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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6873 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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