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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25594 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.

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.

  • -17

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.

  • -16
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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.

  • -11
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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.

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