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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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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.