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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9153 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.

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.

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/

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