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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25588 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Terence Tao: I’m an award-winning mathematician. Trump just cut my funding.

In just six months, the United States has seen a wholesale assault on the scientific infrastructure that helped make it a world leader in innovation. Grants have been cancelled mid-project, fellowships for the next generation of researchers gutted, and federally funded institutes stripped of the resources they need to operate. These decisions are not the result of scientific review or Congressional debate, but of abrupt political directives that bypass long-standing norms, disrupt multi-year projects, and erode the independence of our research ecosystem.

In that time, I have seen first-hand how sustained federal investment—channeled through agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF)—powers the collaborations that link universities, government laboratories, and industry. At UCLA's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), where I now serve as Director of Special Projects, those collaborations have laid the groundwork for both theoretical breakthroughs and practical technologies. My own research at IPAM, for instance, helped lead to the algorithms that now cut MRI scan times by a factor of up to 10. This is the America I chose as my adoptive home: a place where science is valued as a public good, and where researchers from around the world come to contribute their ideas and energy.

It is therefore stunning and devastating to discover that the new administration, in just its first six months, has deliberately attacked and weakened almost all the supporting pillars of this ecosystem. Executive actions have cancelled or suspended federal grants with unprecedented scale and speed, with billions of dollars worth of ongoing research projects and experiments disrupted. This is not because of a negative scientific assessment of the work, but instead by seemingly arbitrary justifications. Critical funding has been pulled for as insignificant a reason as the presence of a key word in the original proposal that is retroactively deemed unacceptable.

Federal support is, of course, a privilege, not a right; and Congress has the constitutional authority to set the budgets and rules for any expenditure of public funds and resources. But many of these executive actions have not waited for either explicit or implicit Congressional approval, and in some cases have even directly ignored past Congressional mandates for appropriations. Relative to the sheer size of the federal government as a whole, the amount allocated for supporting science is not massive. The NSF mathematics and physical sciences (MPS) directorate, for instance, is the largest of the subdivisions of the NSF, and has an annual budget of approximately $1.7 billion. This looks significant until one realizes that it amounts to about five dollars per US citizen per year, and less than a tenth of a percent of the federal budget as a whole.

He seems to be referring to how the admin took an axe to science funding by ctrl+F-ing for 'woke' dictionary terms: underrepresented, minority, diverse, etc. The problem is that the effects seem to be about indiscriminate regardless of whether you were a true believer or merely box checking. Will we see upgraded diversity science pledges in the next democrat admin? Researchers might have to carefully consider the political leanings of their funding proposals in election years.

Since these people seem to make it an axiom that they should never have their funding cut, despite there very obviously being many serious issues with their whole enterprise (which they regularly lament), I am disinclined to weigh their opinions very heavily, shiny medals notwithstanding. Perhaps I'd rather the administration use a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer, but a scalpel isn't really an option, so sledgehammer it is.

Trump can't do any of the things that require influence inside an institution. All Trump can do is hit with stick. The stick is dumb, the stick is indiscriminate, but it's the stick in his hand. Dr. Tao is justified in complaining about the stick and I applaud him for it. Complaining about the stick is normal. If we don't already consider it a human right to complain about the stick, then we should consider it.

There is a cost to the stick and it is painful. This is unfortunate-- disastrous for some people I know. Of the anecdotes I've heard, such as jdizzler's below, everyone thus far has earned my sympathies. I hope we can look forward to a future without punitive actions against universities or research funding.

I've written before:

The institutions should function in a way that they can manage their own reputation and credibility.

In the end, all the stick can do is make it easier for any individual to assert pursuit of truthisms in the face of others who aim to paint big red targets on their back. Become a wee bit wiser to act a little more like good stewards. The only lesson worth learning is that conservatives will throw the entire package of higher learning into the boiling cauldron if they perceive it as an intolerable, hostile institution. Yes, that includes the Good Parts, because, unfortunately, much is packaged together under a generalized monoculture.

One can argue against the stick, one can hate conservatives or Trump, and they can continue to look down upon one or both. Surrender is not required to respect the stick. There is certainly no risk of counter-revolution in research labs or in the student body.

My main criticism is once the stick is proven real it must be shown to be avoidable. To critics that believe the academy is only good for culture war and who are committed to its destruction, I must insist we complete thorough, competent audit of research funding to save the Good Parts.

Dr. Tao is justified in complaining about the stick and I applaud him for it.

Actually, Dr. Tao signed a letter asking for the stick to be deployed against his classroom. He put his signature on a letter talking about how maths classrooms are actually bastions of white supremacy which need to be dismantled. If he was a principled apolitical actor who just wanted to do his research, then he would be justified in complaining about the stick - but even if we take your criticism seriously and make sure the stick is avoidable if you remain apolitical he still needs to get whacked.

Actually, Dr. Tao signed a letter asking for the stick to be deployed against his classroom.

Do you mean the UCLA white supremacy statement, this letter that says punishing a fellow mathematics faculty member for speaking out against diversity statements is wrong, or a different third letter? Or, do you mean that signing the first white supremacy statement was detrimental to his classrooms because its ideas are terrible? If if it's the last one I agree.

In the context of UCLA he is probably justified in not considering himself very political. That is emblematic of the cultural dominance and the ensuing blindness that follows. It's why I say, "Stick, good." However, the guy had the rug pulled out from under him. He didn't have it pulled because of who he is, what he said, or what he did. He had it pulled because UCLA attracted Sauron's gaze. He issues a call to non-action: "the luxury of disengagement is no longer a viable option." Crying foul is not an ideal response to any behavioral correction, but this isn't the most direct, targeted, or deliberate discipline.

I found some of the replies in Trace's thread frustrating. Like getting in a discourse time machine: smart, good natured people carefully walking around that which still cannot be seen. A mutual understanding of university culture and recent history does not appear to be forthcoming. I do not expect academia to kiss the ring of Trump. For that reason I am glad TracingWoodgrain's criticism of Tao went viral. Tao's position and sentiment is common enough, so a public critique is positive even if it does not garner significant agreement.

a different third letter?

I believe it was actually this different, third letter - which was just misinformation that TracingWoodgrains boosted (and upon whom I lay all of the blame). But that first UCLA white supremacy statement also satisfies the requirements for my post, so I'm not particularly upset. The entire university system, his classroom included, is very much a part of the "white supremacy" that the letter seeks to dismantle or co-opt.

In the context of UCLA he is probably justified in not considering himself very political.

He wrote a private article about how Trump is bad and how he had trouble teaching classes after the 2016 election. You don't get to write about how awful and stupid the conservative presidential candidate is (and how his election is so terrible that it causes enough psychic damage to prevent you from working) then talk about how you're not very political.

He had it pulled because UCLA attracted Sauron's gaze.

And he was one of the voices who was shouting out and begging for Sauron's attention. Everyone else was doing it too, and I understand why he simply went along with it. But if he wanted to be apolitical, he could have been - sure, he might have faced some consequences for doing so, but he's now facing the consequences of not doing so.

I found some of the replies in Trace's thread frustrating.

I did too, but I'm now reconsidering it because I think some people were arguing against false claims that were boosted by Trace by mistake.

This is unfortunate-- disastrous for some people I know. Of the anecdotes I've heard, such as jdizzler's below, everyone thus far has earned my sympathies.

Let me register myself - when the election was running the few people I felt comfortable sharing my leanings with hit me with the "dude you might lose your job or whatever" and I said yes that's fine.

Months later I missed out on a major professional opportunity because of a funding cut and people expected me to complain.

No, this is what I asked for.

Fixing the rot instantiated by social justice is going to be painful. We need to accept that.

I am sorry for the people hurt in the process...but it's necessary and I encourage others to mentally frame it that way.

Well no one should accuse you of being an unprincipled hypocrite.

With Trump I was only pretty sure he would commit to immigration (good) and tariffs (bad). I thought tariffs were dumb and it turns out I still think they are dumb. I had little confidence what he'd do with universities, how real DOGE would be, and so on. I was reasonably certain he would more effectively exert his will compared to 45, but was uncertain what he'd choose.

I mean I worry that I get to say this because I have a high degree of financial security and that we shouldn't asking others to make the same mental commitment.

But it should be talked about.

Instead we see a lot of people with no skin in the game cheering and negatively impacted people struggling to admit to themselves that it wasn't what they wanted or not worth it.

This may be low-effort but... why do so many people glaze Terrance Tao...!?

OK, he won a fields medal. Neat. Someone wins one every year.

OK, he won it at a super young age. Neat. There are tons of super-young math prodigies. I went to school with several, they all burned out.

OK, he's published lots of famous math papers. Like... uh... what....? Can you name them? Can you understand them, even a little? Even describe which field of math they were in? (no googling please)

I mean cmon, Einstein was famous too but at least people understood his work a little. Same with Stephen Hawking.

Terry Tao just seems to be a case where the nerd/math world needed a celebreity and they all descended on this one guy for arbitrary reasons.

This is a funny post but

OK, he won a fields medal. Neat. Someone wins one every year.

is literally wrong. «The Fields Medal is a prize awarded to two, three, or four mathematicians under 40 years of age at the International Congress of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), a meeting that takes place every four years». So at most one person wins it every year on average. This level of ignorance of the domain suggests you can't really have valuable intuitions about his merit.

From January 31, 2015 The Parable of the Talents

Every so often an overly kind commenter here praises my intelligence and says they feel intellectually inadequate compared to me, that they wish they could be at my level. But at my level, I spend my time feeling intellectually inadequate compared to Scott Aaronson. Scott Aaronson describes feeling “in awe” of Terence Tao and frequently struggling to understand him. Terence Tao – well, I don’t know if he’s religious, but maybe he feels intellectually inadequate compared to God. And God feels intellectually inadequate compared to John von Neumann.

See i see anecdotes like that, and I think "cool, what did he say that's so smart it made a highly respected professor feel awe? Can i see it too? Maybe I can't understand it but Id like to try. "

With Einstein, there's tons of famous quotes from him, and a ton of pop science designed to help regular people understand his work. Because he did interesting work that we want to understand. Scott Aaronson has a nifty blog helping regular people understand his own work in quantum computing. Ive never seen anyone try to do that for Terence Tao. It just seems like hyper abstract academic stuff that only mathematicians would care about.

This may be low-effort but... why do so many people glaze Terrance Tao...!?

Prior to this discussion, I don't think I had heard of him. But I don't work in a STEM field.

There are tons of super-young math prodigies. I went to school with several, they all burned out.

Isn't the point that unlike your classmates, Tao didn't burn out?

There's an understatement. Looking at the most popular semi-objective metric for research output:

Tao's h-index is 116, with his 116 most-cited papers since 1998 having 116+ citations each (the top one is over 20,000), giving him an annualized h-index of 4.3. Hirsch's original suggestion was that a "successful scientist" after 20 years would be around 1 annualized, an "outstanding scientist" around 2, and a "truly unique" one around 3.

IMHO (very H, ironically, because of low h), a high annualized h-index is neither necessarily nor sufficient to say that someone's a good researcher, but it is pretty solid proof that someone didn't just burn out.

Hirsch's original suggestion was that a "successful scientist" after 20 years would be around 1 annualized, an "outstanding scientist" around 2, and a "truly unique" one around 3.

I'm going to venture a wild guess and say this was before Goodhart's Law had it's way with that measure.

There's also the Mathew Effect, where people give credit to the most famous scientist just because it adds prestige. But can sometimes lead to people like Einstein getting solo credit for things he just briefly mentioned.

Surely people are Goodhart'ing it, but either they're not very good at it yet or they're not trying very hard. The first two math department heads I looked up, at a large top-50 research university, were at [edit: approximately] 1.5 (for a relatively young guy, to be fair) and [edit: approximately] 2.5.

It's a metric that's somewhat designed to counter Goodharting of simpler "publication count" metrics. Divide your research up into "Least Publishable Unit" chunks, and you get more papers, but then the people who want to cite you end up only citing the most relevant chunk and killing your citations-per-paper.

[edit: the "Formatting help" link says you need to double up the ~ character on both sides of text to create a strikethrough, and the preview text rendered fine, but in the thread my pair of single tildes turned into a strikethrough...]

Surely people are Goodhart'ing it, but either they're not very good at it yet or they're not trying very hard.

They are, though. The insanely skewed citation distribution is exactly what you'd expect from people figuring the optimal way to game the system. You're not getting anywhere by autistically focusing on your own reaserch, and hoping others will find it interesting enough to cite. You band together, and boost each other up. There's little individual glory in it for most people, which is why it looks like "they're not very good at it yet, or they're not trying very hard", but that's the best way for them to keep a stable job until they get their big break.

You see this on literally every social network, academia is no different, and the original statement about how much citations which kind of scientist will get, implicitly assumes people won't figure out how these systems work.

Just standard winner-take-all dynamics. The number 1 player in any given sport isn't getting most of his sponsorships because of his absolute ability, but because he's number 1. Way easier to just say "the greatest" than "not Pareto superior but widely considered the overall best when measured along certain dimensions". It's less the math world needed a celebrity than the public needs someone to call the "smartest person on Earth" and by default they're gonna pick a mathematician or a theoretical physicist.

But for what it's worth, his blog explanations of math feel well-written and intuitive in the way only someone with a lot of breadth and depth can be.

That's my suspicion. Its like people have taken the prestige from the entire field of mathematics and awarded it all to this one guy, because they need a single person to be the face. No one cares about the number 2, even if he's also super smart and successful.

I learned analysis from his excellent textbook on it. Felt it gave me much more solid intuitions than Rudin, which I was struggling with. (To be fair, I don't glaze Axler, so there's still a gap.)

hose collaborations have laid the groundwork for both theoretical breakthroughs and practical technologies. My own research at IPAM, for instance, helped lead to the algorithms that now cut MRI scan times by a factor of up to 10.

This is indirectly related to the main culture war topics.

I despise when theoretical or "pure research" academics try to launder their work as being "practical." Even before I get into the (quick) research I did, let's parse out that last sentence.

My research ... helped ... lead to ...

How much did it help? Was it the breakthrough needed to make the tech work? Was it just a novel approach to something that already had a solution? Did the person / organization who made the MRI tech just read one of your papers?

Algorithms

Dude.

cut MRI scan times by a factor of up to 10

What was the baseline time? I believe most MRIs are between 30 - 60 minutes. I don't think they were ever 300 - 600 minutes. "Up to" means it could also be lower. Is this shaving off 15 minutes?

The quick googling I did produced these two items:

A 2007 blog post from Terry Tao where he talks about pixel compression and mentions, at the end, how this could help speed up MRI image processing

A quick patent search - Terry Tao has four, which are all versions of each other

"peOplE aRe LITeraLly DyiNG!" is what we're supposed to feel when we read Terry Tao's sob story. But they aren't.

I can more than appreciate when gigabrained pure mathematicians and physicists honestly tell us "Yeah, we're working on this bleeding edge theoretical stuff. It might unlock the secrets of the universe, but, it's not actually going to be useful day-to-day for ... a while ... or maybe ever."

But I can't appreciate when the same people (let alone the humanities professors) try to wrap themself in the flag (diploma?) and cry out that they are the only reason we aren't all living in pit toilets and dying of diphtheria.

But I can't appreciate when the same people (let alone the humanities professors) try to wrap themself in the flag (diploma?) and cry out that they are the only reason we aren't all living in pit toilets and dying of diphtheria.

I mean, what do you want them to say instead?

They're literally not allowed to say "yes, we are going to take your tax dollars to fund this work because it is intrinsically valuable, and our ability to carry on with this work is more important than your ability to eat at Chipotle for the 5th time this week or whatever else you were going to do with that extra $20". They think that, but they're not allowed to say it. It's not in the Overton window, it wouldn't be egalitarian, it wouldn't be democratic, etc. So they have to lie about "practical benefits" to the grant managers, and ultimately to themselves.

There have been mathematicians that brag about how their work has no application.

Ironically, some of those were number theorists...

Tao isn't the best example to defend academia because 1) he'll be fine (allegedly his funding was partially restored, but moreover he and his students have plenty of potential sponsors), and 2) his field doesn't have obvious, real-life impact.

What about the NIH scientists working on treatments for cancer and other diseases, and those running long-term experiments that will have to be cancelled without funding?

How are we, as a society, supposed to do any universally-beneficial or long-term research with politicization? When one side demands loyalty, then the other side attacks you for said loyalty, how do we ensure the safety of, if not ongoing, then at least future research?

Industry has been embraced by both sides, but doesn't seem keen to host anything "universally-beneficial" or "long-term". Providing upfront funding for decades-long experiments, especially if it's coming from grassroots organizations (since no government or industry), seems infeasible.

Long term, a truce. For a long time we had free speech because everyone understood that policing speech was a double-edged sword - even if it works for you today, it’s going to cut your head off tomorrow.

When everyone understands this, then you’re safe because nobody seriously demands loyalty tests because everyone understands how that ends. All of this came about because the woke thought they were able to escape that and win permanent victory.

MAD requires demonstrating that you are actually willing to fire off your nukes.

(Note also that Trump isn’t demanding a loyalty test. There is no requirement that universities be Trumpist, only that they not openly discriminate against white, Jewish and Asian students. Which seems fair to me.)

Note also that Trump isn’t demanding a loyalty test

He actually is demanding a loyalty test - but for loyalty to Israel rather than the USA.

Note also that Trump isn’t demanding a loyalty test. There is no requirement that universities be Trumpist

The Trump administration has explicitly been angling for commissars DEI for conservatives View Point Diversity Ensurers to supervise the ideological composition of faculty.

But AFAIK that's not what this is. I have complicated feelings about that and will happily discuss another time, but that's not what this is.

I don't know that you can separate them.

How are we, as a society, supposed to do any universally-beneficial or long-term research with politicization? When one side demands loyalty, then the other side attacks you for said loyalty, how do we ensure the safety of, if not ongoing, then at least future research?

Unless you can run the polity yourself, you can't, since a sufficiently hostile government can easily interfere with private funding and research.

That you can't solve this problem doesn't provide any obligation for a political entity to fund an organization of its political opponents. If the universities wanted to have a moral case for funding by both sides, they should have stayed politically neutral. That the Blue required they toe the line, and they did, does not impose a moral requirement on Red to keep funding them while they toe the Blue line.

Tao isn't the best example to defend academia because 1) he'll be fine (allegedly his funding was partially restored, but moreover he and his students have plenty of potential sponsors), and 2) his field doesn't have obvious, real-life impact.

Also, what kind of serious funding does a theoretical mathematician actually need? I could see the need for licenses for certain software like MatLab etc., and the need to rent time on supercomputers, and the need to buy research papers, books, etc. But all of those (except maybe supercomputer time) are things universities are already paying for so the marginal added cost of supporting Tao's research is going to be minimal. The biggest expense is going to be the salaries of Tao and his team.

I’m pretty sure Tao and his team receive high salaries(and while I DON’T understand his work I’m well willing to believe those high salaries are well deserved).

The biggest expense for almost anything is salaries, at least in the UK. I was costing a project recently and even with quite tricked out hardware and server costs, 70% of the final number was just salaries.

Heh, I'm pretty sure I've used software packages more expensive per seat than the engineers to run them. But yes, salaries are generally the largest. I'm sure pure mathematicians use a lot of chalk too.

Damn what kind of software was that?

Ansys has a very high opinion of some of their products. I've heard others complain that some tools for VLSI (silicon chip design) are in similar price ranges too.

I wasn't paying the bills, so I don't have a specific price in mind.

EDIT: Huh, looks like they got acquired by Synopsys, one of the big expensive VLSI tool vendors. Not terribly surprising. Floating licenses help, too.

Probably something from Oracle

Sure, but compared to other research (especially medical research trying to do double blind studies with human patients) the cost of doing math research is significantly smaller.

How are we, as a society, supposed to do any universally-beneficial or long-term research with politicization? When one side demands loyalty, then the other side attacks you for said loyalty, how do we ensure the safety of, if not ongoing, then at least future research?

This appears to be a dilemma. We can have universally-beneficial/long-term scientific research, or we can have politicization of science, but we can't have both at the same time. And this isn't a black-or-white thing, but rather a spectrum where one trades off against the other. I don't think the politicians and ideologues can be counted on to keep their grubby fingers off the superweapon that is the credibility that comes with the label "science," and so if such research is a higher priority than politicization, then the way to accomplish this would have to be from the scientists and academics rejecting the politicization from within. The only alternative is that it doesn't get accomplished at all, and we get corrupted non-credible "research" that serves some ideology at the cost to society at large.

We can have universally-beneficial/long-term scientific research, or we can have politicization of science, but we can't have both at the same time.

The Soviets did.

Biology begs to differ. Or indeed, economics.

Anything that had immediate military applications was specifically depoliticized in the Soviet Union, so that it may be allowed to work. And that's only after they tried the political approach with the military with disastrous results.

They literally had political prisoners do nuclear research, how less politicized can a discipline be in a totalitarian state?

But long term research in anything that did not have specific tangible military results was curtailed by Marxist dogma big time.

If you don't want to fall prey to politics, don't let your institution get stacked by political actors.

Most long lived institutions have to learn this. Universities used to understand it. And then they didn't. Here's the outcome.

It doesn't matter that Tao's smart, it doesn't even matter that his work is useful to humanity. Universities aligned themselves with one side of the friend-enemy distinction, that side lost, therefore they must suffer. There is no other way that this can go. This isn't me saying that it is good that this happens, merely that it is a law of nature.

Next time, fight the militants that are trying to use your university for political ends and win. Defeat has consequences.

Universities aligned themselves with one side of the friend-enemy distinction, that side lost, therefore they must suffer.

Sure, since 2000, campuses really doubled down on social justice.

But that is only half of the story. The other half is that MAGA has fully embraced anti-intellectualism.

Granted, the wokes were certainly not great for intellectual honesty. They had some topics where they had ideological blinders -- anything related to women, race, DEI. Any genuine intellectual had to either learn Kolmogorov complicity (like Scott Aaronson) or be an independent and contrary figure (like Scott Alexander).

From what I can tell, MAGA has little use for intellect. Take the previous Republican president, GWB. He was also not an intellectual giant (though likely smarter than his opponents painted him as). But his policies were written by smart people in conservative think tanks. I disagree with a lot of his policies -- mainly his wars and torture prisons, but I would probably also disagree about his tax policy if I read up on it -- but his policies were at least coherent.

Not so with Trump. His tariff announcements were simply some underling of his asking ChatGPT for the trade deficits with various countries. While he certainly has an uncanny ability for showmanship, he does not have a political vision apart from becoming president and getting the peace Nobel. He is against immigrants because that is what his voters want.

A lot of politicians are opportunistic to some degree. But most pick up the spoken and unspoken rules. With Trump, I have the feeling that he is playing president simulator and skipping through all the dialog and ignoring the world-building. Take J6. If he had read the supplemental material, he would have known that the coup game mechanics work different in POTUS2016 than in Tropico, and just telling his followers to "stop the steal" would be futile. But he does not care about the finer points. He wants to be a beloved king, whatever the Americans call him. (He can't be playing a tabletop because any self-respecting DM would have either stopped his character or walked out. On the other hand, it is bizarre that the game designers even included a dialog option to criticize Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit.)

I think that even in the GWB era, the universities were mostly left-leaning. But they also knew that Bush needed the US to keep its technological advantage for his new American century grand strategy or whatever. With Trump, all bets are off. That guy put an anti-vaxxer in charge of the health department, not out of personal conviction or even because it was a big campaign promise, but just on a whim. Whatever research is done in the STEM departments of universities, and however useful it is to either humanity or the US in particular, it is likely less beneficial than vaccine development.

In short, the universities had quite a few bad reasons to be against Trump (e.g. SJ), but they also had a lot of excellent reasons to be against him. I also do not think any big university will fully suck up to Trump, e.g. giving him a honorary doctorate (which would work great -- a pompous celebration of Trump is just what he is waiting for).

Granted, the wokes were certainly not great for intellectual honesty. They had some topics where they had ideological blinders -- anything related to women, race, DEI.

You are a master of understatement.

Any genuine intellectual had to either learn Kolmogorov complicity (like Scott Aaronson)

With intellectuals like these, who needs anti-intellectuals? While I disagree with Alexander's take on complicity, I can at least understand where he's coming from in theory. Aaronson, with his persecution complex, groveling to people who hate him, and who attributes his desire to have children entirely to spite, does not strike me as someone capable of doing anything worthwhile with that complicity. It is not a matter of convenience or strategy for him.

On the other hand, it is bizarre that the game designers even included a dialog option to criticize Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit.

The best part of the AO with Chris Christie was the anecdote near the end, Chris talking about Trump trying to do his makeup at some campaign event. The man cares about appearances, in his way.

I also do not think any big university will fully suck up to Trump, e.g. giving him a honorary doctorate

Like Trump, the universities that "matter" are way too prideful to do anything so strategic. And to be fair, the big ones are probably correct that they can play out the clock instead. That said, that does suggest exactly where they find their telos these decrepit days.

They won't understand it, because they're convinced that this doesn't count as 'politics' but as the principle of basic human dignity, or some BS like that.

You have been warned repeatedly to stop putting words in other peoples' mouths. Especially when it comes to low-effort dismissals like this. Or like half of your comments over the last month.

Three day ban.

  • -10

Without “some BS” this seems like a clearly true and factual statement. I can certainly dig up a number of “‘political correctness’ is just basic decency” quotes.

Yes, there were a number of things he could have done to make his comment more accurate, charitable, or defensible.

People understand it's political. That's why the claim is often that science is always political so you're either for good things or for bad things.

But simply stating "I thought we were on the verge of a thousand year woke reich and would never face consequences (but I certainly would if I defected)" is unflattering.

People understand it's political.

I mean, not all of them. There are definitely SJWs who believe that SJ doesn't count as politics but indeed "just common fucking decency"*, although there are certainly others who'll yell at anyone who thinks it's possible to be apolitical.

And, of course, it's practically a defining attribute of the social justice movement that it considers basically all its positions not just mere political issues.

*You've got to remember - until Musk broke the dam by buying Twitter, SJ's massive gaslighting operation to manufacture apparent consensus by banning everyone who disagreed from the virtual public square was actually working pretty well on a lot of people. Something that "everyone" agrees on doesn't look very political.

I mean, not all of them. There are definitely SJWs who believe that SJ doesn't count as politics but indeed "just common fucking decency"*, although there are certainly others who'll yell at anyone who thinks it's possible to be apolitical.

I think the "personal/everything is political" is a better explanation of the mindset than "just common fucking decency". Especially because it's paired with a sort of almost gnostic/mystery cult mentality. The Onion parody of the general mindet of "if only you were educated as I was" is instructive: "just decency" doesn't require induction into a political discipline.

"It's just decency" can be taken as an attempt to build consensus that ran out of control, precisely because of the dynamics you note.

The response to Tao's article pointing out times he's talked about politics before in the past is interesting to me, because nowhere at all (that I know of) has Trump or his administration stated that he is targeting funding over a professor's personal beliefs. And yet somehow it seems everyone just takes it for granted, of course it's targeted government punishment coming down over personal wrongthink they say, Tao's beliefs are definitely relevant to the cuts.

Very odd, I don't think I've seen this happen much before where even the main defenders are like "ok yeah we all think Trump is lying but the libs deserve it. It's obviously angry revenge first and foremost"

As others have already noted, Tao isn't specifically targeted here. UCLA got its funding cut on the basis that it was illegally discriminating on the basis of race in admissions and creating an anti-semitic environment (among other things, UCLA sat back and allowed pro-Palestinian protestors to block Jewish students' access to classes, something which it resolved with a settlement of $6 million dollars). Then Tao throws a shitfit.

The broader issue here is that academia serves a couple of interrelated functions. The first is performing research and discovering truths about the world that can be used to help others down the line. The second is one of using academia to "liberate" people socially based on a certain political ideology, which the proponents of said political ideology conflate with the first aim because they have already subscribed to a number of tenets their opponents don't hold. This kind of thing has serious knock-on effects in academia, where people will often discriminate against conservative candidates - in fact only 18% of respondents within academia state they would not discriminate against conservatives, and that's only capturing what they are explicitly willing to state; the actual prevalence of bias against conservatives is probably higher. Papers that support the liberal instead of the conservative view are more likely to be published instead of file-drawered. Etc.

In effect the left turned academia into their political tool, and made it such that it was impossible for conservatives to defang them of their influence without also indirectly crippling knowledge-producing institutions. This puts conservatives in quite the bind - every time they wage war on the institutions that also serve as factories for leftist propaganda, they also run the risk of stopping up legitimate research and can be attacked on that basis. It's a situation the left created, not the right, and one can hardly blame the right for deciding "fuck it, we're going to flamethrower everything anyway".

As others have already noted, Terrence Tao isn't specifically targeted here.

I agree! So it's really odd that everyone keeps seeming to mention his personal political beliefs. It feels like they want it to be a story of suppressing the wrongthinkers so they can justify why their censorship is special.

Yes, I think this feels odd to people who actually believe that balance and harmony can be brought back to academia by playing within rules and norms that have been finely tuned in these places to achieve plausible deniability and leftist creep simultaneously.

"Why don't we just separate the real world truths these people discover from the political ideology they have a religious-like attachment to?"

The ideology and the institution are now inseparable by design. That's why.

I don't think most of the people making this argument believe Trump is doing it because he specifically wanted to penalise Tao. They're just making the point that Tao did insert himself into the culture war and can't claim he was Just A Normal Guy Doing Research Things until politics found him, that in the "tranquil past" he did not solely "focus on technical or personal aspects" of his own research, teaching, and mentoring, nor did he "leave the broader political debate and activism to others".

I mean the context here is Tao expressing disgust at the Trump administration's supposed imposition of politics upon academia and thus crippling it, something which is difficult to see as anything other than exceptionally hypocritical when Tao himself actively participated in the politicisation of academia (the open letter). The point of bringing it up is not to justify Tao's defunding but to respond to what he wrote about it.

Would he have kept his job had he refused to sign the open letter? Remember Steve Hsu.

Should it matter? "I was just following orders" usually isn't a defense for actively helping the enemy. Would Tao be willing to go full MAGA if it meant Trump would give him funding back?

I legitimately DON’T know if Tao has personal political opinions. But I strongly suspect that Trump would very much like to truth social about the world’s smartest man endorsing a favorable balance of trade or what have you.

But I strongly suspect that Trump would very much like to truth social about the world’s smartest man endorsing a favorable balance of trade or what have you.

And I bet that Tao wouldn't. Not even if pressured by the administration.

For the purpose of discussion I'm just taking his assertions at face value and assuming they're sincere. If you ask me though, I'm cynical enough about academia and the kind of environment it fosters that I don't think it's a given that any of the statements he's made about politics can be assumed to be genuinely held (including this writeup that's attracted so much controversy). It's possible they're all informally coerced in one way or another.

Somebody with a profile like him probably gets harangued by colleagues to "speak up" and "do some good" a lot, and it's not hard for me to believe that making the right mouth sounds is a low enough price for him to pay to keep doing the maths he likes.

His public political beliefs have been mentioned because the article claimed he tried to stay out of politics. He did not, not even in his official capacity.

And yet somehow it seems everyone just takes it for granted, of course it's targeted government punishment coming down over personal wrongthink they say, Tao's beliefs are definitely relevant to the cuts.

No, this is not quite correct. Everyone is acknowledging that even if the government were punishing Tao in particular (and they are not, they are targeting the university in general), then Tao has already voided his right to principled protest. In terms of defense in depth, Tao's motte was already invested with demolition charges, by his own rotten hand.

So you agree with the woke leftists that professors and researchers with "bad opinions" should be punished even if it's not irrelevant to their work?

  • -18

Making this comment once is fine.

Two or three times, maybe there's a use case.

Copying and pasting it to this many different people is obnoxious.

They're all making the same general point so how is it obnoxious? I'm wishing to clarify with different people their views on censorship.

  • -16

You got thorough responses from multiple people here. You could have made one reply pinging the others (@[username]). Or even made all the replies you did, but link them back to this one: "see discussion here." I recognize it's kind of awkward either way.

The problem is that most people who copy-paste a response in 8 different spots are not interested in holding 8 nigh-identical conversations. Better to pull them back into one location.

Yeah no matter what way it is awkward and will still inevitably devolve into separate discussions regardless unless I make the assumption that everyone is a hive-mind and will continue to have similar responses to follow-up posts without divergence.

  • -10

There is an "@" function to send alerts to people you're not replying to. For instance, you can summon me by saying "@magic9mushroom" (quotes not required).

Then they could all respond to the single post.

That will still inevitably devolve into separate discussions regardless unless I make the assumption that everyone is a hive-mind and will continue to have similar responses to follow-up posts without divergence would it not?

  • -10

But people browsing would only need to read your post once instead of 6 times.

Sure but the chaos would be limited to a single subthread instead of being scattered everywhere

So you agree with the woke leftists that professors and researchers with "bad opinions" should be punished even if it's not irrelevant to their work?

No. I would be perfectly happy to live in a world where some woke professors and some conservative professors sniped at each other at conferences and from offices across the quad, but otherwise left each other alone. This, in theory, is what tenure and the notion of academic freedom are.*

The Left was not content to live in this world, and across the generations took over the universities, installed their own apparatchiks in administrations, systematically discriminated against disfavored demographics, anathematized and drummed out opposing voices, instituted political litmus tests in hiring and publishing, and created a climate of fear on campuses where the vast majority of students parrot political lines they do not believe in order to avoid social and personal blowback.

If we cannot have an academy run according to our preferred rules - academic freedom, properly understood - then at a minimum we will live according to the woke's rules applied evenhandedly. Perhaps with enough rounds of tit-for-tat, we will be able to reach a new harmonious equilibrium.

So how do you feel about a situation like this? https://x.com/pjaicomo/status/1958124476001861948

Do you believe the left would be justified with removing Tom Macdonald for his "the devil is a democrat" speech because the right wing started with saying legal residents don't have protections?

I don't think so because I have principles about free speech that apply regardless of who started it, but if I understand you correctly revenge is a perfectly suitable argument for going against one's words.

  • -12

So how do you feel about a situation like this?

Face tattoos, white guy dreds, mediocre taste in music... are there any examples that aren't quite so literal regarding the old maxim about defending scoundrels?

Do you believe the left would be justified with removing Tom Macdonald for his "the devil is a democrat" speech because the right wing started with saying legal residents don't have protections?

"Legal resident" is an extremely broad category. It's not clear to me under what policy Macdonald resides in the US, but if there are Congressionally-approved restrictions on the speech of certain categories, then yes, this applies under "your rules, applied fairly."

I'm not a free speech absolutist, but I care about fairness and equality before the law. Unilateral disarmament of letting one side do whatever and the other side only gets to wag the finger and say tut-tut does not improve the status of the principle at hand.

I'm not a free speech absolutist, but I care about fairness and equality before the law. Unilateral disarmament of letting one side do whatever and the other side only gets to wag the finger and say tut-tut does not improve the status of the principle at hand.

Then don't go for unilateral disarmament, use your power to enact fair rules for government. Groups like FIRE, and in the past stuff like the Free Speech League, the First Amendment coalition and other groups protect our rights by fighting for them legally in all cases.

And they failed.

Principled free speech defenders strongly benefit from the shoe on the other foot.

This is advice for the last conflict - when the ACLU wanders around as a shambolic corpse that refuses to support the rights of "those people" you know the old institutions can no longer help.

More comments

It appears nobody has attempted to deport Tom Macdonald for that video. As I understand the law, one may only be deported for First Amendment protected activity on the personal (that is, not delegated) determination of the Secretary of State that it compromises a compelling US foreign policy interest. This means that "The Devil is a Democrat" is not deportable -- Macdonald would in fact be on thinner ice if he criticized Canada, as that would implicate US foreign policy interests, though it is unlikely Rubio would make such a determination.

This has nothing to do, however, with the Tao situation. And that particular law seems like it's going inevitably to head to the Supreme Court.

It appears nobody has attempted to deport Tom Macdonald for that video.

Yes it's a hypothetical. Would it be ok if the future Dems declared him to not have first amendment rights as a legal residents in the US and deport him based off political speech they find insulting?

This is the culture war thread, not the random hypothetical thread.

Do you believe the left would be justified with removing Tom Macdonald for his "the devil is a democrat" speech because the right wing started with saying legal residents don't have protections?

I don't think so because I have principles about free speech that apply regardless of who started it, but if I understand you correctly revenge is a perfectly suitable argument for going against one's words.

The Left already is doing such things while mouthing banal principled platitudes, and has been for decades. It has won them near-complete control of the knowledge-making and -legitimating institutions in the country, including academia, journalism, with significant inroads into corporations and the legal profession. It has enabled the Left to take its social program from radical fringe to state-enforced orthodoxy. They have hijacked bureaucracies, lied about their intentions, ignored or subverted laws they did not agree with, including court decisions, and more.

They did these things not even for such a good reason as revenge, but instead out of pure will-to-power.

Remove the beam from thine own eye before complaining about the mote in another's.

They did these things not even for such a good reason as revenge, but instead out of pure will-to-power.

Is revenge a good reason to do things you find immoral? I think a lot of us more principled folk would disagree.

  • -11

If I am attacked, it is good to use force against my attacker to both defend myself but also to establish future deterrence. If I am cheated, it is good to sue not just for the value of what was denied me but also for punitive damages - to take the cheater's money. If I am stolen from, it is good not just to retrieve what was stolen, but also to incapacitate the thief to prevent their ability to do these things again.

More comments

No. As I just said, the point is irrespective of if they should be punished. The point is that regardless of whether or not they should be punished, they have no right to object on principle.

If you willingly join an army that refuses to take prisoners, and just executes all surrendering enemy forces, then you don't get to cry when you get summarily executed instead of taken prisoner - regardless of the moral positions of the enemy forces.

This is pure "your rules, applied fairly".

If Tao objects to this, then perhaps dear Terry ought to evolve his moral universe beyond the level we expect from elementary schoolers. As far as complaints go, "He hit me just because I hit him first!" is the mark of a particularly dull and narcissistic child.

No. As I just said, the point is irrespective of if they should be punished. The point is that regardless of whether or not they should be punished, they have no right to object on principle.

Tao was part of the government and was cutting grants to wrongthinkers? I didn't know that. I guess he got what was coming to him then.

  • -16

Feel free to reread my prior posts, and the other ones people are posting in response to you.

In a roundabout way, yes. He signed a letter that was used to support policies that funneled money and grants away from non-progressives to progressives.

The other way to look at it is that the whole thing is so riven with enemy collaborators that you throw a rock in what is ostensibly the field that needs politics the least and the people you hit are also complicit so fuck it, carpet-bombing is called for.

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.

Terry Tao gives all of the great reasons why we like science. And hes right on those reasons. But he does not give the reason why his funding was cut. Which is odd, he is a smart guy, but reading his letter you get the impression that Trump / the NSF just came in and randomly cut his funding. He actually say this himself:

This is not because of a negative scientific assessment of the work, but instead by seemingly arbitrary justifications.

[Side note: very lame Terry. Your entire funding just got gutted, and you can't even nut up enough to say it was "arbitrary", just "seemingly arbitrary". Weak.]

Anyways, it just seemed odd that UCLA got its funding cut for no reason, the admin has been sending letters to colleges outlining its reasons. So I looked, and this is what I found. I took it from the link to the lawsuit below, where the Trump NSF letter to UCLA is reprinted.

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has undertaken a review of its award portfolio. The agency has determined that suspension of certain awards is necessary because they are not in alignment with current NSF priorities and/or programmatic goals. NSF understands that [UCLA] continues to engage in race discrimination including in its admissions process, and in other areas of student life, as well as failing to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias. We have considered reliance interests and they are outweighed by the NSF’s policy concerns.

Effective immediately, the attached awards are suspended until further notice.

NSF is issuing this suspension to protect the interests of the government pursuant to NSF Grant General Conditions (GC-1) term and condition entitled ‘Termination and Enforcement,’ on the basis that the awards no longer effectuate program goals or agency priorities. This is the final agency decision and not subject to appeal.

Costs incurred as a result of this suspension may be reimbursed, provided such costs would otherwise be allowable under the terms of the award and the governing cost principles. In accordance with your award terms and conditions, you have 30 days from the suspension date to furnish an itemized accounting of allowable costs incurred prior to the suspension date.

The lawsuit gives details on claims/allegations from a second NSF / Trump letter:

• UCLA engages in racism, in the form of illegal race-based preferences in admissions practices;

• UCLA fails to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias;

• UCLA discriminates against and endangers women by allowing men in women’s sports and private women-only spaces

What does Terrance Tao say about these allegations? Nothing. Totally ignores them. Doesn't acknowledge them.

I am sympathetic to the argument he makes. But he is willfully blind to the larger systemic issues in his employer and university system at large. UCLA has been told over and over again to stop doing affirmative action. Its the law. And in response UCLA just sticks its fingers in its ears and mumbles something about holistic admissions and does it anyways. Which, to be fair, got them by with doing what the wanted to do for the last few decades.

But not anymore. Sorry Terry.

https://calmatters.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/9e9d118f-51fb-4e98-a9c0-fa060ea131ad.pdf

  • UCLA engages in racism, in the form of illegal race-based preferences in admissions practices;

Affirmative action is a bad thing. One might argue that forcing universities to adjust admission rules through threats of withholding research funding is also bad. OTOH, this is something I could have seen the Obama administration doing as well if the admission rules were against their ideology.

  • UCLA fails to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias;

"bias" seem extreme weak-sauce. Everyone is biased. Of course, sometimes biases are bad, but that would require going very much into the specifics.

The antisemitism thing is more plausible. Of course, for Nethanyahu, anyone who criticizes him is an antisemite, which is a great way to get people not to care about antisemitism.

Personally, I think that if the UCLA does not want to deal with Israeli institutions, that is ok. If they want to allow students to burn Israeli flags, that is also defendable. However, they do have a duty to protect their students and staff from verbal or physical attacks. If they turned a blind eye to Jews or Israeli citizens getting singled out and attacked, that would be bad.

  • UCLA discriminates against and endangers women by allowing men in women’s sports and private women-only spaces

Discrimination in sports? Like 73% of the NBA players being black? There are no level playing fields in sports. You can compensate for some genetic advantages (like high testosterone), but then the people who win will simply win through other genetic advantages. That does not mean that trans women in women's sports are necessarily good, but just that yelling "help, help, I am being oppressed" is just not a thing you do in sports. Are transwomen even winning most competitions?

And the "endangering women" thing is even worse. Are there credible accusations of people abusing their trans status to rape or grope women in their protected spaces, above the base rate? This seems to be a moral panic like the D&D satanism thing.

UCLA is alleged to be violating actual black letter law. Do you think Bob jones shouldn’t’ve been forced to integrate?

Yup. This is what I proposed six months ago. Later, I got showered in downvotes when I said maybe, perhaps, they should do something like this, targeting the institutions and policies in a way that could actually affect change rather than using 'indiscriminate chemotherapy' on academia. Tons of people here seem to have bought into the idea that the entire university system is 'enemy' and must be destroyed rather than changing their behavior.

I find that perspective mostly ignorant of theoretical premises, instead jumping in at the level of 'grunt'. That is, one should start by considering the conceptual nature of war. Clauswitz and all; politics by other means. Even modern political science treatments talk about war with the phrase "coercive bargaining". You actually have a goal that you want to accomplish. Usually that goal is not to simply genocide a people.1 It may be that war or the threat of war furthers that political/bargaining objective.

Now, it's only after elites think that war or the threat of war may further their political/bargaining objective that you start propagandizing the proles about the other side being the 'enemy' that must simply be eliminated. Their weak minds lap that drivel up, likely blind to the political/bargaining objectives that are underlying the entire endeavor in the first place. These are the 'grunts'.

Early on, from what I could tell from the grapevine, they were genuinely just blowing up shit randomly. From what I heard, there was no rhyme or reason that could be discerned; just some random things getting cut randomly, without any meaningful reason attached. Like if some private was suddenly thrust into generalship, not even knowing the terminology or how the systems worked to align efforts with the objective. Such a private would, understandably, make all sorts of random decisions with random and unpredictable effects. Some here were happy with that pathway, with the aforementioned analogy to 'indiscriminate chemotherapy'.

Now, it seems like the administration has either gotten up to speed or put someone in charge who actually knows how to be a general. They might still not be perfect at it, but I'm glad they're at least trying something more like my six month old suggestion. Concerning Tao, specifically, I wrote previously on how this affects individual incentives:

Moreover, it also changes the individual incentives. If you're a hard sciencer who doesn't give a shit about wokeness, you might still find yourself accepting a job at a woke-ass uni, because that might be the place that really enables you to get grants, have equipment/space, top students, whatever. If suddenly, it doesn't matter what you personally do/don't do in your research, but staying at a woke uni means you're forbidden from getting grants, while moving to a cleaned up uni means gravy train, the unis that manage to clean house are going to get showered in top tier talent. No more unis managing to somehow attract some set of possibly politically-neutral, bank-making talent that they skim from to fund their crazy wokies.

1 - Possibly one might have a goal for which genociding a people is the most effective means by which to attain one's goal. Without getting into that conversation too deeply, the actual end being served is still not the actual genocide.

Affirmative action is a bad thing. One might argue that forcing universities to adjust admission rules through threats of withholding research funding is also bad. OTOH, this is something I could have seen the Obama administration doing as well if the admission rules were against their ideology.

Your last sentence is the most relevant. I'm fairly sure there are actual rules (if not statutes) under Title IV of the Civil Rights Act which disallow Federal research funding to schools which engage in racial discrimination. This is not some new thing; it's just Trump using it against schools who discriminate against whites and Asians and Jews instead of just "underrepresented minorities". You can't (in a morally consistent way) nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then call "no nukes" when the Japanese take out New York and Chicago. Of course, the Japanese didn't have any nukes, and the affirmative action people thought the Republicans didn't have any weapons either. They were wrong.

UCLA fails to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias;

"bias" seem extreme weak-sauce. Everyone is biased. Of course, sometimes biases are bad, but that would require going very much into the specifics.

I expect you'll find that "bias" here has some specific technical meaning.

The antisemitism thing is more plausible. Of course, for Nethanyahu, anyone who criticizes him is an antisemite, which is a great way to get people not to care about antisemitism.

I'm pretty sure nobody's being called an antisemite by the Department of Education for criticizing Bibi. There may be questionable cases but they won't go that far. I suspect the antisemitism thing is largely because the institutions (both universities and enforcement bureaucracies) haven't been purged of Jews nor even pro-Israeli Jews (though the latter has likely been keeping its head down at the worst places), so it gets Trump some internal support. Of course, Trump's personal connection to pro-Israeli Jews is also part of it.

Discrimination in sports? Like 73% of the NBA players being black?

UCLA is not, of course, responsible for the NBA. Trump here is referring to Title IX gender discrimination, not racial discrimination, anyway. The rules (again, not statutes -- Title IX has been extended beyond reason by rulemaking and court decisions) require as much money to be spent on women's programs as on men, so Trump is on pretty solid ground if men are taking advantage of women's programs with the university's connivance.

You can't (in a morally consistent way) nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then call "no nukes" when the Japanese take out New York and Chicago.

But I can object when the previously-nuked side runs on a platform of nuclear disarmament (i.e. cancel culture is bad, free speech must be protected), and then, the moment it wins, starts nuking its enemies instead (i.e. just try to cancel the left harder)

You could, if you were able to point out where it happened.

Trump very much did not run on nuclear disarmament. The mild respectable Romney types haven’t been in charge for a while. I’m sure Romney would let UCLA get away with discriminating against Asians and Jews. But Trump and his ilk are not hypocrites for punching back.

Trump has definitely spoken about cancel culture in terms that clearly pointed to the means themselves as being disgraceful, not just the ends.

We must reclaim our independence from the left’s repressive mandates. Americans are exhausted trying to keep up with the latest list of approved words and phrases, and the ever-more restrictive political decrees. (…) The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated, and driven from society as we know it. The far-left wants to coerce you into saying what you know to be FALSE, and scare you out of saying what you know to be TRUE. (…) We will appoint prosecutors, judges, and justices who believe in enforcing the LAW – not their own political agenda. We will ensure equal justice for citizens of every race, religion, color and creed. We will uphold your religious liberty, and defend your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

There just isn't a reasonable reading of that speech where he's saying that the "firing, expelling, shaming, humiliating"-style tactics are neutral weapons that he intends to use just as much once he wins. What he told his voters in that speech was "the Left has made a mockery of true freedom and equality; Americans are rightly exhausted by the climate of fear and hypocrisy; vote for me and I will restore true normalcy and freedom, with genuinely de-politicized institutions and true equality before the law". He was definitely not saying "vote for me and I'll fire, expel, shame, terrify, humiliate and drive out anyone who disagrees with me".

Granted, that was 2020 and I don't recall if/whether he made similar statements during the last election. If your point is that he'd already given up on those principles by 2024… I guess I can't disprove that, but that's somewhat besides the point. The point is that he was saying this stuff a few years ago, and I approved of that for all that I've always disagreed with much of his platform, and now he's falling far short of that promise. It isn't that I'm surprised, but I am disappointed.

When Terence Tao is being treated like James Watson or Tim Hunt, THEN you can give me a villain speech about cancel culture. Not before.

UCLA isn't being punished for its speech. The grants are being revoked in accordance with a long-standing legal precedent that allows the Federal government to take away public money from institutions that illegally discriminate on the basis of race. The only difference between previous applications of this strategy and the present one is the race of the people being illegally discriminated against.

The First Amendment does not actually guarantee the rights of large institutions to discriminate against Asian kids.

Oh, I was arguing under the premise that Tao was indeed being targeted for signing the open letter etc., with the discrimination thing as a handy cudgel. I am open to a factual argument that this is not the case, and have no objection to UCLA being punished for discrimination against Asian kids; I am generally against affirmative action. But lots of people in this conversation were saying "well if Tao was punished for signing the letter, it serves him right" and I find that to be a position worth arguing against even if that's not the fact of the matter in this particular instance.

People on this forum are arguing that Tao deserves to be caught in the blast radius because of his speech, but that's separate from the formal legal justification that the Executive used for its actions against UCLA. Freedom of speech is about what powerful institutions are and are not allowed to do, not about whether individuals who suffer misfortune did or did not have it coming.

I don't think Trump was running as a classical liberal. Those guys were pretty much successfully extinguished by the last decade. The joke is no longer "imagine if the roles we're reversed", it's "we're going to kill you".

If you successfully destroy the disarmament party, you can't object that the nukemback party wins.

Discrimination in sports? Like 73% of the NBA players being black? There are no level playing fields in sports. You can compensate for some genetic advantages (like high testosterone), but then the people who win will simply win through other genetic advantages.

Precisely. If we let everyone play, women would simply be shut out.

Which is why women's sports gives women a place to play that they otherwise wouldn't have, society has decided that 50% of the population being mostly locked out is bad, even if we don't care that Michael Phelps crushes the dreams of all his male competitors daily. There are critiques of Title IX and how it's interpreted wrt what counts as a "sport" but the plain purpose was not to facilitate males destroying the whole point of having female sports.

There's no point in trying to even have a philosophical discussion about which biological advantages society decides counts: what they're doing is just against the law. There's already a law passed to protect women's sports and many universities are simply acting against those rules. That they may feel coerced by a past administration to do it simply says that that administration was also wrong.

If you want to have that debate push for another law and we can have a real discussion on the merits of mixing sports, with a positive case made for this stuff outside of bogus definitional arguments and suicide threats, instead of skin-suiting Title IX and then pushing the burden of proof unto the side that wants to stick to it as it was.

And the "endangering women" thing is even worse. Are there credible accusations of people abusing their trans status to rape or grope women in their protected spaces, above the base rate?

Can you explain your thought process here? Like...why is it that people always go to "a trans person wouldn't abuse their trans status"?

Besides the obvious problems with this, it's a bit akin to saying there's no problem waving through Orthodox Jews in airport security because Jews aren't as likely to do suicide bombings. The point is obviously that weakening the standard allows any bad actor to exploit the situation because trans status isn't exactly based on having completed surgeries now.

This seems self-evident to me. But it is not to a whole swath of people, the question is why we have a gap here.

I was going to suggest that it's caused by priming but OP did say "men in women's spaces" not "transwomen in women's spaces" so I don't even have that explanation.

And the "endangering women" thing is even worse. Are there credible accusations of people abusing their trans status to rape or grope women in their protected spaces, above the base rate? This seems to be a moral panic like the D&D satanism thing.

It's actually a physics thing. The nature of most common team sports in America is such that, if college aged trained athletes attempted to play at the best of their abilities in mixed-sex format, the odds of the women being injured due to inevitable contact with men who are far bigger and faster than them skyrockets relative to just women-only. If we decided to mix the NBA and WNBA and have them play in mixed format, that would also endanger women, ie the WNBA players. No rape or groping required or implied.

Much to consider here. IMO (1) you need to implement serious deterrence to prevent something like the social justice craze of 2020 from ever happening again. Punishing legitimate and important academic work is the best way to go about deterrence, as it motivates normal academics to police their extremist colleagues, rather than acquiescing again. “Conservatives will harm valuable research” is an argument that will persuade an elite and effete academic, where arguments based on logic and statistics obviously failed during the last mania. (2) Now is not the time, because of the threat of China, to be alienating STEM academics. We should want America to be the most reliable and rewarding place in the world for top tier foreign STEM research. The best mathematician in the world criticizing the academic environment is a big deal.

Punishing legitimate and important academic work is the best way to go about deterrence, as it motivates normal academics to police their extremist colleagues, rather than acquiescing again.

Doesn't that just incentive all the smart intellectuals (including those who just want to grill research) to hate you for being the worse of two evils? If one is saying "just add this line of text to your grants" and the other is saying "we will destroy you and your ability to do science and math", I'm not sure why they'd start siding with the second.

“Conservatives will harm valuable research” is an argument that will persuade an elite and effete academic,

Yeah, seems like it will persuade them that conservatives are actively dangerous to scientific research.

It's more showing that Conservatives can also destroy them and their ability to do science, similar to their progressive coworkers that force them to add the line of text in order to not be destroyed currently. Previously, the Conservative request to stop this was "seek truth and don't lend your credentials to anti-science extremists on the other side". Now, the fuck around time has passed and the grillers are finding out.

It's more showing that Conservatives can also destroy them and their ability to do science, similar to their progressive coworkers that force them to add the line of text in order to not be destroyed currently.

I think the history of religious conservatives waging war on evolution, environmental science, and the new embrace of anti vaccine beliefs has shown that already has it not?

And yet, all this seems to have done is just further hurt scientific research instead of counteracting any sort of left wing attacks.

Conservatives lost on every one of those three though, which shows they did not have any power. (Aside from maybe Anti-vaxx now but that's both a left+right thing and mostly only true after progressives destroyed public health credibility themselves.) Destroying academia is in itself counteracting left wing attacks.

Conservatives lost on every one of those three though, which shows they did not have any power.

They didn't actually, in fact part of the private school voucher initiative is to get kids into funded religious schools, schools that use programs like A.C.E, like my Southern Baptist friend had when she was growing up.

I live in a red rural area, I can assure you many of them don't see the fight as lost yet.

And environmental science? Odd then that the leader of the country doesn't believe in climate change and has targeted lots of funding cuts to climate science, including the termination of satellite data and missions regarding carbon dioxide in the atmosphere

If they lost, someone forgot to tell the president of the United States that.

If one is saying "just add this line of text to your grants"

Don't forget things like we'll cut your database access if we think you'll find something you shouldn't.

It is easy to make the argument if you completely understate how one side behaved.

Doesn't that just incentive all the smart intellectuals (including those who just want to grill research) to hate you for being the worse of two evils?

persuade them that conservatives are actively dangerous to scientific research.

That ship has sailed.

I live near a college town these days. At this point enough professors hate the right enough that they can't really hate them more than they already do. The shit they say around me after a few drinks because they think I'm "one of the good ones" is disgusting.

They've hated them at a red-lined 10/10 level since at least the Reagan administration, and nothing short of absolute capitulation from the right would mollify them.

Given all that, why bother?

So you explicitly agree with the woke leftists that professors and researchers with "bad opinions" should be punished even if it's not irrelevant to their work?

  • -15

The administration is not going to get anywhere with a carrot. They might get somewhere with a stick.

I'm not going to advocate for it, but I'm not going to shed a tear if the guy at the end of my local bar who said "I think it would be better if they all just died" back in in 2020 doesn't get more grant money.

If one is saying "just add this line of text to your grants" and the other is saying "we will destroy you and your ability to do science and math", I'm not sure why they'd start siding with the second.

Many - not all, but certainly many - scientists and academics in general care about discovering the truth and thus understand that being forced to add such a line to their grants (among many, many other things) fundamentally corrupts their ability to ascertain the truth in a way that lack of funding doesn't. Funding is a real problem, but money is fungible. Principles aren't. Different people will have different lines where they're willing to betray their principles for money.

Optimistically, academia has enough people committed to truth that they transform academia from within so as to earn credibility back enough to justify public finding. Pessimistically, there are enough ideologically committed and/or unprincipled in commitment to truth that academia will choose to self-immolate. Which would be bad for everyone, but still better than pouring money into nonsense production that gets laundered as true due to inertia of pre-existing credibility. That's actively malignant to society in a way that dried up funding isn't.

The ones who will increase their hatred are the ones who need to be punished more. The ones who recognize the danger of DEI will be satisfied knowing that they’ve made a noble sacrifice for the holistic health of civilization and its progress. The thing about deterrence is that it’s better to do it quickly and harshly, as then you never have to inflict it again out of fear.

If one is saying "just add this line of text to your grants" and the other is saying "we will destroy you and your ability to do science and math", I'm not sure why they'd start siding with the second.

If you think the demands of the left stop at parroting some line about equality and everything else is unchanged, you must have missed the last half century of academia.

It's not where they stop as regards the world is general, but it's the only demand that's relevant to a researcher who's already got a job in academia.

Possibly true for someone like Tao, not for someone that does practical work.

Nonsense, academics have to walk on eggshells when publishing on topics related to things like biological sex and gender identity, race, and many more topics lest they face consequences to their careers.

An example that comes to mind that I read a few years ago (and will try to dig up) was an economics paper that worked together with a utility company in some third world shithole. The research in question: whether cutting off water to non-paying customers would result in more payments to the utility company, resulting in the utility company being able to invest in their infrastructure and provide more and better water service overall, leading to fewer people being without water service overall than a system that treats water access as a "human right".

The research reached the obvious conclusion that anyone who has taken econ 101 would have expected, and the researchers didn't lie about this, but they couched everything they said in tons of trigger-warning type language to avoid conflict. It absolutely had an effect on the strength of their conclusions, how strong of a stance they were willing to take, etc.

Edit: Turns out it was Kenya. Found the paper with its milquetoast conclusions that any econ 101 student could have told you - https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27569/w27569.pdf

And here's one (of many) articles from the "water access is a human right" faction going after the paper and its authors: https://developingeconomics.org/2023/12/11/when-economists-shut-off-your-water/

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. Just hate conservatives? Don't they already? If you're going to be hated, it's common sense that there's an advantage in also being feared and taken seriously. For now, they're not taking Trump and his allies seriously. A DEI enforcer on campus is a greater and more viscerally formidable authority. It will take certain costly signals to change that.

I think it's legitimate to treat them with disdain and disregard. Americans can afford it, and people who opportunistically accepted braindead woke narratives don't deserve much better treatment. The sanctity of folks like Tao is a strange notion. They themselves believe in equity more than in meritocracy.

Oh so what you're saying is that the Dems should go nuclear next election and cut funding for all conservatives unless they go woke and we should go into an arms war of being the Serious Threat each time one group is in power?

Or are only conservatives morally justified in destroying science for culture war issues?

  • -15

This like when the governor of Massachusetts threatened to gerrymander her state. Can't threaten much when you've already fired all of your ammo.

Uh, what conservative science gets government grants?

Army stuff I guess?

You seem to think that there is a tit for tat MAD argument to be made for restraint. Uh, no, there isn't. A politician promising to punish the hicks for having the audacity to touch the academy is less a political platform and more the hysterical overreaction of a crazy person. There's a popular thread of argument that goes 'but imagine if it was happening to you'. In this case, I don't have to imagine: conservatives have been driven out of everything from literature to knitting to table-top RPG games. Your consequences have already happened. Deterrence doesn't work if the opposing side uses the imagined bad end as a frequently-executed goal that often succeeds.

So yes, we are justified. Oderint dum metuant.

This really does seem to be the basic "it's ok when I do it, crazy when the enemy does it" statement. Not uncommon, but as a principled person who has fought against censorship from all directions I disagree with it.

  • -12

No, I want to go further then that. I fully hated it when it was done to me: and no amount of principled pleading ever got them to stop. What is happening right now is wrong and you know what? I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

Certainly, my enemies never did.

So I abandoned the principles. "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" Having principled people like you on my side amounted to jack and squat in the past two decades. So why should I care?

I don't want to make peace with them. I don't want to return to 'neutrality', whatever that means. I want to make peace with the dust and the ash, with the sand of the desert: with desolation and ruin. I am Hulegu sacking Baghdad: let the rivers run black with the knowledge I am destroying. Better my rules enforced unfairly, because the ideal neutral is impossible.

This is the compromise you are seeing, a game of defunding and well-written lawfare. What I actually want is the books burned and the scholars that wrote them alongside. Anyone who even knows who Foucault is should have their frontal lobes lobotomized. But I can take what I can get. If my intellectual enemies live in fear and deprivation that is good enough.

Your attempts to appeal to liberal sensibilities fall on deaf ears because I don't have them. Not anymore.

So I abandoned the principles. "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" Having principled people like you on my side amounted to jack and squat in the past two decades. So why should I care?

Because there are such things as moral imperatives which you should follow even if they do not bring you material benefits; indeed, even if following them costs you dear. Having been persecuted does not give you a license to persecute in turn, any more than having been raped give you a license to rape your rapist. It's not about what it gets you - it's about right and wrong.

If you are in fact devoid of moral principles (on this topic), then so it goes. No arguing with demons. But don't say that you used to have principles, and now you don't have them "anymore" because they got you nothing tangible. If your moral principles were conditional on beneficial outcomes for you, then you never had any in the first place.

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Well if you no longer believe in freedom, ironically that's your free right to do so. American society is powerful enough to withstand anti-American values such as yours as we have been since the foundation of our country.

Far more powerful threats to freedom have tried to take down the constitutional rights, the freedom fighters who don't give up keep pushing it back up.

  • -11
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That argument would be a lot stronger if the dems hadn’t already done this, multiple times. There is a reason that all of the conservative leaning talent leaves for industry (it isn’t just about money)

That argument would be a lot stronger if the dems hadn’t already done this, multiple times. There is a reason that all of the conservative leaning talent leaves for industry (it isn’t just about money)

The world isn't only made up of "allies" and "enemies", there's lots of people who have been fighting against censorship from the left who are fighting against it now too. You're always free to join us and keep your principles.

Oh so what you're saying is that the Dems should go nuclear next election and cut funding for all conservatives unless they go woke and we should go into an arms war of being the Serious Threat each time one group is in power?

I mean, I'm assuming Dase is Republican or anti-Dem, and I'd guess they'd be absolutely for this, though I'm not sure "should" is the right term to use. As a Democrat, I would say they absolutely shouldn't do it, at least from a completely cynical and selfish perspective. Woke ideas are unpopular enough nationally that Dems adopting an undeniable "any government function that's not woke must be destroyed" policy would severely hamper their electoral prospects nationally.

cut funding for all conservatives

Are you referring to conservative academics? Then sure, let them cut federal funding for the approximately n=0 research universities that are as institutionally aligned to conservatism as the current targets are to progressivism.

If you’re referring to cutting federal funding to conservatives in other domains, though, then that’s a more complex story. Let’s say that the U.S. military is just as conservative as academia is progressive (even though I do not believe that this is actually the case): should Dems cut all federal funding to the military then as retaliation? Clearly not, since by protecting global trade alone, the U.S. military already earns its keep (and I say this as someone opposed to all its interventionist adventures). You may disagree, but I think that the effect of cutting all federal funding to any universities was cut tomorrow would be far less ruinous than doing the same to the military.

Now, since I can’t think of any other institutions that receive federal funding that are as conservative as universities are progressive, the only remaining targets would be governments of red states (which, as we are often reminded by progressives, take in more federal dollars than they give). So do we cut infrastructure funding to these states? Do we cut Medicare and Medicaid? This does seem crueler to me than cutting funding to universities. This is because the telos of federal funding to state governments is (or at least, seems to me, to a first approximation) to be to improve the quality of life of their citizens. If a Dem government would cut funding to red states, that seems tantamount to saying “We want to make the lives of all conservatives significantly worse off.” It’s essentially a declaration of total culture war, an action against “civilians”. In contrast, the telos of universities (or at least, what they say to justify their receipt of my taxpayer money) is something more like “we produce knowledge that benefits the country and the world”. If a Republican government says “no, we don’t think that you’re producing knowledge that benefits the country, but rather, primarily fighting ideological battles” and turns off the spigot of funding, then continuing the previous analogy, this is more akin to attacking a military target like a munitions factory or an airstrip.

To make the point even clearer: even if funding is cut to all universities, there’s still a story that can be told that goes like “Universities currently aren’t serving the best interests of Americans as a nation, so we are no longer giving the money earned by Americans to these institutions.” The equivalent story when cutting funding to all red states would be “Conservative states currently aren’t serving the best interests of Americans as a nation, so we are no longer giving the money earned by Americans to them.” It’s hard for me to see how that isn’t an implicit declaration that conservatives aren’t American, and thus, as a prelude to civil war!

If a Republican government says “no, we don’t think that you’re producing knowledge that benefits the country, but rather, primarily fighting ideological battles” and turns off the spigot of funding, then continuing the previous analogy, this is more akin to attacking a military target like a munitions factory or an airstrip.

So it's wrong to cut funding to conservative areas for wrongthink because it's a prelude to civil war but in your example where the right wing literally attacks the left in a war analogy it's okay?

  • -11

There’s already a war going on, one that the universities have been waging since long before the funding cuts. The difference here is whether that war should be a limited war or a total one. Even putting aside the fractions of people implicated—conservatives are ~50% of the U.S. population, while academics are a fraction of a percent (or maybe slightly larger)—there’s a difference in the purpose of cutting funding to progressive universities versus cutting funding to conservative Americans.

Even if I want funding to these universities to be cut, I still don’t want some PhD student, writing their thesis on the inescapable legacy of white male oppression or whatever, to be unable to find a job, or to be unable to be treated for disease. I just don’t want to pay money for the purpose of letting people who hate me spread that hate. They can do that on their own time, with their own money, and even if taxpayer-funded infrastructure helps them do that on their own time better because money is fungible, so be it; it still is qualitatively different from me directly funding their Hate Whitey theses.

[EDIT: I realize that this might seem like a bit of a motte-and-bailey, since there are lots of people whose funding is getting cut whose research is not the maximally-inflammatory Hate Whitey thesis. Here we’d have to get into specifics about whether we’re talking about funding cuts for specific projects or funding cuts for the entire university. The former seem entirely defensible to me. The latter does seem a bit more morally fraught, since there’s more “collateral damage”, but only a bit, in part because there is far less collateral damage than targeting literally all American conservatives, and in part because the collateral damage is not the whole point (whereas it is in the case of targeting literally all American conservatives).]

Can’t you see how that’s qualitatively different from me saying “I don’t want these people to be happy, work, or live at all”?

(P.S. This whole discussion is assuming that we should be funding things federally at all. If you want to argue that we should end all federal taxes, then that’s a whole other story.)

Even if I want funding to these universities to be cut, I still don’t want some PhD student, writing their thesis on the inescapable legacy of white male oppression or whatever, to be unable to find a job, or to be unable to be treated for disease.

Why? Why is this belief more justifiable in your eyes than the notion that turnabout is fair play, or that the woke memeplex is an existential threat that must be suppressed by any means necessary, or that it's just funny to watch libs cry?

I largely oppose the above notions, but they are clearly memetically superior - more attractive, more consistent, more vital - than the desire for (")neutrality(") that still lives on in the vestiges of the liberal right. I sympathize with your view, but I'd bet that there will be no graceful ending to this conflict.

conservatives are ~50% of the U.S. population, while academics are a fraction of a percent (or maybe slightly larger)

Quality > quantity.

  • -10
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Oh so what you're saying is that the Dems should go nuclear next election and cut funding for all conservatives unless they go woke and we should go into an arms war of being the Serious Threat each time one group is in power?

For years, classical liberals, right-wingers, and classical liberals thrown into the right-wing pit of deplorables have been making that argument -- "what if they did the same to you?". For years, it has fallen on deaf ears. For that argument to work, when the deterrent fails the reprisals must be taken.

The laws are flat and this IS the devil rounding on the left.

Anyway, what are they going to do, revoke tax-exempt status for conservative universities until they bend the knee? Or maybe require Catholics to pay for abortions?

So do you think there should be a censorship arms war or do you want more academic freedom?

  • -13

or do you want more academic freedom

You left out a third option: I want a magical pink unicorn who shits gold and whose farts cure cancer. I genuinely see that as more plausible than getting our current university system to support academic freedom.

It's all quite unfortunate, and I suspect there is some genius way to get from where we are to a healthy higher education system without use of a flamethrower. But, no one, and certainly not Trump, knows that genius way, so this is maybe the best of a bunch of bad options.

If the main observable action when in power is to further the downward trend against academic freedom, why should anyone trust the claims being made? Actions speak louder than words after all.

If we want academic freedom we should make moves towards academic freedom, not be indistinguishable from the censors.

  • -10
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do you want more academic freedom?

What are you positing as the mechanism to get from here to there?

It doesn't seem to have been an option of the last several decades. Supreme Court cases do nothing, black-letter civil rights law does nothing, hitting them in the wallet might have an effect.

There were probably better ways to do it than this, I would agree. But if the alternative is doing nothing and letting progressives keep degrading the institutions, so be it

What are you positing as the mechanism to get from here to there?

The mechanism is that instead of limiting free speech and punishing academics for wrongthink, we win at free speech by fighting for the principle. This is what principled libertarian first amendment groups like FIRE are doing.

Allowing shitflinging competitions and "you started it" accusations to consume our freedoms will not restore our freedoms, it just creates a downward spiral. As we can see right now, we're even creating new theories of legal harassment.

There’s nothing new about the idea that we need to ban the expression of certain opinions in order to fight discrimination — that’s the reasoning behind a vast number of speech codes that FIRE has fought since 1999. The new, destructive twist on this is what we at FIRE call the cumulative theory of harassment. That’s the notion that while myriad individual instances of expression by unrelated individuals may be fully protected under the First Amendment, they can together create a cumulative harm, even to those not present and not targeted by the speech, that justifies overriding the Constitution.

We're downward spiraling already when principles are abandoned for revenge grievances. Defending freedom is not and never will be easy.

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War is preferable to the one-sided "academic freedom" that previously prevailed.

They themselves believe in equity more than in meritocracy.

I'm fairly sure most top hard-science academics are in favour of meritocracy. The relevant belief they have is instead in blank-slatism: as a matter of faith, they do not accept heredity of merit, especially as correlated with visible social/ethnic group belonging. From this they conclude that apparent differences of outcome between groups must not be due to differences in merit, and a proper meritocracy would not generate them.

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.

and may include the vice president

Is this facetious or did I miss something?

Vance has referenced Scott Alexander's essays indirectly and is familiar with other ratsphere memes and terminology, not sure if there's anything more specific than that.

It's an old joke from a while back; people started speculating that Vance was secretly commenting on the Motte.

The irony when Vance is on the Motte explaining why people think Vance is on the Motte :P

Most who choose to leave will move to Europe

Are you saying we might actually get doctors and engineers this time?

European academics doing a stint in the US could come back, sure. Could American academics come here? I'm a bit dubious on that. I'm not that plugged into the university system, but don't exactly have the impression that they're awash in cash, and kicking off a rat race between foreign and domestic academics might be just what we need to get the local libs to start seeing the issues with immigration.

Europe at this point has been so thoroughly captured by US propaganda that the chances of it breaking with the US geopolitical line are basically nil; ergo, an American academic who moves to Europe will just be serving the same camp in the clash of civilisations for less money.

Ironically, though, European academia is actually less captured by US-style DEI; we can broadly still fail students for being bad with no regard to disparate impact or whatever, and I haven't seen explicit political allegiance tests in hiring. The truest of true believers in the US might therefore find Europe unsatisfactory, and get concentrated further in the US by evaporative cooling.

Maybe not on the Continent, but there is some limited demand for this American export in the UK. This guy found space at the University of Edinburgh and got to work Confronting The University of Edinburgh's History and Legacies of Enslavement and Colonialism.

I don't think anywhere is going to welcome a significant influx of Very American academics. "They're taking our jobs!"

Nobody is firing professors yet. And no, they'll go to industry, not China. Might actually help with productivity.

but even if they remain aligned it's risky to outsource your brainpower and key industries, TSMC being the most obvious example.

At the end of the day this is all a massive, embarrassing bluff, a shit test. A bunch of true believer wokesters in the humanities, with lukewarm STEM intellectuals in tow, are pretending to be the irreplaceable brain of the United States, basically holding the nation hostage. Well, as Lenin said, «intelligentsia is not the brain of the nation, it's its shit», and for all the evils of the Soviet Union it did go to space, and failed through its retarded economic theory (endorsed by many among this very American intelligentsia, surprisingly), not Lenin's anti-meritocratic views.

This movement has, through manipulating procedural outcomes, appropriated funds for (garbage) research that gave their mediocre allies jobs and their commissars more institutional power, delegitimized (potentially very useful) research they didn't like, canceled White and "White-adjacent" academics they didn't like, created a hostile atmosphere and demoralized who knows how many people whose views or ethnicity they didn't like, and now they are supposed to have infinite immunity for their exploitation of the norms of academic freedom and selective enforcement of regulations, because they might throw a hissy fit. And they aren't even delivering! US universities have been rapidly losing their dominance for over a decade! Of top 10 academic institutions, 8 are Chinese already! (Here's a more rigorous, in my view, ranking from CWTS Leiden).

Come to think of it – as a distant echo of these folks' institutional dominance, even I've been permabanned from /r/slatestarcodex of all places, because I've been too discourteous commenting on Kevin Bird's successful cancellation of the "eugenicist" Stephen Hsu (Trace was there too, hah; gave me a stern talking to, shortly before the ban). Now Stephen Hsu is doomposting 24/7 that the US will get brutally folded by China on science, industry and technology. At worst, you might accelerate this by a few months.

It is known I don't like Trump. I don't respect Trump and Trumpism. But his enemies are also undeserving of respect, they are institutionalized terrorists (and many trace their political lineage to literal terrorists), and I can see where Americans are coming from when they say "no negotiation with terrorists". And even then, this is still a kind of negotiation. It's just the first time this academic cabal is facing anything more than a toothless reprimand. Let's see if they change their response in the face of this novel stimulus.

If anything, it is disappointing to me that this pendulum swing is not actually motivated by interest in truth or even by some self-respect among White Americans, it's a power grab by Trump's clique plus panic of Zionists like Bill Ackman who used to support and fund those very institutions with all their excesses and screeds about white supremacy – before they, like the proverbial golem, turned on Israel in the wake of 10/7. But if two wrongs don't make a right, the second wrong doesn't make the original one right either. I have no sympathy for the political culture of American academia, and I endorse calling their bluff.

even I've been permabanned from /r/slatestarcodex of all places, because I've been too discourteous commenting on Kevin Bird's successful cancellation of the "eugenicist" Stephen Hsu

Oh, I thought you were banned for using Russian punctuation, ((saying something like this.))

There was an automatic suspension for «quotation marks» on /r/TheMotte already, near the end of its life cycle. But manual permaban on /r/slatestarcodex preceded that.

They themselves believe in equity more than in meritocracy.

I don't think this is true. They believe in a different kind of meritocracy, specifically one that focuses on the skills needed for social climbing rather than the nominally productive goals that meritocracy usually implies. "Equity" and "equality" are mere tools to be used to gain social standing, whether by elevating oneself or eliminating one's competition.

If you want to be a social climber act like a normal sociopath and become a politician or a corporate executive.

as it motivates normal academics to police their extremist colleagues, rather than acquiescing again

Ah, but in doing so you changes the very nature of the person in question. Serious academics like TT aren't interested in the prior step of acquire enough institutional power to be able to police their extremist colleagues as they have better things to do like discover new math. The person interested in university politics just isn't the same person.

Of course, you do see serious academics that have taken up the task of working university politics. Whether out of duty or necessity or simply inertia. And every single time I've seen it (and to be fair, I wasn't in academics that long, I bailed on it for private industry), it fundamentally changed how they related to the world.

TT doesn’t have to be personally interested or personally engaged in the politics. He simply needs to voice his opinion on new department heads in an email, or apply to a school without DEI, or ask about it in the interview, or ask a grad student to keep an eye out for DEI words. This is enough pressure to curb DEI.

The reason DEI was able to spiral is because the spiral did not affect the academics’ social status, but actually increased it. One way to lower the status of DEI is to make it associated with defunded and destroyed institutions. If it weren’t for the threat of China, I would say the deterrence should have been much stronger.

Wholeheartedly agree, but I think this is a lot harder than you imagine.

Without being interested or engaged in politics, he needs to select an avatar that understands it keenly. That's both a principle/agent problem and a

The reason DEI was able to spiral is because the spiral did not affect the academics’ social status, but actually increased it.

Which is downstream of the fact that DEI advocates were the kinds of people that were interested in things like department/university politics.

"But I'm not interested in politics."

Too bad. Politics is interested it you. Keep it at bay or perish.

Scientists lost the right to the world's indifference the day Francis Bacon published The New Atlantis.

I'm not really talking about national politics, I'm talking about the petty intradepartmental stuff. Or maybe it's just "all politics is local" again.

Moreover, they can't care about it because the people that do care have infinite time to devote to political games.

Moreover, they can't care about it because the people that do care have infinite time to devote to political games

That's just the Iron law of Oligarchy. You will be ruled by people who care about politics more than other things. That's a given. That's how human society works.

But scientists wanted to rule themselves and have influence over policy. So now they get to fight in the mud with the politicians.

You should have stayed benign if you wanted the protection of that status.

If the dude was able to write diversity statements, or whatever was the requirement for his old grants, without becoming a different person, why would they speaking up to say "this is retarded and needs to stop" suddenly change their core personality traits?

Writing some boilerplate doesn't require politics. It's indicative of someone whose political stance is to recite whatever those who care about politics care about in order to do esoteric math.

Do you think he'd endorse MAGA to get more funding? Because I don't.

Have you read DARPA grant applications? I remember (in 2005) PIs filing all kinds of "we will use micro-scale flux capacitors to create a mobile platform capable of detecting chemical and biological weapons so as to ensure American victory in the GWOT".

No, I mean do you think Terence Tao, personally, would endorse MAGA to get more funding?

It wouldn't, but saying "this is retarded and needs to stop" doesn't actually stop the commissar from doing his work. @anon_ is pointing out that reining in the DEI commissars requires actually controlling the university's internal levers of power (in particular, the admin section of the university).

Yeah, the kind of person whose opinion matters is only the kind of person with political stature.

Being a professor at a California university is like being a soldier of the new Red Army. Terence Tao signed the open letters, took the government money, parroted the party line, and made the libations. He should not act so shocked that the other team is treating him as an enemy soldier, because he is one.

Hasn't he ever heard the saying, "And them that take the sword shall perish by the sword"?

The academic establishment has sinned against America and America must administer its punishment. Burn it all! Fire and sword and no mercy! Let the funding be cut, let the tenured professors be thrown out to seek work in the private sector, let the student loans no longer be backed by the government, and let the hollowed-out ruins of the academic establishment of the 2020's stand forever as a warning to future scientists about the dangers of taking sides in politics. Taxpayer money is a privilege, not a right.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding between two very closely related but irreconcilable positions on the state of academia, both of which can be summarized as "it's been captured by woke and that's bad". One position is that the academics themselves are culpable because this makes them complicit in nebulous sins against the American people. The other position is that the academics forced to parrot spurious diversity statements to keep their jobs are, you know, the victims, with ideologically-captured admin as the bad guys. The second position seems trivially the correct framing to me, and wanting to punish the academics as collaborators looks about as absurd as saying you're going to topple a tyrant to liberate the people, then executing anyone who ever saluted the tyrant at gunpoint.

The other position is that the academics forced to parrot spurious diversity statements to keep their jobs are, you know, the victims, with ideologically-captured admin as the bad guys. The second position seems trivially the correct framing to me, and wanting to punish the academics as collaborators looks about as absurd as saying you're going to topple a tyrant to liberate the people, then executing anyone who ever saluted the tyrant at gunpoint.

The admin didn't force the professors to put Foucault on more syllabi than Shakespeare; Marx and Judith Butler over Plato; Said over Locke. Mill, or Aristotle; Fanon over Machiavelli and Hume.

My personal experience is that, with the exception of a handful of autistic math and econ professors, the academics are 100% complicit. The entire history department at my major state university was made up of proud, self-professed marxists. Professors would regularly stop teaching in the middle of class to go on political rants. 80% of surveyed academics admitted to engaging in deliberate discrimination against conservatives.

I don't buy the poor, hapless academic argument. They've been happily leading the charge for the politicization of the academy for decades.

Even so - surely the entire point of being mad about the politicization of the academy is to rescue whatever fraction of professors do live in fear of cancellation. What else would even be the point?

What else would even be the point?

To destroy enemy centers of power.

The point is to rescue the students, and therefore the next generation of professors. To the extent it's convenient to save the careers of the good ones, we should try to do so, but I'm not overly concerned about mathematicians who just kept their heads down catching strays. We need to take academia back down to the foundations before rebuilding. That's inevitably going to result in some collateral damage. The non-crazy professors had literally decades to set their house in order. If they wanted moderation they should have advocated for moderation sometime before social justice started lapping McCarthyism in terms of body count.

I care more about the educations of my future children than I do the careers of some scientists too timid to stand up against the last decade-plus of woke star chambers. I'm perfectly happy to sacrifice an entire generation of academics to this project.

Uh, rescuing the students?

Even so - surely the entire point of being mad about the politicization of the academy is to rescue whatever fraction of professors do live in fear of cancellation. What else would even be the point?

To prevent the academy from being used as a political weapon against oneself. Which does not require rescuing anyone.

This is isomorphic to left-wing cancel culture, equally morally bankrupt, and equally un-American. The only ethically justifiable mandate for fighting cancel culture is to restore intellectual freedom and freedom of speech. If you abandon that justification then you are as hypocritical and craven as your enemies, and, if nothing else, you have no high ground from which to criticize Tao.

This is isomorphic to left-wing cancel culture

It isn't, though, that's the thing. Presuming Tao were being targeted (something which I don't think is evident, but we can presume it), it would be for signing off on an ideological document that commits to him to an ideology that explicitly rejects things like objectivity and reason as tools of White Supremacy for oppressing minorities; the ideology openly and proudly prefers personal testimony labeled as "lived experience" to ascertain "their truth" which is just as valid as anyone else's. This is fundamentally incompatible with mathematics, which relies on logic to make objective statements, or generally the academic pursuit of truth, at least for commonly understood meanings of "math" and "truth." Now, people can paper over and ignore or mitigate fundamental incompatibilities for a long time, but likely not forever, and so such ideological commitments a major handicap in an academic being able to credibly produce truth.

This is the general problem that this ideology runs into when trying to claim victimhood of cancel culture. By its very nature, the ideology is about redefining and subverting our understanding of basic concepts like "truth" or "reason" in a way that's incompatible with academia as we know it. And if academia were transformed according to the ideology, it would no longer be academia in terms of the functions it serves our society (i.e. knowledge generation & education), but rather a church. And so rejecting ideologues of this stripe from academia isn't cancel culture in a symmetrical way to the now-traditional leftwing cancel culture, which has to do either with opinions that are orthogonal to the person's ability to do a job or with chains of "logic" that fall apart under the smallest scrutiny (e.g. this CEO disagrees with me on gay marriage, which means he must have bigoted antipathy, possibly subconsciously, against gay people, which means he cannot be relied on to be their boss in a fair way).

Now, one could argue that the benefits of these ideologues, given their ability to still pursue truth thanks to compartmentalization and cognitive dissonance, outweighs the harms of them also laundering ideological falsities under the label of truth, as well as the harms of the continued self-discrediting of academia due to placing trust in someone who's ideologically committed against fundamental principles of academia, and therefore, these people ought not be "canceled" from academia. The strength of that argument would depend heavily on the specifics of the benefits and harm. But that's a different argument than one around symmetry.

chains of "logic" that fall apart under the smallest scrutiny

This is kinda how your argument about the contents of the letter reads to me. It is certainly how it would read to anyone to my left. The impossibility of neutrally adjudicating which "chains of logic" of that type hold up, and which don't, is precisely why we need a society-wide norm that no arguments of that form will be considered, under any circumstances. I could as easily argue that no religious people should be allowed to work in STEM, because if they believe in miracles, their epistemology is clearly compromised in a way that is fundamentally incompatible with scientific truth-seeking. That's an argument that feels true to me on a deep level. I really think we'd have better science if all science was done by committed atheists. But I have never and will never advocate for setting such a policy. Arguments of this form are an indiscriminate superweapon that unravels societal trust when anyone starts breaking them out.

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This is isomorphic to left-wing cancel culture, equally morally bankrupt, and equally un-American.

No, it isn't.

The only ethically justifiable mandate for fighting cancel culture is to restore intellectual freedom and freedom of speech.

Probably not true, but even assuming it is, restoring intellectual freedom and freedom of speech does not require rescuing anyone.

No, it isn't.

How so?

restoring intellectual freedom and freedom of speech does not require rescuing anyone.

"Rescuing such-and-such people" was just a fancy way of saying "lift restrictions on freedom of speech currently affecting such-and-such people". Imposing new restrictions on those same people, policing for the opposite quadrant of political speech, is… not that.

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To prevent academia from leveraging the power that it has (to pronounce Official Expert Truth) in support of the Left.

Rescuing academics would be nice but the vast majority of people who weren’t at least lukewarmly woke left years ago, like me. And the ones who are left will find they can get a lot of mileage out of “of course I agree with you but if I say it in public Trump will pull our funding”.

Even if the admin have a woke score of 110 and the academics only have woke scores between 30-90, neither group actually likes me.

Most of the academics didn't complain about being forced to parrot spurious diversity statements, nor even when those spurious diversity statements were made the foremost criteria in their hiring. They DO complain, loudly, when the Trump administration moves explicitly against those spurious diversity statements and other requirements. If they were really held captive by an ideologically captured admin, they should welcome the Trump administration as liberators.

If they don't, I see three possibilities

  1. They actually agree with the admin. This is what I suspect is true.

  2. They don't agree with the admin, but believe accepting the admin's dominance is preferable to the short-term pain Trump is imposing. If they believe this, they are, IMO, fools.

  3. They think Trump will fail, and thus adhere to the admin in order to prevent later repercussions against themselves. In this case they are craven.

None of these cases demand they be given any sort of mercy.

I have no doubt that there are some true-believers. Though actually, I suspect that what academia has, ultimately, is a supermajority of normie liberals - people don't like cancel culture or having to parrot meaningless diversity statements, but agree with the left more than the right overall, and with a deep-seated distaste for Trump. Such people, I would describe as living under the yoke of the cancel-culture regime as much as anyone. If you take free speech seriously, then they're archetypal examples of victims of cancel culture. But they have every reason to believe Trump sees them as enemies anyway, and thus, correctly refuse to welcome the Great Liberator because they identify any call to do so as an attempt to divide and conquer.

More to the point, to whatever extent there are conservatives in academia whom cancel culture is preventing from speaking up, they are the people Trump is/should be trying to save. If everyone in academia is in fact a true believer in wokeism, then by definition cancel culture in academia would be a nonissue: there would be no wrongthink for cancel mobs to punish, and no free speech would be infringed. Attacking cancel culture in academia is only a worthy endeavor if you presuppose that there are, in fact, people currently forced to mouth insincere diversity statements that you want to rescue. An attack vector which hurts such people as much as their oppressors - even if they are a minority - inherently loses its justification.

Also, whether you describe #3 as "craven" or simply rational behavior depends a great deal on the object-level question of whether Trump will, in fact, fail. Say I, a closet conservative in academia, happen to believe he will fail, hard, with, say, >80% confidence. Wouldn't it be idiotic of me to throw off the mask now? You say craven, I say survival instincts. Don't online right-wingers tend to approve of hiding your power level?

normie liberals - people don't like cancel culture or having to parrot meaningless diversity statements

Such people don't exist. The most "moderate" fringes of the enemy have still shown a voracious appetite for land acknowledgements, attaching black/brown/trans flags to everything, mandating everyone take the nlm loyalty oauth, cancelling nazis (everyone right of them), diversity quotas, and more of anything called "DEI".

There are no "normie liberals" who don't love all those things. If you think they do, then show me they exist.

Normie liberals don't tend to talk a lot about politics, especially not in public. Most of them are hanging out under real names, and their social circles include social justice warriors willing to cut them off for heresy. They're afraid to get thrown out into the Wilderness if they speak their minds.

(I'm legitimately unsure if @WandererintheWilderness's username references that article, because yeah, theMotte as a community has been cast out into the Wilderness even if doesn't fully have the "Wilderness nature".)

If you take free speech seriously, then they're archetypal examples of victims of cancel culture.

No, the real victims of cancel culture are the ones who didn't get to be in that position because they are conservative. My preferred result is admissions officers being put in prison for decades of discrimination. What is happening is the compromise.

I have no doubt that there are some true-believers. Though actually, I suspect that what academia has, ultimately, is a supermajority of normie liberals

Varies by department, of course, but at some point the ratios are so extreme I don't think it's reasonable to really consider them normie. Many are, sure, but cutting off half the normal curve suggests the left tail is going to be significant.

And I can't get the full text at the moment, but helluva statement from the abstract of this paper:

Third, conservatives fear negative consequences of revealing their political beliefs to their colleagues. Finally, they are right to do so: In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists said that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents were, the more they said they would discriminate.

Though actually, I suspect that what academia has, ultimately, is a supermajority of normie liberals - people don't like cancel culture or having to parrot meaningless diversity statements, but agree with the left more than the right overall, and with a deep-seated distaste for Trump.

Then they have chosen their side, and are correctly considered collaborators.

If everyone in academia is in fact a true believer in wokeism, then by definition cancel culture in academia would be a nonissue: there would be no wrongthink for cancel mobs to punish, and no free speech would be infringed.

Those who cancel are perfectly happy to go after those who are only perceived to commit wrongthink, or to change the definition of wrongthink to catch those who were formerly right-thinkers, and thus to even cancel true believers.

Attacking cancel culture in academia is only a worthy endeavor if you presuppose that there are, in fact, people currently forced to mouth insincere diversity statements that you want to rescue.

As I said above, certainly not. If cancel culture has already pushed out everyone who is not a true believer, or I can't rescue those who have not been pushed out, it is still good to destroy cancel culture in academia as a step in either re-populating academia with non-wokes, or destroying academia in its entirety so the wokes cannot use whatever power and influence academia has to cause trouble in other areas.

An attack vector which hurts such people as much as their oppressors - even if they are a minority - inherently loses its justification.

No, it doesn't. If there's one oppressed person per 1000 in academia, and they are hurt as much as the 1000 by some measure, this is what's called collateral damage. No one is required to use a perfectly precise weapon.

Say I, a closet conservative in academia, happen to believe he will fail, hard, with, say, >80% confidence. Wouldn't it be idiotic of me to throw off the mask now? You say craven, I say survival instincts.

Trump, however, must act as if he will succeed. And if he does, they were craven.

Don't online right-wingers tend to approve of hiding your power level?

A phrase I associate mostly with the dissident right/neo-Nazis, actually. But keeping your head down when you're totally outclassed may be merely prudent. Keeping your head down when you have a chance at success is cowardly.

Aren't the head "admins" typically drawn from the tenured faculty (sometimes hired across institutions)? I doubt there is a college president (or provost, or dean, or department head) out there without a doctorate. Maybe not all the mid-level admins ("Deputy Title IX Coordinator"), but those aren't intended to be steering the ship.

Whew boy, now this is really some waging of the culture war.

Has Terence Tao actually engaged in any political activism other than sharing his opinions, or are you purely criticizing him for having anti-right political opinions and working for a California university?

Saying that being a professor at a California university is like being a soldier of the new Red Army is hyperbole. It's the same kind of hyperbole that committed Soviets used against their own ideological enemies in the Soviet academic system.

Sure, I don't think that Terence Tao is entitled to taxpayer money. I don't think even he is trying to claim that he is entitled to taxpayer money. Surely there's some room for nuance in looking at this situation.

TracingWoodgrains has a thread on the topic here: https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1957878299146993821

Terence Tao, signing an open letter in 2020: "We are enraged at the everyday operations of a white supremacist society. ... Complicity with these systems of oppression is deeply rooted in the origins of this country."

He also wrote a blog in 2016 entitled "It ought to be common knowledge that Donald Trump is not fit for the presidency of the United States of America". He might want to put forth the image of a politically neutral mathematician now that his funding is at risk, but that does not reflect his previous behavior.

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/06/04/it-ought-to-be-common-knowledge-that-donald-trump-is-not-fit-for-the-presidency-of-the-united-states-of-america/

link to the letter https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/scientists-condemn-racist-violence these cut have to do with UCLA's complicity in failing to denounce antisemitism, not the letter ? Had he not signed the letter, presumably his funding would have still been cut?

Are you saying the government should punish one of the greatest mathematicians alive because he expressed his political opinions on things and the current leader doesn't like it?

Man I thought woke cancel culture was insane in their assault on academic freedom and free speech on campuses but this seems to be going up a whole nother level.

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Absolutely, you step into the ring you should expect to get hit back. Stay the fuck out of politics if you're not a political figure.

But had he not signed the letter, would his funding not been cut? The stated justification by the trump administration has to do with UCLA failing to adequately police antisemitism on its campus, not wokeness.

So you explicitly agree with the woke leftists that professors and researchers with "bad opinions" should be punished even if it's not irrelevant to their work?

  • -14

Define "bad opinions."

I don't think Tao should be defunded for this alone, but neither should he be defended as a neutral apolitical little guy.

Every academic that has used the word "whiteness" should be treated the same way the universities would treat, say, David Duke.

Yes, until the other side commits in a way that means their violation of trolerance will cost them in power then absolutely. If one side pays no price for punishing those with "bad opinions" they're going to do more of it when they return to power.

So how do you feel about a situation like this? https://x.com/pjaicomo/status/1958124476001861948

Do you believe the left would be justified with removing Tom Macdonald for his "the devil is a democrat" speech because the right wing started with saying legal residents don't have protections?

I think no, but "the other side started it" being a valid reason to betray what you previously said seems like it would apply here too then.

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Have you heard of this little thing called freedom of speech?

  • -11

He still has tenure. the funding can be terminated at will

He's not being silenced or arrested. What is the old XKCD line, that's not your free speech rights being violated, that's just someone showing you the door.

He's not being thrown in prison. As fond as I am of defending free speech, free speech is not the right to receive a check from the government to subsidize your tongue.

right, he still has tenure

free speech is not the right to receive a check from the government to subsidize your tongue.

No, but it is the right to keep your non-political job whatever political opinions you espouse outside of that job. If Tao stopped midway through math lectures to rant to his students about his personal opinions, that'd be one thing. But if his political advocacy on his own time does not interfere with doing his job as an academic, then it is a violation of free speech to jeopardize his career on the basis of his political speech, no different from when left-wings cancel-mobs do it.

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Snarkly: As I've heard it described, it doesn't include freedom from consequences.

Are you saying the government should punish one of the greatest mathematicians alive because he expressed his political opinions on things and the current leader doesn't like it?

Oppressing right wingers is OK, but the leftists can't be touched because they're more valuable human capital? Anti-egalitarian. I like it.

In all honesty, what would a government do to him? Cut his government funding? If he's that good, he can probably find alternate sponsors.

Edit: Also, holy hell, you got a lot of downvotes for that. Undeserved IMO; your point seemed entirely reasonable to make.

They've gone so far towards being egalitarian they've become anti-egalitarian.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

  • George Orwell, Animal Farm

Man I thought woke cancel culture was insane in their assault on academic freedom and free speech on campuses but this seems to be going up a whole nother level.

In what way is it a higher level? The other camp has actually gotten people fired for expressing political opinions that seem pretty commensurate with the pro-progressive noises Terry has made. He is not even getting fired or having his career seriously threatened, but is just being subjected to some inconvenience (much greater for his students). Even the fallout to students is not without mirror precedent: at the US university where I did my PhD, a grad student I knew was prevented from graduating even with a different nominal advisor purely to put pressure on his advisor who got #MeTooed (in an incredibly fishy case) but was fighting back.

It is understandable that Terry is complaining (and, indeed, he owes it to his students to make this effort), but he has made his bed.

So you explicitly agree with the woke leftists that professors and researchers with "bad opinions" should be punished even if it's not irrelevant to their work?

  • -19

I don't understand why you are just ignoring the question - it wasn't intended as rhetorical.

Anyhow, my answer to this question is no, but as with many other things (e.g. war crimes, military invasions...) I would rather live in a world where 2+ competing parties do it than in one where only 1 party does it, even if having 0 parties do it is best.

To make it very explicit for the situation at hand: not punishing any researchers for opinions unrelated to their work is best, but punishing researchers of all teams for opinions unrelated to their work is second best. (Not even a distant second best - as a working scientist I honestly think the science community would be much improved if all scientists trying to play at being politicians or "public intellectuals" were summarily kicked out)

I don't understand why you are just ignoring the question - it wasn't intended as rhetorical.

it's because he is concern trolling the lot of you.

So how do you feel about a situation like this? https://x.com/pjaicomo/status/1958124476001861948

Do you believe the left would be justified with removing Tom Macdonald for his "the devil is a democrat" speech because the right wing started with saying legal residents don't have protections?

It seems to me that this line of logic would be just as valid.

not punishing any legal residents for political opinions is best, but punishing legal residents of all teams for political opinions is second best.

Personally I think no, but "the other side started it" being a valid reason to betray claimed principles would justify the next Dem admin removing Tom from the country.

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It would be nice if you answered his question before asking a follow-up. Particularly when it has nothing to do with the case we're discussing.

There's no point in explaining why it's another level of wrong for government to target scientists and researchers funding over wrongthink if they're perfectly fine with that level of government suppression over academic freedom to begin with.

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Are you saying the government should punish one of the greatest mathematicians alive because he expressed his political opinions on things and the current leader doesn't like it?

Not should. Must.

No peaceful government is possible if the power of censorship and control over truth is only available to one side.

When the left picked that sword up, they were warned endlessly that this would have consequences once they would inevitably lose power. There you go.

So you explicitly agree with the woke leftists that professors and researchers with "bad opinions" should be punished even if it's not irrelevant to their work?

Will you be upset if the left comes back into power and explicitly targets all conservatives with funding cuts after you've said it's now ok to do?

  • -16

Progressives already do that, and have loudly proclaimed for years it is OK to do. So I will not be upset because it is expected behavior from them.

What conservatives are there? Certainly none in academia. The left already uses its power to purge conservatives as much as they possibly can.

I believe in free speech and other such natural rights, so it should not happen. I also think that

This isn't about moral rectitude, it's about what's possible. You can't start shooting kulaks and demand they not shoot back because God commanded that thou shalt not kill.

I'm simply informing you of what's possible in the political climate created by such acts. Which is exactly what I was warning everyone would happen ten years ago.

The left wing has thoroughly destroyed the classical liberal fort on its advance, and now that the advance has stopped, it can't hide behind its walls whilst retreating. Actions have consequences.

I believe in free speech and other such natural rights, so it should not happen. I also think that

Well you say that and yet nothing in the following sentences expresses any idea that it is wrong to target researchers and scientists for their personal political beliefs. In fact all the effort seems dedicated to defending the idea of targeted wrongthink suppression.

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Yeah, I'm thinking he should be punished. It's not his place as a mathematician to tell me how orange man bad. I'm not even inclined to care about his supposed groundbreaking work if he has martyr his supposed scientific reason on the altar of woke.

You agree with the woke leftists that professors and researchers with "bad opinions" should be punished even if it's not irrelevant to their work?

  • -16

He's not a neutral party. I actually would also like whole divisions of X studies wiped off the universities, so my views aren't neutral either.

Nah, I just don't appreciate his rhetorical approach here. It comes across as disingenuous. He's trying to pull the "wise man above the fray descends from his ivory tower to bestow wisdom upon the masses" when in reality he has been down here flinging shit along with the rest of us.

In terms of the actual issue, his funding was not specifically cut, and Tao making this all about him comes across as somewhat egotistical. UCLA's funding was cut for what appear to be fairly legitimate reasons. For example, they are still racially discriminating in college admissions, in flagrant violation of the recent SCOTUS decision. This comment goes into more detail: https://www.themotte.org/post/2732/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/357296?context=8#context

Even if your portrayal of what he said was accurate, that is not "a whole nother level", it's "more of the same", and perhaps even "way more mild". But it's not accurate. He wasn't punished for his political views, his university was for their discriminatory practices. Tao was portraying himselfnas politically neutral, and the above comment was pointing out he's lying.

Signing an open letter and writing an article that attacks Trump is pretty innocuous behavior, in my opinion. Is there any evidence that he tried to, for example, cancel anyone?

Signing an open letter and writing an article that attacks Trump is pretty innocuous behavior, in my opinion.

Surely the contents of the open letter would matter, wouldn't it? Would signing an open letter committing oneself to help the 4th Reich take over the United States also be pretty innocuous?

Of course, this letter isn't that. Rather, it's an open letter espousing an ideology that's specifically anti-logic, which I don't think is innocuous for a mathematician. The most innocuous and, IMHO quite likely, explanation for his behavior is that he unthinkingly followed sociopolitical pressure to sign that document. And caring so little about what he puts his signature on that he's willing to sign off on a belief system that rejects the very basis of what he's studying is at least as concerning as it is innocuous. If a bus driver was known to openly support an ideology that rejected the notion of left and right or red and green, the bus company would be justified in not considering that all that innocuous, even if the bus driver was merely doing it to look cool for his peers.

Would signing an open letter committing oneself to help the 4th Reich take over the United States also be pretty innocuous?

Yes, it would be. The United States is so far away from being taken over by either communists or by Nazis that an open letter in support of either of those groups would be innocuous.

You are fighting the hypothetical in a way that seems in bad faith. The ideology in question that refuses to be named does not share this characteristic of "anywhere near as far away from taking over US as Nazis or Communists;" it has already taken over the institution in question, i.e. academia, and if it hasn't, then it's certainly caused severe transformations to it, with plans to make even more. If signing off on Nazism or Communism is "innocuous" only or primarily due to circumstance of these ideologies being so weak as to be unworthy of consideration, that certainly doesn't apply to this real case.

Attacking Trump on his private blog as a candidate for President is Tao's right as an American citizen. Putting a pseudo-mathematical spin on that (as he does) to try to back his political views with his mathematical expertise is a version of getting Eulered, but while it's bad epistemology that's all it is.

Signing an open letter like that one, on his authority as a professor of mathematics at a university -- a public university at that -- is politicizing the institution. When people with the opposite politics get in power, it is perfectly reasonable for them to decide that no, they do not want to provide government funding for institutions that are fighting them politically. The letter isn't innocuous at all.

When people with the opposite politics get in power, it is perfectly reasonable for them to decide that no, they do not want to provide government funding for institutions that are fighting them politically.

I agree! And I agree that the open letter is pushing it, and I find the letter pretty obnoxious.

I think that Tao by signing the open letter was, deliberately or not, unfairly taking advantage of the fact that non-leftist academics who signed an open letter supporting different politics would possibly expose themselves to career-endangering consequences.

That said, I still think that @Sunshine's take goes overboard. Identifying your own political side with America as a whole and calling for the wholesale demolition of the other side is a bit much of a reaction to what amounts to an academic most people have never even heard of putting his name on a politicized open letter.

I agree! And I agree that the open letter is pushing it, and I find the letter pretty obnoxious.

A few posts ago you said it was "pretty innocuous behavior".

Sunshine's post is way over the top. But it's a lot closer to the truth than "UCLA, Tao, and his colleagues did nothing wrong"

Just because I find it obnoxious doesn't mean that I don't find it innocuous. I observe obnoxious political activities all the time, coming from both the left and the right, without necessarily thinking that it is any sort of serious political threat.

The "left" ran a profoundly successful multi-decade propaganda campaign to convince the entire country that racism is quite close to the worst possible sin. Obviously not everyone has bitten, but overwhelmingly the general population on the left AND right buy it. Now the left doesn't think what they are doing is racist, but a good chunk of the middle and the right do - and they've been trained to tear down people and institutions that support racism by the left.

This some combination of not accepting immoral behavior, being held to your own standards becoming a problem, and inevitable consequences of your decisions.

If someone believes that anyone who holds the belief that an ethic group is scum deserves what's coming to them and believes an ethnic group is scum....you are doing what they asked when you come for them.

Add in the meta game aspect of tanking trust for authority leading to bad outcomes in society? These people deserve what is happening to them, and more.

I've heard of none. Why do you believe that should matter?

Most people here are familiar with the Herbert quote:

“When I am Weaker Than You, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom Because that is according to my principles.”

That is a reasonable approximation of my model of Blue Tribe. Over the past ten years, I've watched Progressivism attempt a full-fledged social revolution through methodical weaponization of our society's institutions and centers of value. The revolution they attempted was merciless and insane, caused incalculable harm, and cannot at this date truly be said to have failed. They are on the back foot, momentarily, but they very clearly have learned nothing and will go right back to their revolutionary march the instant they see an opportunity to do so. They must not be given that opportunity. Their political movement must be entombed, their centers of power torn down and destroyed, any possible route back to social dominance foreclosed.

It seems madness to me to pretend that, having seen what we have seen, we should go back to "the way things were before", turn our backs and let them have another swing at our necks. If forestalling that threat means a few years of reduced scientific output, so be it. That is a small price to pay compared to another Blue offensive. To the extent that "neutral" institutions wish to protect themselves from the depredations of unrestrained culture war, common knowledge is necessary that such a defense is achieved through rigorous neutrality, not unlimited Blue appeasement.

You appear to be approaching this from a frame of "how can we remove the worst outliers from the academic system, so that we can get back to the work at hand". I approach it from the angle of "Even ignoring the worst outliers, the Academy has become a vast system for converting taxpayer money into Progressive political power and social control". "Cancelation" is a single facet of that machine. The machine, as a whole, must go.

Over the past ten years, I've watched Progressivism attempt a full-fledged social revolution through methodical weaponization of our society's institutions and centers of value. The revolution they attempted was merciless and insane, caused incalculable harm, and cannot at this date truly be said to have failed. They are on the back foot, momentarily, but they very clearly have learned nothing and will go right back to their revolutionary march the instant they see an opportunity to do so.

Whenever I hear cries of "help help I'm being repressed for my speech" from the left, I think about Masterpiece Cakeshop and the neverending litigation the owner has been put through, the mocking phrase "freeze peach," the national ACLU changing its guidelines for case selection to avoid representing right-wingers (that internal memo from way back in 2018), state chapters of the ACLU refusing to represent right-wing groups, and the infamous xkcd comic about being shown the door. They demonstrated their true principles when they had power and I have no reason to think anything has changed.

That is a reasonable approximation of my model of Blue Tribe.

Well, how is it not also a reasonable approximation of the Red Tribe also? The sad reality is that the quote really should go, "when I am weaker, I ask for freedom because that is according to the principles we all claim to have; when I am stronger, I take away freedom because that is according to the principles we actually all share".

The progressives, in their many years of relative weakness, had me bamboozled; I'm not inclined to repeat that mistake with the other camp now in the #resistance.

Well, how is it not also a reasonable approximation of the Red Tribe also?

I don't think so, but I am exceedingly aware that I have no way to prove it to skeptical Blues or Greys. My perception of the Red side is that what we want is to not be ruled by Blues, rather than to rule Blues. I've been advocating for a national divorce for many years now, and I'm hopeful that this is the direction we're currently moving in. I don't want to fight Blues for control of social institutions. To the degree that institutions are shared and therefore must be fought over, I would rather deconstruct those institutions and allow the value that fed them to be diverted to new institutions that are not shared. That applies to Academia, the education system generally, the courts, the police, entertainment, everything.

I believe that the whole culture war, everything we're seeing, is because we can't get away from each other. And an unfortunate consequence is that much is shared, and must be fought over; there's only one presidency, only one congressional majority, only one Supreme Court. All of those have to go away, and it seems clear to me that the most straightforward way to make them go away is to capture them, contaminating them with Redness from the Blue perspective and thus mobilizing Blue Tribe to attack their legitimacy. More unfortunately, this is likely indistinguishable from seizure of power from anyone who doesn't already buy it, even without inherent human bias. If there were a way to avoid that, I'd be for it. It doesn't seem to me that there is, though.

For what it's worth, I try at least to be straightforward as I can in my own communication. I don't believe in "freedom" or "human rights", "free speech" or any of the old liberal touchstones. I don't recognize appeals to these ideas when others make them, and I try my best to avoid appealing to them for my own side as well. I believe they are fundamentally incoherent concepts outside an environment of values-coherence; they are never going to work across tribal lines. Both Reds and Blues want good things and not bad things. Expecting otherwise is foolishness.

If there were a way to avoid that, I'd be for it.

Well, you could cut out the middleman and simply secede. Didn't work so well the first time, I'll grant you, but, like… if Trump announced some kind of federal split live on air tomorrow, do you really think that ends with a boots-on-the-grounds, millions-dead civil war? Somehow I can't picture that. If it gets anywhere, I'd expect something more like a messy, drawn-out, infrastructure-wrecking, but ultimately-bloodless Brexit-type scenario. Lawfare, not warfare. Who knows how it would end, but starting from your premises, it seems worth a shot.

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To some extent you're right, and it's just human nature, but I also think that the Blues have some universalist drive that the Reds don't.

The most obvious case is Commies insisting that you can't just implement their system in one country, and show the world how obviously superior it is, because something something capitalism ia a global system. But even basic libs have the same instinct, everytime I saw someone propose "why don't you do your thing in your jurisdiction, we do ours in our, and we leave each other alone" someone would show up saying "this would be too cruel for people under your jurisdiction". I don't think all Blues believe this, but 100% of the time the person saying it would be Blue, and other Blues would never give them any pushback.

Eh, this seems very dependent on whom you include under "Reds". If the actual (historical) Commies count as Blue, then surely their Yankee rivals should count as Red - and the Cold War era was rife with missionary wars to bring Democracy and Capitalism to other countries. You can stretch the line into the past all the way to Matthew Perry forcing Japan open to international trade, and into the future at least to Iraq, which was sold by its Red cheerleaders as Operation Iraqi LibertyFreedom. Now, you could argue that all the democracy-bombing was window dressing and each instance was actually motivated by hard geopolitical and economic interest, but then how do you disprove the same statement about the Commies? Isn't the best ideological window dressing one that the NPCs on your side fanatically subscribe to? Also, if you are fighting a civilisational battle, is ideological conversion even distinguishable from hard geopolitical interests?

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The nuance was available for Tao and other academics doing "good" work to police their own and not let their own research to be used to launder pure advocacy and propaganda under the guise of research. You can't be a part of "no enemies on the left" for the better part of your career and then act shocked when people put weight on your words and actions.

If Terrance Tao wants my support for his academic research, he can start by writing a substack comprehensible to a STEM undergrad explaining what the deal is with inter-universal Teichmüller theory. Until then, have fun in the private sector buddy. Meta is hiring.

Anything that harms "higher" education, the NGO complex and the politically captured "scientists" is good by me. This guy checks all three.

The Science chose to align itself with wokeness, and it put itself in the crosshairs. How many people who knew better, within this scientific infrastructure, held their tongues when we were told covid would not spread if you were protesting for racial justice? How much serious rigor goes into racial justice narratives that justify a need for more black doctors, damn the merit? Science is subject to pressures that betray its very purpose, and there seems to be no interest in stopping these threats from within. Eventually, you're going to draw attention from an outside force, when the corrupting element becomes a driving force.

With that in mind, the fact of the matter is that anyone who's pro-America and pro-"Science" just doesn't seem to have much in the way of common goals these days. 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. There's obvious value in science and all, but if they wanted America's unconditional support, they should have been more willing to bat for America themselves when they had the chance.

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?

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?

Both would result (has resulted) in worse science than no political tests, but almost certainly some sort of jingoistic nationalist right America-first political test would result in better science than the woke left. The woke left has, as its basis, a rejection of concepts like "objectivity" and "logic," which are pretty fundamental to doing science. I expect that testing for nationalist right would filter out more intelligent people, but filtering for the woke left filters for more people who are willing and able to reject the fundamental basis of science. Filtering for scientists based on their commitment to the woke left is like a straight guy going to a lesbian bar to hit on women. You've pre-filtered specifically for people who have made visible commitments to behavior that is specifically antithetical to the role they're supposed to fill.

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?

Quite probably yes, except some strains of conservationism.

Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

That wouldn't rule out me or any of my research advisors. I don't think it would get Terence Tao, either. It's a cute motte for what is obviously a much more expansive bailey.

I don't mean it literally. I mean that same level of scrutiny for the new dissident ideology that ostensibly attempts to subvert the order of the United States. Senate commissions hunting down people who ever took part in a DEI program and retiring them early so they never participate in high level anything again, that sort of thing.

You know, denazification.

Shit test the students on their opinion of the US as a force for good and weather they hate "straight white men" [tm].

I feel like it is worth noting here that the results of any valid scientific investigation don't depend on patriotism?

I can understand how, particularly in the humanities, the results of any given study can be more pro or anti America, or whatever other nation. A subject like history is as much about framing a narrative of the past as it is about objective facts, so you might have great reason to worry about bias.

But science or mathematics, at least if they are carried out in any kind of reasonable good faith, are hard to skew like that. It doesn't matter whether such-and-such the physicist is a rootless cosmopolitan because the results of theories of physics do not depend on the character or values of the theoretician. The maths work out or don't work out regardless, and a country that deprives itself of genuinely useful knowledge because of concerns about the character of scientists is needlessly crippling itself.

But science or mathematics, at least if they are carried out in any kind of reasonable good faith, are hard to skew like that.

You need the word "hard" before "science" for this to be especially accurate. Because, well, Social Psychology is a Flamethrower.

And a number of other caveats: there’s reason that one of the big Darwin blowups was over a ‘physics’ paper.

@OliveTapenade said "hard", not "impossible", and even then I'm not sure that that was published as a physics paper even if it seems to have been (arguably fraudulently) funded as one.

You are ignoring what the actual situation is. Regardless of their actual research output, the supposedly legitimate researchers allowed their research to be misrepresented to support left wing narratives. And even when the research was too obscure or theoretical to do that, they still allowed themselves to provide cover fire for much larger groups of illegitimate "research". It is bad to not be able to calculate the proper path to the moon from Cape Canaveral. But it doesn't matter that you got the calculations right in some obscure corner of the world, if actually those calculators ran cover for DEI nonsense that they, the white men, aren't even a part of NASA or any of NASA's consultants. Instead those places are all black women cosplaying that movie that came out a decade ago and the rockets all land in the Atlantic.

Inflammatory claims require evidence. This is still not a place to air your grievances without doing any work to back them up.

Your mod log is a long, long series of similar comments. One week ban.

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This is abusing your moderatorship to win an argument.

What? With whom?

But science or mathematics, at least if they are carried out in any kind of reasonable good faith, are hard to skew like that.

Well...

The maths work out or don't work out regardless

Mathematicians are pretty honest about the fact that problem selection, and ultimately basic choices of definitions, are driven at least partially by cultural and aesthetic concerns. But the actual content of mathematics is extremely difficult to politicize, given how abstract it is.

It doesn't matter whether such-and-such the physicist is a rootless cosmopolitan because the results of theories of physics do not depend on the character or values of the theoretician.

It is much harder to introduce bias into fundamental physics than it is to introduce bias into psychology or even biology. I kinda gotta hand it to Irigaray for having the chutzpah to suggest that we haven't fully characterized the solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations because of men's fear of menstruation and "feminine" fluids, but... yeah that's actually not a reasonable thing to believe...

I kinda gotta hand it to Irigaray for having the chutzpah to suggest that we haven't fully characterized the solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations because of men's fear of menstruation and "feminine" fluids,

You left out that mechanics of hard, rigid, phallic objects have been solved, also because men run the world..

As an aside, Irigaray is someone I have mentioned to progressives in private discussion, and asked them to answer for her. The response I get is universally that that her fluid mechanics quote is crazy, and it doesn't really represent the feminist or progressive movements. I mean, at least the people I deal with are sane enough to recognize that level of insanity and disavow it in private. However the wider progressive movement has not disavowed her assertion, and in fact seems to promote ideas that are just short of said assertion. While it is important to consider the strongest ideas of a movement, so as not to be knocking down straw or weak men, the insistence on that when it matters in private coupled with the lack of public disavowal on their end makes for an insidious motte and bailey.

While it is important to consider the strongest ideas of a movement, so as not to be knocking down straw or weak men, the insistence on that coupled with the lack of disavowal on their end makes for an insidious motte and bailey.

Doubly so because Science™ claims to be the process by which we find "strongest ideas" generally. It's both a direct and a meta-level failure.

As an aside, Irigaray is someone I have mentioned to progressives in private discussion, and asked them to answer for her. The response I get is universally that that her fluid mechanics quote is crazy, and it doesn't really represent the feminist or progressive movements.

I went and read the "The 'Mechanics' of Fluids" chapter in Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One to make sure I wasn't misrepresenting her. I believe that it can be steelmanned (or at least, one thread of thought within it can be steelmanned).

The critical passage seems to be this:

[...] Certainly these “theoretical” fluids have enabled the technical—also mathematical—form of analysis to progress, while losing a certain relationship to the reality of bodies in the process.

What consequences does this have for “science” and psychoanalytic practice?

And if anyone objects that the question, put this way, relies too heavily on metaphors, it is easy to reply that the question in fact impugns the privilege granted to metaphor (a quasi solid) over metonymy (which is much more closely allied to fluids). Or—suspending the status of truth accorded to these essentially metalinguistic “categories” and “dichotomous oppositions” — to reply that in any event all language is (also) metaphorical, and that, by denying this, language fails to recognize the “‘subject” of the unconscious and precludes inquiry into the subjection, still in force, of that subject to a symbolization that grants precedence to solids.

It is philosophically contentious whether anything like a "solid object" even exists at all. Arguably, our fundamental ontological presuppositions are not given to us, but are instead the result of choices we make (or, perhaps, choices made for us by society and the structure of language). Science, by its own admission, makes use of idealized theoretical models that are one step removed from actual "reality" (spherical cows in a vacuum and such). We can imagine an alternative isomorphic description of the same physical model that keeps all the math exactly intact, but uses different linguistic imagery. Why a "spherical" cow "rolling" down an incline? Why not a "viscous" cow "flowing" down an incline?

Because the metaphorical imagery employed by science is fundamentally arbitrary, Irigaray's contention is that the fundamental choice of which parts of physics to label as "solid" mechanics and "fluid" mechanics in the first place reveals something sociologically and psychologically about the people doing the labeling (obviously, she would say that it reveals a fundamental aversion to or discomfort with fluid imagery and feminine imagery in general).

Well, good on you for reading that and trying to steelman it. No matter what, I always believe that all ideas should be considered at their own merit.

However, I'm not sure I fully agree with your analysis. I'm not the best at understanding those sorts of jargon-upon-jargony passages in this type of philosophy. I'm inclined to, at a certain point, simply write it off as something that's so detached from reality as to be worthless. I can understand a little better if I go really slow, but even so, I'm not really seeing how what you said relates to the passage you quoted. It seems to me that her point has something to do with (arbitrarily) claiming that metaphor is more like a solid, and metonymy is more like a fluid, presumably because fluids in real life have the capability of changing shape. But this to me already is an overstep into the ridiculous, because she is simply using her own personal associations to claim two unrelated abstract concepts are related, not justifying it, and then going on to use that towards her own end.

I don't really know where you're then getting this notion that we can draw any conclusion from what she says to how theoretical objects are thought up for use in scientific scenarios.
And in reply to the point that you think she's trying to make, I'd say, if people are choosing spherical cows for their thought experiments (not something I've personally heard of myself, but I'd believe that it's a thing if you say so), it's likely because it is a simpler concept to do math with, than fluid cows. And it's not un-justified, since our bodies behave more like solids than fluids under such conditions; we generally take up a certain volume, give or take a very small amount for our ability to deform our skin by pushing into it. Certainly the outside of our bodies generally stays together under normal conditions, and holds inner fluids inside, such that they have little effect on how we'd interact with an incline.

I don't really know where you're then getting this notion that we can draw any conclusion from what she says to how theoretical objects are thought up for use in scientific scenarios.

It was the idea that occurred to me while reading the text, so I just went with it!

I fully admit I'm engaged in a "motivated" reading. I'm more concerned with trying to extract a coherent philosophical idea from the text rather than with reconstructing Irigaray's exact mental state. But I don't think my interpretation is baseless either.

Backing up to give more context:

What is left uninterpreted in the economy of fluids—the resistances brought to bear upon solids, for example—is in the end given over to God. Overlooking the properties of real fluids—internal frictions, pressures, movements, and so on, that is, their specific dynamics—leads to giving the real back to God, as only the idealizable characteristics of fluids are included in their mathematicization.

Or again: considerations of pure mathematics have precluded the analysis of fluids except in terms of laminated planes, solenoid movements (of a current privileging the relation to an axis), spring-points, well-points, whirlwind-points, which have only an approximate relation to reality. Leaving some remainder. Up to infinity: the center of these “movements” corresponding to zero supposes in them an infinite speed, which is physically unacceptable. Certainly these “theoretical” fluids have enabled the technical—also mathematical—form of analysis to progress, while losing a certain relationship to the reality of bodies in the process.

What consequences does this have for “science” and psychoanalytic practice?

Roughly: Science can't just give a direct description of every single microdetail of reality. It has to "symbolize" things -- create simplified and idealized theoretical models. These models are inevitably attached to linguistic imagery.

And if anyone objects that the question, put this way, relies too heavily on metaphors, it is easy to reply that the question in fact impugns the privilege granted to metaphor (a quasi solid) over metonymy (which is much more closely allied to fluids).

Honestly not entirely sure what this part means. I assume that she's saying that solid imagery is more metaphorical, and fluid imagery is more metonymic, and her questioning here is impugning the privilege that the current imagery of physics grants to solids over fluids.

Or—suspending the status of truth accorded to these essentially metalinguistic “categories” and “dichotomous oppositions” — to reply that in any event all language is (also) metaphorical,+ and that, by denying this, language fails to recognize the “‘subject” of the unconscious and precludes inquiry into the subjection, still in force, of that subject to a symbolization that grants precedence to solids.

They key part is really the line at the end, "the subjection, still in force, of that subject to a symbolization that grants precedence to solids". The current "symbolization" of physics grants precedence to solids. But she's implying that that could change. We could imagine an alternative symbolization that grants precedence to fluids instead (without changing the content of the underlying physics).

it's likely because it is a simpler concept to do math with, than fluid cows.

Again the suggestion is that the imagery could change without changing the math.

Solid objects are already a lot more "fluid" than they might initially appear. See for example The Problem of the Many. It's not too hard to imagine an alternative conceptual landscape where we view the world of macro objects as being fundamentally populated by fluids, with "solids" being an exotic deviation from the fluid norm, if they even exist at all.

Because the metaphorical imagery employed by science is fundamentally arbitrary, Irigaray's contention is that the fundamental choice of which parts of physics to label as "solid" mechanics and "fluid" mechanics in the first place reveals something sociologically and psychologically about the people doing the labeling (obviously, she would say that it reveals a fundamental aversion to or discomfort with fluid imagery and feminine imagery in general).

Whether it's true that the scientific metaphorical imagery is fundamentally arbitrary and/or the degree to which it is/isn't is an interesting question. It's somewhat analogous to phonemes / morphemes. In most (maybe all?) structuralist linguistic models, phonemes are defined as lacking information individually. They're the sub-components of higher level objects that do convey information but they're interchangeable building blocks. Studying natural languages as used, though, seems to show that phonemes can have information: round sounds are associated with words involving the concept of roundness or fullness, sharp sounds are associated with spiky objects or violent concepts.

The associations seem somewhat universal and somewhat arbitrary and are not absolutes, every language has counter-examples. They also aren't necessary for a language's expressiveness so they are optional and to some degree interchangeable.

If the metaphors that tend to be used in scientific imagery are / are not potentially tied to some lower level structure in how humans form concepts, we could maybe learn more about the process of cognition. The degree to which they're socially mediated would still be interesting.

I believe that it can be steelmanned

Perhaps the rationalist habit of steelmanning should be put to rest.

You can find something valid in pretty much any rant. But if the rant is bad enough, you're going to do it by ignoring the author's intentions, and by ignoring the other 80% of the rant that can't be made valid by any standard.

We've had Holocaust deniers here. Occasionally they come up with something I can steelman (like lampshades made of human skin probably not being real). But the effect of steelmanning this is to ignore and gloss over 1) what they're saying, and 2) what they're trying to do by saying it.

I am not a “Rationalist” and my habits are very much my own.

I approach every text with the level of respect it deserves. Nothing more, nothing less.

I feel like it is worth noting here that the results of any valid scientific investigation don't depend on patriotism?

Do they depend on Diversity Equity and Inclusion? If not, how is it that none of the people complaining about Trump's cuts seemed tobhave an issue with their funding being dependant on that supposed "box checking"?

Very well-said. The thing about inviting cleansing fire is that it's not exactly discriminate.

That's the point of cleansing. You don't discriminate between filth.

Scientists are born subjects.

If the delusional fever dreams of democrat true believer karens come true and a Christian theocracy rises to power, the scientific establishment will simply publish appendixes to their papers reconciling them to the current state of creation research. Woke is the same damn thing. Trump should be demanding they include 'murica, fuck yeah! loyalty pledges instead of yeeting them for kowtowing.

While that would probably be a better outcome (to those who value American interests (me)), I don't think it would work. It's too deeply entrenched. I really don't think there's any coming back from it when you look at issues like transgender beliefs. Do you think biologists are about to walk all their support of that back, in favor of what used to be (and, in my mind, still is) an unquestionably obvious conclusion? I don't think it could happen. There will be no surrender on that front of the culture war, especially when you consider the immense reputational damage they'd incur from changing their story like that. It doesn't even matter if it's left wing or whatever at that point, they'd look absolutely retarded to come out and say "Oh, we were wrong about not knowing what a woman is."

Maybe the issue is that, despite a subject mentality, they're absolutely unable to contend with the fact that they are bleeding reputation to people who matter and can exercise control over them. They see the looming threat of admitting failure, and they clearly understand the damage that could incur, but they don't realize that doubling down on what many people see as overwhelming stupidity is causing them to lose substantial trust day after day. All they need to do, they think, is preach endlessly to the choir, those who have already given heart and soul to expert worship and could not think to question them, blind to the irreplaceable losses that their endless march incurs.

They just don't get it. They don't realize that they have a reputational standard that needs to be maintained. You get the certs, you wave a paper, and the people obey. If that's what you're used to, why shouldn't you fight to keep it that way? But any ruler can take things too far. I think there was a perception of invulnerability, that it would not matter what peasants who doubt The Cause think; you just have to yell at them again and again, and reinforce the need to Trust The Science, and all sorts of other patronizing measures. The idea that the experts could be in error is unthinkable, even as Trump hits them in the face with a sledgehammer over and over again while giving them very easy outs. Any mistakes can be corrected, any challenge from the opposition can be waited out (as they are too valuable to be dispensed with, clearly), and anyone noticing their repeated failures can only cause harm by going above their stations to cast doubt on the methods of their betters, who need to remain unchallenged for the ultimate good of America (which they often seem to hate).

I don't want to sound like I am enforcing a consensus, but it is funny. The way you frame the recapture of academia feels to me like The One Ring. You can claim it for yourself, but it will either unmake you into just another dark lord, or it will make you an unwitting pawn of the Enemy himself. Only by destroying it, perhaps, can what's in motion be stopped - and that is the only challenge that has not entered their darkest dreams.

Do you think biologists are about to walk all their support of that back, in favor of what used to be (and, in my mind, still is) an unquestionably obvious conclusion?

Observably, the medical industry seems to have been able to successfully walk back from several scandals of seemingly similar magnitude (on a logarithmic scale). The lobotomy as a procedure won a Nobel Prize in medicine. The sister of a future president had one! It had similar arguments over its ethics and efficacy, but in the end we don't do them anymore (I hear there are some rare similar procedures, with much more oversight and gatekeeping). It's largely been swept under the rug, though there wasn't zero introspection on the topic. At smaller scales I could point to "repressed memories," Freudian analysis, and such.

But it might take a decent fraction of a generation.

With respect to lobotomies, I think the medical industry managed to restore quite a bit of public trust with the polio vaccine. Right around the time people were realizing what a terrible idea lobotomies actually were, along came this absolute miracle of modern science. If public opinion swings towards "puberty blockers in children are horrific, actually" and then a universal cure for cancer is developed, I think people will be a lot more willing to overlook the misstep.

public trust with the polio vaccine

I know where you are going with this but ironically the polio vaccine ended up being a long term public relations disaster once the pain of polio started to fall off. Check out the whole Salk vs. Sabin thing if you want to dig in.

The lobotomy as a procedure won a Nobel Prize in medicine.

Exaggerating for effect, but: I will not stand for this lobotomy erasure!!!!!!

But seriously lobotomy was a great idea at the time and we dropped* it as soon as it stopped being a great idea.

Lobotomy (1930s) predates psychopharmacology (thorazine in the 1950s), some psychiatric illness responds to therapy alone but even with modern therapy modalities quite a few conditions can be debilitating to the point people would elect voluntary death (see last week's discussion) and that's with modern support and medication.

Some illness benefits from therapy for outcome improvement but requires medicine. The obvious heavy hitters are schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (~20% fatality rate from a manic episode pre-modern medicine).

Prior to the modern resources and approach you were absolutely going to die or end up locked up in an asylum with zero quality of life. Lobotomy managed to work some of the time. It wasn't great and had hideous side effects but it was the same as trepanning. You got no tools in the toolbox you use what you got.

Usage dropped off sharply after we had options but any modality with understood risks and benefits is going to take time to get replaced by new things.

Meanwhile it got a horrid reputation because mental illness scary and authority bad. The reputation is certainly deserved but the malign is generally misplaced.

It's helpful to consider that the best intervention we have period for psychiatric problems is still electro-shock therapy (now: ECT), which is equally poorly portrayed in media.

It is incredibly effective and safe and it is hard to get patient's to do it because of the media presentation which is basically based off of fear of mental illness and an impression garnered back from when ECT existed but anesthesia didn't (which was...certainly a more difficult time).

*okay started dropping it.

You probably know more of the specifics than I do, but it was at least in some places (notably the Soviet Union and Sweden) seen as controversial at the time.

I'm not an expert on the history of soviet mental health treatments lol but as part of my brief lit review for that comment I did spot that the soviets banned it first, they also had a history of misappropriating mental health stuff for political reasons (see: sluggish schizophrenia).

Secret police with a picture of a stethoscope duct taped to their head is a bit different than the medical establishment going about their regular or irregular business.

Now the choice of death, lobotomy, or locked up and the key thrown away is a tough one but I think when people hear lobotomy that's not quite what they are thinking. Many people then and now are more okay with locking people up and forgetting them than seeing lobotomized people around (which we do do chemically now). This isn't "wrong" per se, but it's not generally fully explored by the people advocating it.

As someone in the sciences (doing my PhD at Hopkins) these cuts have hit us quite hard. The NSF has basically been dismantled, and the NIH funding system has become much more restrictive. To me, none of this makes a whole lot of sense. These grants were pennies on top of the giant stacks of dollars that the military, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security represent. Yes you get a bunch of duds, but a lot of the research funded has an extremely high ROI. I get that Trump wanted to shut down "woke" research, but he could have done that without cutting overall funding (just mandate that the NIH can't fund transgender research, shutdown the diversity grants, etc.).

This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research. Which I can't really blame the Trump administration for. It was the idiot professors and students who tried to make the department officially pro-Palestine, admit a bunch of diversity PhD students who aren't up to snuff, and antagonize the administration because they thought Trump was a fascist who started this whole thing.

So it seems to me once again a case of Trump punishing the people who tried to screw him over, rather than something that genuinely would be the best move for the country.

I get that Trump wanted to shut down "woke" research, but he could have done that without cutting overall funding (just mandate that the NIH can't fund transgender research, shutdown the diversity grants, etc.).

Could you? One of the morbid bits to this saga has been how often people have pointed to what they saw as clearly misaimed anti-DEI efforts that must have been motivated by an LLM or a bad grep, and then oops.

Yes, there are research areas with neither blatant political abuse or outright woke goals. But the people who want to do the woke research can, as warned, lie: there’s far less signal than anyone thinks to a research’s quality from how sober the grant application.

I get that Trump wanted to shut down "woke" research, but he could have done that without cutting overall funding (just mandate that the NIH can't fund transgender research, shutdown the diversity grants, etc.).

The problem is that there isn't only some single class of "diversity grants". Every grant has some sort of DEI stuff written into it, including the main IPAM grant. It's a Gordian knot tying research to DEI, and there's only one way to deal with those.

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.

How?

The diversity statements didn't appear there out of the ether, they are heing pushed forward by people with inatitutional power. Demanding that they merely stop requiring these statements, and change the names of "women's scholarships" to "totally not women's scholarships" will result in no substantial change other than the people who set up this system being marginally more quiet until the next Dem administration.

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.

The fear that another Trump-esque administration will come to power and do the same thing again will surely remain.

I have a US mathematician friend who is entirely apolitical, but joined the DEI committee at his department (where he helped them implement DEI measures, screen applicants etc., not to mention the implicit lending of legitimacy) a few years ago out of the simple consideration that he was coming up for tenure review and it was a no-brainer to do this simple thing that would greatly improve his chances. There are, I figure, many cases like that. If it stops being a no-brainer career booster and starts being a gamble (will get favoured by the system, but might also get targeted for reprisal in the future if the wrong administration is in power), I imagine far fewer will go for it.

while the net effects on DEI would be the same as in my proposal.

Again, how?

If UCLA gets their funding cut for woke recruitment practices, but other universities bend the knee, you don't think that creates an incentive for UCLA to clean up house, or doesn't boost the relative position of universities that aren't insane?

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.

Only temporarily.

That's already a few years of personell changes and shifting the balance of power within the university system. It can be rolled back, but can't be undone at the snap of the fingers, and is therefore superior the solution you are proposing, that doesn't change anything except for the packaging.

rather than something that genuinely would be the best move for the country

professors and students who tried to make the department officially pro-Palestine, admit a bunch of diversity PhD students who aren't up to snuff, and antagonize the administration

This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research.

So to avoid politicizing scientific research, we should water down the quality of the researchers and let a bunch of activists take over the institutions, and that would genuinely be the best move for the country?

Am I reading that right?

Sorry I think my response was a bit confusing because I don't want to pin the blame solely on Trump for this. Universities have played with fire for a long time and somehow seem surprised to be getting burnt. I just lament that the administration seems to be cutting down the tree rather than pruning some of the worst branches. We can punish woke without destroying the research apparatus.

Your problem is thinking there is a healthy tree at all. There are a tiny number of healthy branches. The roots and trunk are diseased and rotten.

The tree needs to go, dig up the dirt, salt the hole and burn anything still crawling.

There are no good branches. APAB.

You must be well aware that comments such as yours are clear examples of "waging the culture war", something the thread rules explicitly ask users to avoid.

This also falls under the rule against making "sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike."

You've been warned in the past for doing this, but it's been a while, so I'll leave it at this.

There's a colourable argument that trying to sort the good from the bad - particularly within the uni bureaucracy as it exists - is a poor cost-benefit.

There's not a colourable argument that there is no good. That's just pretending the debate is one-sided. A third of voters with postgrad degrees voted for Trump. Those people are probably not on-board with the SJ agenda. There will also be SJ-opponents among those who did not vote, and even among those who voted for Harris; if I were a US citizen, I would probably have voted for Harris simply because I think Trump is too old to lead the free world in a potential WWIII and because WWIII almost certainly implies the semi-permanent fall of SJ anyway.

The institutions are weaponised against you; that's true. Many, perhaps most, of the people there are your enemies; that's true. God knows I feel like I'm in enemy territory every time I pass a bulletin board in a university and it's plastered with SJ signs. But that's just it; I do pass bulletin boards in universities, and I despise those signs. Not literally everyone in academia is your enemy.

A third of voters with postgrad degrees voted for Trump. Those people are probably not on-board with the SJ agenda.

While JT may well be opposed to everyone that went through college, I'm guessing the percentage that works for universities is much, much lower than 1/3.

But that's just it; I do pass bulletin boards in universities, and I despise those signs.

I am glad to have gone to university in less fraught times, and that I do not have the daily temptation to just remove the signs.

While JT may well be opposed to everyone that went through college, I'm guessing the percentage that works for universities is much, much lower than 1/3.

That is fair, somewhat; I would anticipate the split among professors being somewhat more tilted (though not as much as you'd expect, at least among the STEM faculty).

However, I didn't say "college degree". I said "postgrad degree". As in, basic tertiary degree and then another degree on top (e.g. PhD, Masters, MD, and whatever law is).

Not literally everyone in academia is your enemy.

I'll be the judge of who my enemies are. Literally every single person in that status hierarchy is my enemy. They belong to a heretical cult of a now-dead social religion and nothing short of full destruction will slow their war on science, reason and western civ. In the same manner that a hostile military must be broken before peace terms can be decided, so must academia be levelled before the social contract can be redrawn.

My advice is not to go down with such a leaky, corrupt and evil ship. Academia declared war on society. Society has started to notice. And people like me are just waiting for the right time to hole this bitch below the waterline, sling the grappling hooks and raise the Jolly Roger.

This is not a war and no one is participating in some holy revolution. This is not what war looks like. Social institutions do not function like militaries, nor is it wise/necessary to 'break' or 'level' the ones you don't like or which have issues. This is the same fallacy that leftists who want to defund the police engage in.

The leftists who thought it was a war were routing their opposition right up until the right decided it was one as well. Perhaps they were correct that it was a war -- or perhaps if one side treats it as a war, it is one.

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Not literally everyone in academia is your enemy.

And?

I try to avoid enemy/friend distinctions for many reasons. I am not adopting or revealing any preference here. This is a specific point about the metaphor.

But if you are going to adopt/concede an 'enemy institution' paradigm in the first place, there's no particular relevance of 'not literally everyone is your enemy' beyond the utility of those not-enemies to help target the enemies. If they aren't, or can't, then even if they better qualify as collateral rather than collaborators, neither category is enough to merit any principle against targeting the enemy institution. If their presence is used to claim the institution cannot be targeted because of the damage to the non-enemies, this is merely the use of human shields. Human shields are not protection of legitimate military targets. This is especially true if they are willing human shields, voluntary or paid or otherwise.

If their presence is used to claim the institution cannot be targeted because of the damage to the non-enemies, this is merely the use of human shields. Human shields are not protection of legitimate military targets.

I believe I said that.

There's a colourable argument that trying to sort the good from the bad - particularly within the uni bureaucracy as it exists - is a poor cost-benefit.

But @JTarrou made a very specific claim that the others on team "burn it all down" have not made in this thread:

There are no good branches. APAB.

This is why I responded to him and not to the others on that team, because that claim is false; not all professors are, in fact, "bastards". I claim the right to, as politely as I can, correct those on this board who say false things (NB: I have no strong opinions about whether JTarrou is lying vs. hyperbolising vs. ignorant), even when those false things are not especially relevant.

All professors contribute to and derive their living from participating in a fundamentally hostile institution, and the financial indenture of the student body and taxpayers which fund it.

A lot of plumbers and housewives and kindergarten teachers died in Dresden. They were all the enemy. Those who can't grasp this basic concept have no business in war.

When you’re a marine in Iwo Jima, you light fires at every cave entrance after you’ve thrown 3-4 grenades in. Then you move onto the next one. And the next one.

There’s nothing worth saving in there that just won’t slow you down and get your people killed.

That’s just where we are in the culture war. How could anyone be surprised at this point?

Dude, chill

You aren't on Iwo Jima. You're on an Internet board with rules against waging the culture war.

Dial it back, please.

Huh. I rated that one Neutral, because I read it as an obvious metaphor for "raze the institution quickly, ignore the regrettable collateral damage, move on to the next head of the hydra", which is a solid - if bitter - policy prescription and doesn't go the "YOU WERE ALL GUILTY AND YOU WERE ALL LEGITIMATE TARGETS!" route of indiscriminately demonising whole groups.

On reflection, I can see that if one read it literally, or even as ambiguous, that puts a very different spin on things.

Don’t worry; I could tell that it was metaphor. Nobody wants to waste hand grenades in this economy.

But if you don’t think “there’s nothing worth saving in there” counts as indiscriminate demonization, what does?

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This is by no means super important but usually when you guys ban someone you put the length of the ban in the mod tag comment, didn't see one here but he does have the "user was banned for this comment" flag.

Not sure if in error or what but wanted to call attention.

Toa is correct. It's a one-day ban.

It shows up in the moderation log as a one-day ban.

If you were part of the Trump administration, how would you punish academics for their woke excesses without negatively impacting useful research? The federal government does not directly control how universities manage their own affairs and any penalties assessed on the universities as a whole can be cast as damaging research in some way.

The only thing that I can think of is some sort of rule like "any university that violates XYZ policy automatically becomes federal property", which would allow the federal government to directly fire and hire, but nationalizing the universities comes with a million other problems.

Cut federal grants for diversity, withhold federal grant money from universities that don't toe the line on controlling the woke issues on campus. This is the stance that the admin took with Harvard and has served to keep Hopkins from acting up too much.

Pair this with maintaining the levels of federal funding support and you get reallocation of funds to less woke universities and less woke academics at woke-er universities putting pressure on their departments to crack down on dissidents. This is what we had here at Hopkins where the pro-Palestinian protests were shut down by the President because he was scared that this would result in a Harvard-like situation.

Cut federal grants for diversity, withhold federal grant money from universities that don't toe the line on controlling the woke issues on campus. This is the stance that the admin took with Harvard and has served to keep Hopkins from acting up too much.

I'm confused. Is this not the exact thing that this whole deal with Tao and UCLA is about? The federal government revoking a DEI grant? It may have kept Hopkins from acting up, but it definitely hasn't stopped Tao from kicking up a storm.

I agree with you that this is a decent approach, but to me it seems that it is also more or less what the Trump administration is currently doing.

Yes this does seem to be the case with UCLA. I'm complaining about axing the NSF and reducing the NIH budget.

That makes sense. I think I lost track of the thread's context at some point.

I don't know much about changes to the NSF and NIH so I won't comment there.

That makes more sense. Thank you.

The problem is the whole ecosystem is corrupt and tries to launder political propaganda by citing to things like Tao's work and other stuff like it. This is what happens when good people operate within a bad system, they become part of the problem.

This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research.

If it's paid for by taxes it's political.

The main grant for IPAM is already unsuspended anyway (possibly because UCLA bent the knee).

Further, the grant DID fund DEI programs in the past, such as (from the latest annual report):

“PUNDiT: (P)racticum for (Und)ergraduates (i)n Number (T)heory” is a 2-day intensive program which will showcase number theory broadly interpreted at the introductory level. A goal of this program is to expose Southern California students traditionally underrepresented in number theory (such as women and historically marginalized minorities) to the beauty of the subject.

And as tracingwoodgrains points out, Tao already chose a side His complaints about "political directives" ring hollow.

He did good finding that letter but Trace is definitely a huge tool for not posting the actual link - I believe this is correct: http://atripati.bol.ucla.edu/May2020AntiRacismLetter.htm

Isn't UCLA's math department built on ancestral and unceded land violently stolen from the Tongva by white settler colonialists? By actually dismantling oppressive structures instead of just giving lip service, Trump is implementing the woke program.

I'm a bit more sympathetic to Tao: he lives and works in a milieu where not signing that letter would have made many of his colleagues and students (maybe even his wife) shun him; and if he didn't, he would absolutely have been hounded and targeted to to make some statement because of his stature. He still had more agency in the matter than most, but it's a mitigating factor. Do we condemn Kolmogorov?

Do we condemn Kolmogorov?

Sure. Appeals not to generally devolve into special pleading that are categorically rejected in other contexts.

Kolmogorov complicity is still complicity, and it was specifically complicity with, for, and for prestige within one of the worst authoritarian/totalitarian states of the 20th century. Kolmogorov is not morally absolved by being a stellar mathematician who advanced the field. He has the same sort of moral onus of gifted scientists of other totalitarian regimes, who are routinely condemned.

Terence Tao is guilty of the same level of complicity as Havel's greengrocer - he mouths the enemy's words in order to pass the enemy's loyalty tests and prosper under enemy rule. Kolmogorov went beyond that - he testified as a witness for the prosecution at the show trial of his PhD advisor. Under ordinary western liberal ethics, that is bad. If you think that "traitors to lords and benefactors" (Dante's words for the group he selected for the very lowest circle of Hell) share the basic nature of Judas (as Dante and all the ancients did), then it is unforgiveable. A new regime that is for maths but against Communism offers Tao his job back, but not Kolmogorov. I suspect part of what is going on here is that the MAGA base is against maths as well as Communism.

Do we know Tao is just mouthing the words? Some of the stuff I saw linked made an argument he is 100% down with such things.

Do we condemn Kolmogorov?

I don't condemn enemy conscripts. "The enemy" is not necessarily synonymous with "evil", and that's something lots of people have forgotten (the Nazis are a foundation of how the American Empire justifies its right to rule to itself, so it's kind of unavoidable)- if my enemy forces all of its constituent parts to, for example, wear a blue shirt or die, I don't blame anyone for putting the blue shirt on [whether or not they share all of my enemy's goals is irrelevant].

Yet, I don't think friendly forces are evil for killing them either- even in an environment where the enemy has intentionally frustrated identification of those who cause the enemy's cause (those who would rather die before ceasing to be the enemy), and those who would abandon those principles to not be dead (this includes those who only joined for the meals).

It is not, and cannot be, the enemy's fault that circumstances forced your uniform upon you; your only hope is that your own side advances its interests in such a way that your enemies do not decide to violently destroy you if and when they obtain the power to do so.

He does not necessarily deserve the consequences of being an enemy (contra traditionalist thought, where he does), but at the same time it is not immoral to destroy enemies (contra progressive thought, where it is), so I guess it depends on what you actually mean by "condemn".

I'm a bit more sympathetic to Tao: he lives and works in a milieu where not signing that letter would have made many of his colleagues and students (maybe even his wife) shun him;

"Letter? What letter? Oh there was an email? I must have missed it. Can you send it again I'll definitely put it at the top of my queue for sure."

Academics are absolute masters at ghosting and dodging, as everyone who has set foot in a school can attest to. And I'm 100% confident that there are plenty of other UCLA professors who didn't sign the letter. So given that he didn't just ignore it, he's fully responsible for the consequences of signing that letter.

Edit: I'm not going to bother checking the entire list, but the very first 2 professors in the math department aren't on the letter: https://web.archive.org/web/20200807214114/https://www.math.ucla.edu/people/ladder

That's pretty convincing that he wasn't merely coasting along but more enthusiastic (or, at least, more hopeful of positioning himself for more spoils) than the average. Quite disappointing: I had a recollection of him speaking against the new equity based California math standards, which improved my opinion of him, but I can't find that anywhere so I must be misattributing. Sad.

I don't see anybody in my field there, either.

Do we condemn Kolmogorov?

Scott doesn't. I do.

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