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magicalkittycat
17hr ago
Yeah no matter what way it is awkward and will still inevitably devolve into separate discussions regardless unless I make the assumption that everyone is a hive-mind and will continue to have similar responses to follow-up posts without divergence.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
17hr ago
we win at free speech by fighting for the principle.
Then it is never won. And that is fine! I admire Tolkien's long defeat, but we should not confuse it with something winnable.
Supah_Schmendrick
17hr ago
Do you believe the left would be justified with removing Tom Macdonald for his "the devil is a democrat" speech because the right wing started with saying legal residents don't have protections?
I don't think so because I have principles about free speech that apply regardless of who started it, but if I understand you correctly revenge is a perfectly suitable argument for going against one's words.
The Left already is doing such things while mouthing banal principled platitudes, and has been for decades. It has won them near-complete control of the knowledge-making and -legitimating institutions in the country, including academia, journalism, with significant inroads into corporations and the legal profession. It has enabled the Left to take its social program from radical fringe to state-enforced orthodoxy. They have hijacked bureaucracies, lied about their intentions, ignored or subverted laws they did not agree with, including court decisions, and more.
They did these things not even for such a good reason as revenge, but instead out of pure will-to-power.
Remove the beam from thine own eye before complaining about the mote in another's.
magicalkittycat
17hr ago
That argument would be a lot stronger if the dems hadn’t already done this, multiple times. There is a reason that all of the conservative leaning talent leaves for industry (it isn’t just about money)
The world isn't only made up of "allies" and "enemies", there's lots of people who have been fighting against censorship from the left who are fighting against it now too. You're always free to join us and keep your principles.
magicalkittycat
17hr ago
Yes, exactly. This is why current complaints about the lack of academic freedom cannot be taken seriously.
Do you think the only complaints about academic freedom come from the same people who were censoring before?
I hope you are aware there are tons of free speech and first amendment advocacy groups, left and right leaning libertarians, and other stuff like that who opposed left censorship before and are opposing right censorship now.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
17hr ago
A third of voters with postgrad degrees voted for Trump. Those people are probably not on-board with the SJ agenda.
While JT may well be opposed to everyone that went through college, I'm guessing the percentage that works for universities is much, much lower than 1/3.
But that's just it; I do pass bulletin boards in universities, and I despise those signs.
I am glad to have gone to university in less fraught times, and that I do not have the daily temptation to just remove the signs.
It’s only a “slow news cycle” because most of the other going-ons look bad for Trump, and posting anything that looks bad for Trump is tactically unsound for the right-leaning posters here; assuming it’s even crossed their new feeds.
Guess I could be too cynical about it, but I assume that’s why there’s been minimal discussion about other happenings, like the sweeping new steel & aluminum tariff expansions, Trump attempting to get his fingers into Samsung, administration staffers drawing up an “enemies list” of “woke corporations” to target for being insufficiently supportive of the OBBB, Oklahoma’s groundbreaking innovation in PragerU-based loyalty tests, the administration’s latest attempts to purge the Federal Reserve and install loyalists, the ongoing D.C. takeover that the administration has been looking at expanding to other Democratic cities, the escalating gerrymandering feud and mail-in-ballot targeting signifying the GOP’s looming attempt to try and ‘steal’ the midterms, and the much-vaunted Alaska summit amounting to a big fat nothing, etc.
Though TBF I guess there is an ongoing discussion about the continued fallout of the MAGA movement’s attempts to dismantle the country’s institutions up in the Terrence Tao subthread, so there’s that, I suppose.
Inspired by the discussion on science and scientists below, I want to bring up a series of books that I read as a teenager, and recently revisited this year: the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.
1. Red Mars
Out of all the books in my childhood, this looms the largest. This book is almost the entire reason for me wanting to go to MIT (become an astronaut so I could bring life to dead planet like Sax), and my interest in political philosophy (so I could figure out who was right between John, Arkady, and Frank). Just as KSR shows Mars here as a canvas that people use to paint their idealized image of society, society that will really truly be constructed by ideology, rather than history, I used this book as a template for my own life trajectory: a way of prescribing meaning to another-wise empty scientific materialism by coopting some elements of ecoism (which I should have always known I liked, but anyway). I also recently discovered that one of my favorite board games, Terraforming Mars is heavily inspired by this book, which was also cool.
It's funny coming back to this and seeing what worked and what didn't. The science fiction elements are very obviously unbelievable. We can barely launch people into space these days, much less send millions of times more mass than we've ever sent to space far out of Earth's gravity well to Mars (I know that most of the delta G is from the surface to LEO but still). Aging won't be cured by simply repairing damaged DNA, and terraforming is likely to be a much slower process than as depicted in the book, if it's even physically possible at all.
The geopolitics is a little bit better. The overpopulation crisis on Earth that drives much of the plot is solving itself right now, but the hegemony of transnational corporations (a big element of the board game too) is happening before our eyes. Knowing a bit more about the other cultures (Arabs and Swiss mainly) depicted in this book also allowed their adaptions to the planet to carry more weight for me.
And of course the personal is still fantastic. The love triangle between John, Frank, and Maya. The enigma of what Frank actually wants out of Mars (even though we get two POV sections from him). The solid dependency of Nadia, the fiery revolutionary fervor of Arkady, and the conflict between desire for death (Ann CLAYbourne) and life (Saxifrage Russel), all were much more interesting to me this time around. And how each of these characters reflects their own emotions on the landscape of Mars (which I know much better because of the game). And perhaps that this reflects my philosophical shift too: away from materialism and towards something more interested in life itself.
2. Green Mars
If Red Mars was the book that made me want to be an astronaut, Green Mars is what made me want to become a biologist. There is just something so magical about turning a dead planet alive (not only through the introduction of plants, but also culture). Maybe what really will follow in the death-throes of rationality is a kind of Viriditas, or worshipping of life, that we see come to life in the green movement in this book.
In terms of plot, this book follows our protagonists from Red Mars (the first hundred) after they have fled underground following the failed revolution of 2061, as well as some of their children: the first natives of Mars. The plot spans the course of 60 years, and is all over the place. One part focuses on Terraforming, another on a political conference to decide the fate of Mars, and still another on the quiet semi-retirement of one of the expedition leaders around the shore of the expanding Hellas Sea.
The characters were hit or miss for me. I really connected with Sax Russell, who is a scientist like myself. Sax is pretty autistically interested in science and the natural world, until a traumatic brain injury causes a radical shift in his personality and he grows interested in other humans. Nirgal, one of the native martians, and Art, a diplomat sent by one of the "good" transnational corporations I also liked reading about, but the female characters (Maya and Ann) were a huge miss for me. I found Maya to be a horrible, self-absorbed person, and found it hard to relate to Ann's obsession with maintaining Mars in a pristine, but dead state.
In terms of themes, a couple things stuck out to me. Firstly, science is political. This is very obvious in the novel, as the terraforming efforts are a scientific endeavor, but also a thorny political problem whose resolution very much depends on scientific feasibility. This is no less true in our world: the debates about global warming, pollution, veganism, etc. are all political as well as scientific questions. By refusing to engage on the level of the political, as if it is somehow beneath them (or worse, like we see below with Terrance Tao, considering social issues "solved") scientists are shooting themselves and their interests in the foot.
Secondly, Robinson wants to highlight the effect that geography has on culture. We get extremely long (and often boring) descriptions of Martian geography to help us place the adaptions that various immigrant cultures are making as they come to Mars. No culture is unchanged, and this is at least partially because of the unique geographical (and other physical) quirks of the planet.
Finally, as some of our characters enter their ~15th decade, Green Mars brings into question the continuity of our identity and its dependence on memory. Are we still the same person that we were 20, 30, 100 years ago? At what point do memories become indistinguishable from facts we could have read in a textbook?
3. Blue Mars
This was my favorite book growing up as a kid, but I found this entry on re-read in the series to be hopelessly fragmented and meandering in its focus. Much of the plot of the book is concerned with the formation of a new government for Mars (a vaguely socialist federation with strict limits on immigration from earth). There's some exploration of colonization of the outer solar system, but it is also hopelessly myopic and bohemian: there's no true political or cultural diversity in any of the colonies that are visited. On a personal level, very few of the first hundred have survived, and the ones that have have basically completed their character arcs. There's some interesting stuff with dealing with memory but other than that I found this book rather forgettable on a personal level.
Conclusions
So why is this culture war? We live in a society that is, for better or worse, driven in large part by scientific progress and research. Many of the big questions of our time: climate change, artificial intelligence, the obesity crisis, the fertility crisis, etc. are not only political, but also scientific questions. To ignore the input of scientists on these issues, like many on this forum want to do, seems incredibly myopic. At the same time, the training that we get as scientists (or at least the training that I have received) does not create people who are really able to participate in the political process. Gell-Mann amnesia is very real in academia: not just about the hot-button topics like race and gender, but also made-up shit like "learning styles", the efficiency of renewable energy, and a general understanding of politics and human psychology. Combine this with a massive ego because of success in one specific area, and you have the idiot savants that Nassim Taleb likes to harp on who cannot compromise or think outside the box. What Robinson is highlighting with his trilogy about colonizing Mars, perhaps the ultimate scientific endeavor, is that unless this changes, the science is not going to get done properly in the real world. As Miguel Unamuno once said, perhaps apocryphally, vencer no es convencer (to defeat is not to convince). The strain of liberal (and perhaps now woke) thought that currently dominates universities is not going to be able to beat the world into submission to its ideas, it has to learn how to participate in the political process and convince people (and perhaps be convinced in turn). Perhaps too this is a lesson that the rationalist community could learn as well, although I think most of you here at TheMotte have absorbed it plenty well.
For me on a personal level this series of books has helped to clarify what a future spiritual belief system might look like for me and the world. I’ve always struggled with the anthropocentrism of Christianity: perhaps something like Viriditas combined with Nietzchian vitalism could expand on the weak points I see in the Christian system.
FistfullOfCrows
17hr ago
He's not a neutral party. I actually would also like whole divisions of X studies wiped off the universities, so my views aren't neutral either.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
17hr ago
Do you expect demands of political loyalty to result in better science when they are coming from the nationalist right rather than the woke left?
Quite probably yes, except some strains of conservationism.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
17hr ago
Of course. I believe we need another 30 years war like cycle to remind everyone why the tech of liberal tolerance was developed in the first place.
Supah_Schmendrick
17hr ago
The other position is that the academics forced to parrot spurious diversity statements to keep their jobs are, you know, the victims, with ideologically-captured admin as the bad guys. The second position seems trivially the correct framing to me, and wanting to punish the academics as collaborators looks about as absurd as saying you're going to topple a tyrant to liberate the people, then executing anyone who ever saluted the tyrant at gunpoint.
Well, how is it not also a reasonable approximation of the Red Tribe also?
I don't think so, but I am exceedingly aware that I have no way to prove it to skeptical Blues or Greys. My perception of the Red side is that what we want is to not be ruled by Blues, rather than to rule Blues. I've been advocating for a national divorce for many years now, and I'm hopeful that this is the direction we're currently moving in. I don't want to fight Blues for control of social institutions. To the degree that institutions are shared and therefore must be fought over, I would rather deconstruct those institutions and allow the value that fed them to be diverted to new institutions that are not shared. That applies to Academia, the education system generally, the courts, the police, entertainment, everything.
I believe that the whole culture war, everything we're seeing, is because we can't get away from each other. And an unfortunate consequence is that much is shared, and must be fought over; there's only one presidency, only one congressional majority, only one Supreme Court. All of those have to go away, and it seems clear to me that the most straightforward way to make them go away is to capture them, contaminating them with Redness from the Blue perspective and thus mobilizing Blue Tribe to attack their legitimacy. More unfortunately, this is likely indistinguishable from seizure of power from anyone who doesn't already buy it, even without inherent human bias. If there were a way to avoid that, I'd be for it. It doesn't seem to me that there is, though.
For what it's worth, I try at least to be straightforward as I can in my own communication. I don't believe in "freedom" or "human rights", "free speech" or any of the old liberal touchstones. I don't recognize appeals to these ideas when others make them, and I try my best to avoid appealing to them for my own side as well. I believe they are fundamentally incoherent concepts outside an environment of values-coherence; they are never going to work across tribal lines. Both Reds and Blues want good things and not bad things. Expecting otherwise is foolishness.
dukeleto
17hr ago
That argument would be a lot stronger if the dems hadn’t already done this, multiple times. There is a reason that all of the conservative leaning talent leaves for industry (it isn’t just about money)
netstack
Texas is freedom land
17hr ago
You got thorough responses from multiple people here. You could have made one reply pinging the others (@[username]). Or even made all the replies you did, but link them back to this one: "see discussion here." I recognize it's kind of awkward either way.
The problem is that most people who copy-paste a response in 8 different spots are not interested in holding 8 nigh-identical conversations. Better to pull them back into one location.
If the main observable action when in power is to further the downward trend against academic freedom, why should anyone trust the claims being made? Actions speak louder than words after all.
Yes, exactly. This is why current complaints about the lack of academic freedom cannot be taken seriously.
If we want academic freedom we should make moves towards academic freedom, not be indistinguishable from the censors.
If Ukraine wants peace, they should make moves towards peace, not shoot missiles into Russian territory.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
18hr ago
it is the right to keep your non-political job whatever political opinions you espouse outside of that job
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. Open letters signed as part of UCLA faculty are "part of the job," and complaining about his funding is... job-adjacent, surely?
If he was being attacked and defunded for attending a protest off campus and explicitly not as a university representative, you'd have a stronger point.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
18hr ago
Define "bad opinions."
I don't think Tao should be defunded for this alone, but neither should he be defended as a neutral apolitical little guy.
Every academic that has used the word "whiteness" should be treated the same way the universities would treat, say, David Duke.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18hr ago
Only commiseration here. The worst is when the sleeves are so slim, I can't even roll them up. That just feels insulting.
hydroacetylene
18hr ago
A totally rational civilization will never explore the stars, because the actual use cases for space are not that far. Yes, satellites and 0-g manufacturing are real things but you DON’T go past the orbit for them. Maybe asteroid mining but that’s still not interstellar travel.
Theres game theoretic reasons for interstellar WMDs, but not for much actual exploration.
Why not? You could structure the economy such that it wasn't just a few chaebols who dominate everything. You could give affirmative action to applicants with siblings. There are any number of things that a country could do. They could give the top students in exam a harem and tell him to produce 50 kids.
And it doesn’t address that when kids are optimized, parents want something back from that, which leads to grinding hangwon helicopter parenting into zero sum competitions. Notably higher tfr strata are the ones that are OK with their kids becoming plumbers- republicans in the US, yankis in Japan, and so on. We can reasonably expect the adoption of literal designer babies to have the same effect on people who optimize for IQ as selective college admissions.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
18hr ago
I have no doubt that there are some true-believers. Though actually, I suspect that what academia has, ultimately, is a supermajority of normie liberals
Varies by department, of course, but at some point the ratios are so extreme I don't think it's reasonable to really consider them normie. Many are, sure, but cutting off half the normal curve suggests the left tail is going to be significant.
And I can't get the full text at the moment, but helluva statement from the abstract of this paper:
Third, conservatives fear negative consequences of revealing their political beliefs to their colleagues. Finally, they are right to do so: In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists said that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents were, the more they said they would discriminate.
Ioper
18hr ago
Anything that fits the chest/shoulders has a waist big enough for putting away a 12pack a day.
There are v-shaped slim fits. They have not been hard for me to find.
I guess It could be an issue if you're specifically looking for a form fitted but loose shirt.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
18hr ago
There is an "@" function to send alerts to people you're not replying to. For instance, you can summon me by saying "@magic9mushroom" (quotes not required).
Then they could all respond to the single post.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
18hr ago
They've gone so far towards being egalitarian they've become anti-egalitarian.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
- George Orwell, Animal Farm
That will still inevitably devolve into separate discussions regardless unless I make the assumption that everyone is a hive-mind and will continue to have similar responses to follow-up posts without divergence would it not?
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