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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25373 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.

Scientists are born subjects.

If the delusional fever dreams of democrat true believer karens come true and a Christian theocracy rises to power, the scientific establishment will simply publish appendixes to their papers reconciling them to the current state of creation research. Woke is the same damn thing. Trump should be demanding they include 'murica, fuck yeah! loyalty pledges instead of yeeting them for kowtowing.

While that would probably be a better outcome (to those who value American interests (me)), I don't think it would work. It's too deeply entrenched. I really don't think there's any coming back from it when you look at issues like transgender beliefs. Do you think biologists are about to walk all their support of that back, in favor of what used to be (and, in my mind, still is) an unquestionably obvious conclusion? I don't think it could happen. There will be no surrender on that front of the culture war, especially when you consider the immense reputational damage they'd incur from changing their story like that. It doesn't even matter if it's left wing or whatever at that point, they'd look absolutely retarded to come out and say "Oh, we were wrong about not knowing what a woman is."

Maybe the issue is that, despite a subject mentality, they're absolutely unable to contend with the fact that they are bleeding reputation to people who matter and can exercise control over them. They see the looming threat of admitting failure, and they clearly understand the damage that could incur, but they don't realize that doubling down on what many people see as overwhelming stupidity is causing them to lose substantial trust day after day. All they need to do, they think, is preach endlessly to the choir, those who have already given heart and soul to expert worship and could not think to question them, blind to the irreplaceable losses that their endless march incurs.

They just don't get it. They don't realize that they have a reputational standard that needs to be maintained. You get the certs, you wave a paper, and the people obey. If that's what you're used to, why shouldn't you fight to keep it that way? But any ruler can take things too far. I think there was a perception of invulnerability, that it would not matter what peasants who doubt The Cause think; you just have to yell at them again and again, and reinforce the need to Trust The Science, and all sorts of other patronizing measures. The idea that the experts could be in error is unthinkable, even as Trump hits them in the face with a sledgehammer over and over again while giving them very easy outs. Any mistakes can be corrected, any challenge from the opposition can be waited out (as they are too valuable to be dispensed with, clearly), and anyone noticing their repeated failures can only cause harm by going above their stations to cast doubt on the methods of their betters, who need to remain unchallenged for the ultimate good of America (which they often seem to hate).

I don't want to sound like I am enforcing a consensus, but it is funny. The way you frame the recapture of academia feels to me like The One Ring. You can claim it for yourself, but it will either unmake you into just another dark lord, or it will make you an unwitting pawn of the Enemy himself. Only by destroying it, perhaps, can what's in motion be stopped - and that is the only challenge that has not entered their darkest dreams.

Do you think biologists are about to walk all their support of that back, in favor of what used to be (and, in my mind, still is) an unquestionably obvious conclusion?

Observably, the medical industry seems to have been able to successfully walk back from several scandals of seemingly similar magnitude (on a logarithmic scale). The lobotomy as a procedure won a Nobel Prize in medicine. The sister of a future president had one! It had similar arguments over its ethics and efficacy, but in the end we don't do them anymore (I hear there are some rare similar procedures, with much more oversight and gatekeeping). It's largely been swept under the rug, though there wasn't zero introspection on the topic. At smaller scales I could point to "repressed memories," Freudian analysis, and such.

But it might take a decent fraction of a generation.

The lobotomy as a procedure won a Nobel Prize in medicine.

Exaggerating for effect, but: I will not stand for this lobotomy erasure!!!!!!

But seriously lobotomy was a great idea at the time and we dropped* it as soon as it stopped being a great idea.

Lobotomy (1930s) predates psychopharmacology (thorazine in the 1950s), some psychiatric illness responds to therapy alone but even with modern therapy modalities quite a few conditions can be debilitating to the point people would elect voluntary death (see last week's discussion) and that's with modern support and medication.

Some illness benefits from therapy for outcome improvement but requires medicine. The obvious heavy hitters are schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (~20% fatality rate from a manic episode pre-modern medicine).

Prior to the modern resources and approach you were absolutely going to die or end up locked up in an asylum with zero quality of life. Lobotomy managed to work some of the time. It wasn't great and had hideous side effects but it was the same as trepanning. You got no tools in the toolbox you use what you got.

Usage dropped off sharply after we had options but any modality with understood risks and benefits is going to take time to get replaced by new things.

Meanwhile it got a horrid reputation because mental illness scary and authority bad. The reputation is certainly deserved but the malign is generally misplaced.

It's helpful to consider that the best intervention we have period for psychiatric problems is still electro-shock therapy (now: ECT), which is equally poorly portrayed in media.

It is incredibly effective and safe and it is hard to get patient's to do it because of the media presentation which is basically based off of fear of mental illness and an impression garnered back from when ECT existed but anesthesia didn't (which was...certainly a more difficult time).

*okay started dropping it.

You probably know more of the specifics than I do, but it was at least in some places (notably the Soviet Union and Sweden) seen as controversial at the time.

I'm not an expert on the history of soviet mental health treatments lol but as part of my brief lit review for that comment I did spot that the soviets banned it first, they also had a history of misappropriating mental health stuff for political reasons (see: sluggish schizophrenia).

Secret police with a picture of a stethoscope duct taped to their head is a bit different than the medical establishment going about their regular or irregular business.

Now the choice of death, lobotomy, or locked up and the key thrown away is a tough one but I think when people hear lobotomy that's not quite what they are thinking. Many people then and now are more okay with locking people up and forgetting them than seeing lobotomized people around (which we do do chemically now). This isn't "wrong" per se, but it's not generally fully explored by the people advocating it.

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