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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7040 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.

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.

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.

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).

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