Don't Hold Them Back Became Let's Give Them an Advantage

Katherine Johnson (1918-2020) received
the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The 2016 film Hidden Figures was based on the true story of African-American women mathematicians who were crucial to the success of NASA's early missions. They had to overcome extreme race and sex discrimination, accompanied by condescending attitudes, to be taken seriously.

By the end of the movie their skill and reputation became so widely known at NASA that John Glenn insisted that the numbers be checked manually by Katherine Johnson, one of the "hidden figures," before his historic flight. She also performs emergency calculations to bring John Glenn home when one of his capsule's heat shields broke loose.

It's a popular theme in fiction and real life: the talents of a person who is discriminated against are so outstanding that the powers-that-be must call on the person to solve an important problem. Anti-discrimination narratives appeal to both the heart and the head: the former because the victims are treated unfairly and the latter because society's potential is unrealized by holding back skilled people.

60 years later the pendulum has shifted too far in the other direction. Anti-discrimination has given way to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) quotas. DEI is especially damaging in the technological contest with China: [bold added]

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute reported this year that China leads the U.S. in research on 37 of 44 critical technologies, including advanced aircraft engines, electric batteries, machine learning and synthetic biology. In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, Dan Wang, an expert on China’s technology landscape, wrote that “China now rivals Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in its mastery of the electronics supply chain.” In 2007, the Chinese added less than 4% of the value-added costs of iPhones made in that country. Now it’s more than 25%...

Given this challenge, you might imagine that America would re-emphasize the principles of objectivity and merit that made it the world’s leading scientific innovator. You would be mistaken.

Where it once was taken for granted that expanding knowledge was more important than a scientist’s sex or skin color, anyone adhering to that approach in the U.S. now must fend off charges that it is racist, patriarchal, colonial, or a tool of oppression. As a group of 29 scientists and academics contended in a recent paper for the Journal of Controversial Ideas, scientific progress in the West “is being hindered by a new, alarming clash between liberal epistemology and identity-based ideologies.”...

The U.S. will only find it harder to compete with China if activists and administrators are allowed to bully scientists into caring more about artificial diversity goals than about their work. To quote the 29 authors who stood up for merit, “for science to succeed, it must strive for the non-ideological pursuit of objective truth.”

In the liberal arts and social sciences, the DEI crowd can advocate for individual revealed truths and personal lived experiences. By contrast, those who work in STEM fields believe that there are objective truths, and the goal of science is to discover these truths. I am 100% sure that the mathematicians who worked for NASA would agree.