you know, big fan of science history and I read many books that describe paths of women in science. Marie Curie biography or Lise Meitner or others, maybe less famous, but nevertheless important figures. So, the world was very different. Women cannot pursue science in many places. Marie Curie had to go and work as a governess for quite a few years to raise some money such that she could go from Poland. Poland and Russia didn't admit women to universities and to get to study in Sorbonne in Paris, that was, in Paris, that was admitting women. So, I'm old enough to remember the climate in science, which was not very, well, I wouldn't say open, but it wasn't encouraging women. Like, I told you how my mother, like, didn't, didn't feel it's a good idea for a woman to go into science because it's just wrong, wrong career. And I've been in many places, even when I was a postdoc in Berkeley, I was for basically, I think, entirely two years, I was the only woman at our group seminars, where there were, like, a couple of, you know, a dozen plus of postdocs and students. And I was the only one there and the only one who didn't wear glasses that made me double excluded. So, you know, my senior colleagues who are still working can tell really heartbreaking stories about how women were shortchanged with resources and kind of pushed to the, not recognized fully for their merit at my time when, I do not know, like about 15 years ago, 20 years ago, we did have a situation where you would see that you have this discrepancy between, in recognition of work by women and discrepancy in terms of conference invitations and awards and so on. So these things existed, they were very real, but we need to stay grounded in the reality and see what is the current situation. And you do not need to take my word for it, some serious scholars, Stephen Ceci from Cornell, social psychologist, he looked at the state of women in STEM currently, and he and his co-authors, they carried out detailed study where they pulled out all papers, all data from the literature that investigated the existence of biases against women in STEM. So they ploughed through all this data and did very careful analysis, and they came to the conclusion that in the past 10 or 20 years, so that's the margin, they say, there is no evidence of biases against women in STEM in the following domains, in publications, in grant funding, in recommendation letters, in hiring. In hiring, actually, they show evidence of bias in favor of women, which, you know, yeah, my experience now confirms that. And the only domain when they found evidence of bias against women is teaching evaluations. So somehow in teaching evaluations they did. So, and that, you know, I think it's a great finding. It's uplifting. It means that, okay, glass ceilings is gone. So it's a great evidence of progress, how much, how far we went as a society, how the situation changed for women, but some people just are not willing to accept it, and they continue to make claims contrary to the reality that somehow we have sexist discrimination against women in the present, right now. So, you know, evidence doesn't support it. And then there is additional kind of line of thought, and I hear it very often expressed by sometimes very well-meant people, meaning people, they say, well, yes, Anna, so like you said, there was a huge unfairness against women and minorities in the past. Therefore, we need to do something now to redress these past injustices. And to me, it doesn't make any sense, like, you know, if you start discriminating against men now, it's not going to change anything for this generation of past women that were denied opportunities. You know, we don't have time machine to go back and redress inequalities. And what we do in the present pertains to the present. It doesn't change the past. So we should be grounded in the reality.

John Tomasi: May I offer an observation? And I'd love to hear what you think about this. When you talk about injustices towards women, for example, in science, historical injustices, I think your conception of injustice is always tied to the idea of merit. It sounds like as though when you're talking about people not being cited or not giving research opportunities or whatever it might be. In every single case, it seemed to me, as I was listening to you, I was thinking there's a baseline you have of merit being what should be. Merit determines what should be. And deviations from merit, at times when merit's not recognized when women are excluded from labs, for example, or their findings are not taken seriously, or their lectures or their teaching are not evaluated in a fair way. Those are all deviations from the ideal of merit. Is that right?

Anna Krylov: Yes. Yes. Merit in me is grounded in reality because merit is, you know, how good you are, how good your work is, what your accomplishments are. And that's something that we can evaluate objectively. Maybe it's not, you know, this 100% reliability. There might be some, there might be some situations when it's difficult to compare to, you know, to work side by side or to people. But overall, merit exists, can be evaluated, because ultimately it's grounded in reality. And deviations from merit, yeah, that's what I think, what I consider to be injustice and unfairness when people are not evaluated based on their merit.

John Tomasi: And so you just added another piece, I think. You just said that merit means connected to reality. And that's interesting because it sort of sets up that contrast that we were talking about a few moments ago. You have people who advocate the postmodernist approach that there's not truth, that's all standpoint knowledge. They're skeptical of merit as an ideal, right? So they reject that conception of what, they don't identify justice and injustice based on whether merit was recognized or not. They identify justice or injustice with some different criteria. For example, identity politics or some conception of what an equitable arrangement might have been. I wonder if we could, if we can dig in a little bit about, just help us understand about STEM funding and STEM research. How has DEI affected funding? I'm aware that during the Biden administration, there are at least two executive orders that had to do with, I think, but they used the word inclusion, I think, unfortunately, but they used the word inclusion, talking about funding, mandating, mandating how funding in science should go, federal funding, NSF grants, for example, certain Department of Education programs, NEH, National Endowment for Humanities, too. Can you say a little bit about funding in science and how DEI has come into that? What do you see?

Anna Krylov: Yeah, maybe, John, I will get to it, but maybe, can I tell you another short story about...

John Tomasi: Please, please, let's do it any way you want.

Anna Krylov: A little bit more story, which is, I wanted to explain my first exposure to the concept of merit. And it happened around the same age when I decided to be a scientist. And in Russian language, we actually do not have the word merit. We do not have the word pluralism, privacy, so many, many terms just don't exist in Russian. But the concept definitely existed. And after, you know, like, my mother scolded me for my idea to be a scientist, and after she saw that I am persistent with my determination, she came back and sat me down for a serious conversation. So I was like, I do not know, in seventh grade. And she said, look, you know, honey, I know you are ambitious. I see that you are very smart. You want to do what you want to do, you are stubborn, it's all good. But she said, look, seriously, you cannot become a scientist because argument number one, we do not have connections, she said. We do not have connections in Russian scientific circles, which means that you will have very difficult time to advance. You will be sitting there in the back of the lab, writing thesis, PhD thesis after one another for sons and daughters of those who have connections. And, you know, you won't be able to. And then she said the second argument is that, well, you know, you need to think about how you are going to provide for your family and what are you going to bring home and because in Russian economy, you know, like everything was in short supply and money meant nothing. And she said, yeah, like you should go and take a job where you can be closer to some material goods so you can bring some food home or, you know, some textiles or whatever. And what are you going to bring from university, like pens or notebooks? And she had very good reason to make these two points. And that's when I first time, you know, started to think about this idea of merit versus, you know, all these structures of corruption or nepotism or, you know, social hierarchies that work against merit. And actually for me, you know, I ended up in a place where meritocracy was at play, like when I came to Hebrew University, I, well, first of all, I didn't speak any language to, you know, like to communicate. So it was quite difficult. But when I get to communicate with my future advisors, we very soon started to write equations. And through that, you know, we established a contact and he was, he said, I do not know, he said that he was able to see a merit in my preparation and my understanding of mathematics. And I get my foot in the door. I get my chance to advance. So, yeah, the same applies for subsequent stages of the career. Like in some instances, I had to work maybe harder than others because of difficult start. But what was important is that I was judged largely by my merit. And that allowed me to get my job and to advance.

John Tomasi: So, so, so may I just, may I just say that's a, that's a fabulous story about your mother. That's just really, it's great. But something I'm hearing you say also is that in your experience, being part, entering into a meritocracy at Hebrew University, for example, was for you a way of opening doors. It was meritocracy was an opportunity for you to move through, into society, into a position that you never could have gone to without merit, without a meritocracy. So it had a, it's interesting because the, but there's the, there's a progressive flag that the defenders of DEI and the postmodern worldview sometimes carry around as they're the vanguard of progress and opening and liberation and so on. But what I'm hearing you say is that in your experience, it was meritocracy, that strict demanding discipline of excellence, which opened the possibility for you to have the path of life that you've had, that you've, that you've walked.

Anna Krylov: Yes. And that's one of the reasons I'm so, I feel so strongly about defending meritocracy. And I'm not alone. You know, you can find many more scientists that can tell you similar stories that came from very modest background and they get to become what they became because their skills, their talents, their work was recognized, you know, first to standardize tests, then through, you know, their accomplishments and so on. Many black scholars make the same point and their careers show the same trajectory. Glenn Loury, for example, he wrote very eloquently about his, his life path and how meritocracy helped him to, to came to this distinguished position from a very, again, very difficult start in life. And as you and I both know, Glenn was the first tenured black professor of economics at Harvard. And he's told me in part because he was working on equations and difficult, difficult problems in economics where it was like, can you do the math or not? And he could do the math. So he just could show them that, which is similar to your experience, I think. And he moved through the system because in high school, a teacher recognized his talent and then he was able to get the fellowship and his path was difficult. He was telling that he had to work a second job to unload train cars at night to make the ends meet. I had to work a second job when I was in graduate school, taking cleaning jobs before going to lab to make our ends meet. So it wasn't easy, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that I was judged by the merit. Now, was it fair that I had to do cleaning jobs and some people didn't? I do not know. I think it's an unimportant question. I think it's unproductive to kind of going and trying to ask what was fair, what is fair and what we should focus on, whether we see fair treatment of people based on their accomplishments. But let's get back to the funding question because I really think it's one of the most important.

John Tomasi: Please, please. Tell us what you see. Most of our audiences are not scientists. Some are, of course. But can you just tell us about what the experience is? Has DEI come into science and funding? What do you see out there?

Anna Krylov: DEI came into funding in a major way. And I think that's arguably most important domain in the practice of science because funding is a lifeline for scientists. If you do not have funding, you cannot do the hiring process itself because you cannot stay in academia without funding. And American funding system, I thought it was great, especially when compared to other countries, to European countries, to Latin America, to Russia. And these countries still struggle in developing meritocratic funding system and the systems that they have in place. The biggest problem for these countries is not the lack of funding or short, you know, lack of resources, but how funds are distributed. How, you know, how, you know, things are not given by the merit, but by some connection and all that. Now, American science used to operate on meritocratic principles. So, proposals were evaluated based on, in the very rigorous process of peer reviewing and panels, where people look at the validity of proposed ideas on the quality of preliminary results, if they're there, in the potential impact of proposed work, and also on the track record of proposers, what they accomplished before and, you know, how good, how qualified they are to do it. And, of course, also in different funding agencies, one of the people look at how well the proposed work aligns with the mission of the funding agencies. For example, NIH is dedicated to research related to human health. NASA is dedicated to space exploration. The Department of Energy is dedicated to energy research and so on. So, and again, you know, like, I should say, maybe right away is that the system wasn't perfect. You know, nothing is ever perfect. So, you can hear about stories how some great proposal from a future Nobel laureate was trashed and not funded at some point. So, that's all happened. It happened to me. Many people have these examples. Now, but what is important is that on a long run in bulk, the process worked. And I remember when I was frustrated with my failures with early proposals, my colleagues said, look, you know, calm down. Like, do your best next time. And you should know that cream rises to the top. You will get it. So, it's frustrating when it doesn't come right away. But, and people had trust in the system and they saw myself how it works. So, what happens now? And it started, well, it started gradually, but then, you know, we experienced a sudden change. What we see now is that, you know, can you put dates on, I'm sorry, can you put, can you put some dates on this for us?

John Tomasi: Like, roughly, when did you start seeing a change happening in the funding criteria in science?

Anna Krylov: Around maybe, there was, again, some background, you know, things that creeped through that started actually around 90, when I started my work. That was when National Science Foundation introduced what they call broader impact criteria in addition to intellectual merit. And at the time, that sounded like something rather benign and maybe even positive when they say that, you know, we want you to explain how you work, benefit society at large. And then, you know, in the beginning, people thought, well, you know, I train workforce. I train graduate students to become experts in this, that benefits the society. Or, you know, my theoretical work can lead to better solar energy. These things. But very soon, because this criterion was very work, it became more and more a vehicle to implement diversity. And they have now a big part of it is increasing participation, which sounds like, again, also a good thing. There is nothing wrong with increasing participation, but what we see increasingly expected and what people kind of push towards to is to implement some identity-based practices in how you hire, how you mentor your students, and how you do the work. So, that was kind of a slow creep. But then, fast kind of change happened around 2022, 2023. And the first thing that really shocked me was we received email from the Department of Energy. So, the head officer that informed us that starting from 2023, every proposal submitted to Department of Energy, and Department of Energy, as I said, that's agency that has very specific mission, promoting, you know, energy research, should include PIER plans. It's a critical plan for promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, and that this plan will be used as part of proposal evaluation, and proposals that do not have this plan, will not be even reviewed, and so on. And that, and if I may say that, I believe that was a direct result of the two executive orders that I mentioned before. Correct, yes. That was, this and also appointments, the head of DOE was one of the appointees by Biden administration that came from very modest scientific background, but an extensive background in diversity, equity, and inclusion. So, and the same, you know, like, if you look at NASA programs, they now also require this, they call it inclusion plan, which, now, what is important is, yeah, some people, when you talk about this thing, they say, well, you know, what's wrong with that? You can write how inclusive your group is, and how you will support everyone equally, and how you will promote people based on their merit and not their identity, and so on, but don't fool yourself. So, it's not what they want, and we have plenty of evidence for that. For example, NASA put these multiple documents on their website, PowerPoints prepared to help PIs to understand, the proposers to understand what is expected from these inclusion plans. And they say that, well, your inclusion plans should demonstrate understanding of systemic barriers and discrimination related to the proposer team. So, basically, you cannot say that in our domain, in our little team, we have no barriers and no discrimination. You have to first illustrate the knowledge, so you cannot get out of it easily. Then they want, now, NASA, for example, they expect you to put some specific time of your personnel and also some resources for executing these DEI activities. Now, even more, they want you to hire external DEI consultants and pay them from the grant. That will, you know, consult you and oversee your activities, because, obviously, like simple chemists cannot be trusted to execute DEI properly. And if you look at NIH, NIH have a lot of also very detailed explanations of what they expect to see and what they want to see in the reporting, in proposals. You can also see it, you can also read the abstracts and sometimes these plans when they're available or funded proposals. So, you will see that there is no mistake of what they want you to do and say. So, it's not something that makes sense. If you put something that makes sense, your grant will be trashed.

John Tomasi: And this is another sphere, what I'm hearing you describe is another sphere where academic or scholarly expertise is displaced by non-experts having a role now in making decisions about, for example, who you hire onto your team, who you bring into your lab. So, it's a displacement of expertise, which is a displacement of merit, yet again. Yeah, well, some people say that, well, merit is still at play. We just want to give a head start to minorities. What do you think of that?

Anna Krylov: Well, I think it's not a valid argument because, let's say, if you want to hire, if you have a quota to hire, let's say, 50% of women. And yeah, you can then select the best women from the pool to fill your quota. But to give you, like, very simple numerical example, let's talk about something simple with large numbers so it's easier to see. If you have, like, engineering school that recruits undergraduate students, and if you have a pool of candidates, let's say, 2,000 men and 200 women applying. So, if you assume, which is a reasonable assumption, that both schools have about equal distribution of talent and credential and potential, then, you know, if you hire the best people from both schools, just strictly by merit, you will end up with the undergraduate pool that reflects this asymmetry in applicants' pool. You will get 20 women and 200 men, let's say. But if you follow the quota, like we know many universities are doing, MIT, for example, is one of them who was caught red-handed in executing such gender quotas. So, if you hire 200 women and 200 men, then obviously you will end up with a pool of women who are not as good as 200 of the best men because you did not follow because of this asymmetry. So, and it's the same applies to hiring people for jobs, you know, hiring the best woman out there doesn't mean to hire, it's not the same as hiring the best candidate out there.

John Tomasi: Right, right.

Anna Krylov: Yeah, it's very important because science requires really, like, the unique combination of talent, ability, preparation, creativity, and dropping the bar a little bit, it's really dangerous.

John Tomasi: We're coming up towards the end of our time. I wonder if you could just say a word more about what you just said, about what the social costs are. If science progresses a little less quickly, or if a lab does not make the breakthrough that it might have made because it did not have quite the best people there, can you quantify that? How would you, do you have a way of thinking about that, what the loss is, what the opportunity cost is, perhaps?

Anna Krylov: Well, there are quite a few consequences to consider. The most immediate one would be the, all the things that didn't get discovered, you know, vaccines that wasn't developed, or treatment against deadly disease, or new energy solutions because the lab wasn't staffed by the best people, or because the best proposals weren't funded, and so on. So, that's immediate consequences to technology, to society. But there are also maybe broader consequences, and that is that when you see this ideology, DEI and the like, injected into science, that causes mistrust. And we already see that trust in higher education and science and institutions is dropping among American public. People do not trust universities anymore. Now, why is it bad? Well, if public loses trust in science, in universities, in scientific research, you know, we are in danger to losing funding for science because public has a right to say, look, I do not want my tax dollars to be used for advancing DEI or to some crazy projects that I have long list about, like injecting critical race theory into chemistry curriculum or things like that. So, it also creates threats for democracy because if there is a mistrust between people and institutions, that's a recipe for resentment, for, you know, it's not a good starting point for collaboration between public legislators and scientists. So, there is also danger of people losing trust in scientific findings. If you read some of these, you know, in these op-eds or these abstracts of proposals or titles of some proposals dedicated to critical race theory in chemistry, you know, when people look at it, they say, look, you scientists are saying these things. You are saying that there is unconscious biases everywhere, which is, you know, contrary to what I see as a person or what science says. You tell us about all the things that, you know, there is a continuum of genders and that sex, biological sex doesn't matter. So, that means that we do not trust you as an expert, as a disinterested and objective expert. You know, you guys are just parts of political game. You are agents who are pursuing some political idea. Therefore, we do not trust you. And that's a fertile ground to all kinds of conspiracy theories and losing trust in sound scientific findings. And it's really dangerous for the society. So, I think, yeah, so there are many reasons to be concerned about this invasion of ideology into science. And I hope very much that scientific community will come together and we'll fight against them and we'll not, like, kind of quietly letting these ideas to spread further.

John Tomasi: Thank you. And just to close, you and I could talk about this for hours more, and we will talk about it some more, at a conference that you've organized, a really important conference you've organized at USC, Censorship in the Sciences, which is coming this January 10th through 12th, I believe. Can you just tell us a little bit about that conference just briefly as we close?

Anna Krylov: Yeah, first of all, I would like to thank Censorship in the Sciences for being a generous sponsor and supporter of this conference.

John Tomasi: It's our honor. It's our honor. We appreciate it very much.

Anna Krylov: So, the conference is called Censorship in the Sciences, an Interdisciplinary Perspective. And the idea came from a collaboration among a number of people that resulted in a paper that we published last year talking about modern censorship. And the focus of the conference is just censorship in the sciences. So, we do not talk about censorship in the broader society and literature or arts. And so, what we will discuss, what will be discussed, are examples of censorship in sciences. And we didn't talk about it, but that's another manifestation of ideological invasion into science when some topics and some findings are considered to be taboo.

John Tomasi: Nice.

Anna Krylov: And then research along some topics is suppressed and when some scientific findings are censored. And we will have examples of it from life sciences, from climate, from health studies.

John Tomasi: And Anna, you've assembled, no surprise to us, you've assembled just an amazing, an amazing superstar cast. Jonathan Rauch, our friend, will be there, who also, by the way, recently became a board member at HxA. Can you just mention a few other people who are coming to that conference?

Anna Krylov: So, Greg Lukianoff will be there. Jacob Mchangama will be there. So, he wrote extensively about free speech and censorship. Wilfred Reilly will be there. So, we have scientists, we have philosophers of science, we have social scientists, Cory Clark, Lee Jussim will be there. And they will be talking about kind of studying how censorship operates. The mechanisms of it, social drives, motivation of people. So, yeah, so it will be a three-day conference and we will have scheduled very soon. So, we still have a few open spots. So, I would like to see some heterodox people coming in and joining us for this. So, I'm very excited about it.

John Tomasi: Well, I'll certainly be there. Anna, it's been really a pleasure talking with you. Thanks for joining me on Heterodox Out Loud.

Anna Krylov: My pleasure. Thank you, John.