ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
23d ago
And what would they do? Move to China, lol? They're too self-interested for that, and China censors even more things they'd be inclined to make noise about. Move to allied nations, maybe Australia in Tao's case? It's not such a strategic loss given their political alignment with the US.
Most who choose to leave will move to Europe, but a few (early career, mostly foreign-born) will find what China can offer them appealing. There's an outside chance that the EU will get off its ass and become a geopolitical rival to the US, but even if they remain aligned it's risky to outsource your brainpower and key industries, TSMC being the most obvious example.
The sanctity of folks like Tao is a strange notion. They themselves believe in equity more than in meritocracy.
That doesn't make him any worse at math. Such beliefs are common in people like Tao from living in a high-IQ bubble their whole lives. You can listen to Richard Feynman claiming that anyone can do physics at his level through hard work alone (apologies for the silly background music). If we were to fire every professor who believed in the blank slate and replace them with true believers in meritocracy, we'd end up with just the inhabitants of this forum. And while the folks here are pretty bright and may include the vice president, I don't think any of us are solving the great mysteries of theoretical physics anytime soon.
ResoluteRaven
23d ago
The cancelled grants can just as easily be reinstated by the next administration. The only permanent effects in that case would be years of lost work on those projects (perhaps majority useless, but some worthwhile) and some scientists leaving for Europe or China, while the net effects on DEI would be the same as in my proposal. If you know of some damage that has been done to academia that can't be undone 3 years from now, I'm curious to know what it is.
ResoluteRaven
23d ago
Most of the DEI requirements I am aware of are additional diversity statements tacked on to the ends of grant applications that could easily be eliminated by the funding agencies. That and getting rid of all the unncessary scholarships for women and minorities, which are easy enough to identify, would have achieved more or less the same results as far as fighting wokeness is concerned with minimal collateral damage.
ResoluteRaven
23d ago
Science's first loyalty is to academia, not the country. And academia is dominated by a culture of rootless cosmopolitanism, which doesn't see any special value in any particular country (least of all America). I have extreme doubt as to The Science's commitment to America being a world leader in anything when they only ever kowtow to their humanities overlords in lieu of fact-finding - overlords who typically hold America in absolute contempt.
Do you expect demands of political loyalty to result in better science when they are coming from the nationalist right rather than the woke left? What would it even mean for academia to place America first? Only working on research projects that increase national power in some tangible way? Refusing to use foreign inventions or admit international students? Making every PhD go through the security clearance vetting process?
ResoluteRaven
23d ago
Researchers might have to carefully consider the political leanings of their funding proposals in election years.
This has always been the case. I learned years ago from my professors that when writing a grant proposal under a Democratic administration you say "by improving the electrolyte in this battery we will increase diversity in STEM, lower carbon emissions, and promote gender equality in developing countries" and when writing one under a Republican administration you say "by substituting this zeolite catalyst we will bring jobs to rural areas, ensure American energy independence, and strengthen our national security." While for some (mostly American-born) the former is what they really believe and the latter is just a game they play to hide their power level, for others (many of the foreign-born researchers the current administration seems to want to get rid of) the whole process is just another hoop they need to jump through to continue autistically pursuing their niche interests and they have no true political allegiance.
Only temporarily. The next Democratic administration will simply praise all the universities that stood up against "the war on science" and move them to the top of the pecking order, while those that bent the knee will be shunned and see their funding cut in a mirror image of what's happening now.
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