domain:parrhesia.co
As others have already noted, Tao isn't specifically targeted here. UCLA got its funding cut on the basis that it was illegally discriminating on the basis of race in admissions and creating an anti-semitic environment (among other things, UCLA sat back and allowed pro-Palestinian protestors to block Jewish students' access to classes, something which it resolved with a settlement of $6 million dollars). Then Tao throws a shitfit.
The broader issue here is that academia serves a couple of interrelated functions. The first is performing research and discovering truths about the world that can be used to help others down the line. The second is one of using academia to "liberate" people socially based on a certain political ideology, which the proponents of said political ideology conflate with the first aim because they have already subscribed to a number of tenets their opponents don't hold. This kind of thing has serious knock-on effects in academia, where people will often discriminate against conservative candidates - in fact only 18% of respondents within academia state they would not discriminate against conservatives, and that's only capturing what they are explicitly willing to state; the actual prevalence of bias against conservatives is probably higher. Papers that support the liberal instead of the conservative view are more likely to be published instead of file-drawered. Etc.
In effect the left turned academia into their political tool, and made it such that it was impossible for conservatives to defang them of their influence without also indirectly crippling knowledge-producing institutions. This puts conservatives in quite the bind - every time they wage war on the institutions that also serve as factories for leftist propaganda, they also run the risk of stopping up legitimate research and can be attacked on that basis. It's a situation the left created, not the right, and one can hardly blame the right for deciding "fuck it, we're going to flamethrower everything anyway".
magicalkittycat
19hr ago
No. As I just said, the point is irrespective of if they should be punished. The point is that regardless of whether or not they should be punished, they have no right to object on principle.
Tao was part of the government and was cutting grants to wrongthinkers? I didn't know that. I guess he got what was coming to him then.
bonsaii
19hr ago
and may include the vice president
Is this facetious or did I miss something?
magicalkittycat
19hr ago
There's no point in explaining why it's another level of wrong for government to target scientists and researchers funding over wrongthink if they're perfectly fine with that level of government suppression over academic freedom to begin with.
07mk
19hr ago
You are fighting the hypothetical in a way that seems in bad faith. The ideology in question that refuses to be named does not share this characteristic of "anywhere near as far away from taking over US as Nazis or Communists;" it has already taken over the institution in question, i.e. academia, and if it hasn't, then it's certainly caused severe transformations to it, with plans to make even more. If signing off on Nazism or Communism is "innocuous" only or primarily due to circumstance of these ideologies being so weak as to be unworthy of consideration, that certainly doesn't apply to this real case.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
19hr ago
I believe in free speech and other such natural rights, so it should not happen. I also think that
This isn't about moral rectitude, it's about what's possible. You can't start shooting kulaks and demand they not shoot back because God commanded that thou shalt not kill.
I'm simply informing you of what's possible in the political climate created by such acts. Which is exactly what I was warning everyone would happen ten years ago.
The left wing has thoroughly destroyed the classical liberal fort on its advance, and now that the advance has stopped, it can't hide behind its walls whilst retreating. Actions have consequences.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
19hr ago
Note also that Trump isn’t demanding a loyalty test. There is no requirement that universities be Trumpist
The Trump administration has explicitly been angling for commissars DEI for conservatives View Point Diversity Ensurers to supervise the ideological composition of faculty.
WandererintheWilderness
19hr ago
No, it isn't.
How so?
restoring intellectual freedom and freedom of speech does not require rescuing anyone.
"Rescuing such-and-such people" was just a fancy way of saying "lift restrictions on freedom of speech currently affecting such-and-such people". Imposing new restrictions on those same people, policing for the opposite quadrant of political speech, is… not that.
John_Doe_Fletcher
anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy
19hr ago
Uh, rescuing the students?
cut funding for all conservatives
Are you referring to conservative academics? Then sure, let them cut federal funding for the approximately n=0 research universities that are as institutionally aligned to conservatism as the current targets are to progressivism.
If you’re referring to cutting federal funding to conservatives in other domains, though, then that’s a more complex story. Let’s say that the U.S. military is just as conservative as academia is progressive (even though I do not believe that this is actually the case): should Dems cut all federal funding to the military then as retaliation? Clearly not, since by protecting global trade alone, the U.S. military already earns its keep (and I say this as someone opposed to all its interventionist adventures). You may disagree, but I think that the effect of cutting all federal funding to any universities was cut tomorrow would be far less ruinous than doing the same to the military.
Now, since I can’t think of any other institutions that receive federal funding that are as conservative as universities are progressive, the only remaining targets would be governments of red states (which, as we are often reminded by progressives, take in more federal dollars than they give). So do we cut infrastructure funding to these states? Do we cut Medicare and Medicaid? This does seem crueler to me than cutting funding to universities. This is because the telos of federal funding to state governments is (or at least, seems to me, to a first approximation) to be to improve the quality of life of their citizens. If a Dem government would cut funding to red states, that seems tantamount to saying “We want to make the lives of all conservatives significantly worse off.” It’s essentially a declaration of total culture war, an action against “civilians”. In contrast, the telos of universities (or at least, what they say to justify their receipt of my taxpayer money) is something more like “we produce knowledge that benefits the country and the world”. If a Republican government says “no, we don’t think that you’re producing knowledge that benefits the country, but rather, primarily fighting ideological battles” and turns off the spigot of funding, then continuing the previous analogy, this is more akin to attacking a military target like a munitions factory or an airstrip.
To make the point even clearer: even if funding is cut to all universities, there’s still a story that can be told that goes like “Universities currently aren’t serving the best interests of Americans as a nation, so we are no longer giving the money earned by Americans to these institutions.” The equivalent story when cutting funding to all red states would be “Conservative states currently aren’t serving the best interests of Americans as a nation, so we are no longer giving the money earned by Americans to them.” It’s hard for me to see how that isn’t an implicit declaration that conservatives aren’t American, and thus, as a prelude to civil war!
WandererintheWilderness
19hr ago
Oh, I was arguing under the premise that Tao was indeed being targeted for signing the open letter etc., with the discrimination thing as a handy cudgel. I am open to a factual argument that this is not the case, and have no objection to UCLA being punished for discrimination against Asian kids; I am generally against affirmative action. But lots of people in this conversation were saying "well if Tao was punished for signing the letter, it serves him right" and I find that to be a position worth arguing against even if that's not the fact of the matter in this particular instance.
chains of "logic" that fall apart under the smallest scrutiny
This is kinda how your argument about the contents of the letter reads to me. It is certainly how it would read to anyone to my left. The impossibility of neutrally adjudicating which "chains of logic" of that type hold up, and which don't, is precisely why we need a society-wide norm that no arguments of that form will be considered, under any circumstances. I could as easily argue that no religious people should be allowed to work in STEM, because if they believe in miracles, their epistemology is clearly compromised in a way that is fundamentally incompatible with scientific truth-seeking. That's an argument that feels true to me on a deep level. I really think we'd have better science if all science was done by committed atheists. But I have never and will never advocate for setting such a policy. Arguments of this form are an indiscriminate superweapon that unravels societal trust when anyone starts breaking them out.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
19hr ago
This is abusing your moderatorship to win an argument.
Ansys has a very high opinion of some of their products. I've heard others complain that some tools for VLSI (silicon chip design) are in similar price ranges too.
I wasn't paying the bills, so I don't have a specific price in mind.
EDIT: Huh, looks like they got acquired by Synopsys, one of the big expensive VLSI tool vendors. Not terribly surprising. Floating licenses help, too.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
19hr ago
Oh so what you're saying is that the Dems should go nuclear next election and cut funding for all conservatives unless they go woke and we should go into an arms war of being the Serious Threat each time one group is in power?
For years, classical liberals, right-wingers, and classical liberals thrown into the right-wing pit of deplorables have been making that argument -- "what if they did the same to you?". For years, it has fallen on deaf ears. For that argument to work, when the deterrent fails the reprisals must be taken.
The laws are flat and this IS the devil rounding on the left.
Anyway, what are they going to do, revoke tax-exempt status for conservative universities until they bend the knee? Or maybe require Catholics to pay for abortions?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
19hr ago
When Terence Tao is being treated like James Watson or Tim Hunt, THEN you can give me a villain speech about cancel culture. Not before.
07mk
19hr ago
This is isomorphic to left-wing cancel culture
It isn't, though, that's the thing. Presuming Tao were being targeted (something which I don't think is evident, but we can presume it), it would be for signing off on an ideological document that commits to him to an ideology that explicitly rejects things like objectivity and reason as tools of White Supremacy for oppressing minorities; the ideology openly and proudly prefers personal testimony labeled as "lived experience" to ascertain "their truth" which is just as valid as anyone else's. This is fundamentally incompatible with mathematics, which relies on logic to make objective statements, or generally the academic pursuit of truth, at least for commonly understood meanings of "math" and "truth." Now, people can paper over and ignore or mitigate fundamental incompatibilities for a long time, but likely not forever, and so such ideological commitments a major handicap in an academic being able to credibly produce truth.
This is the general problem that this ideology runs into when trying to claim victimhood of cancel culture. By its very nature, the ideology is about redefining and subverting our understanding of basic concepts like "truth" or "reason" in a way that's incompatible with academia as we know it. And if academia were transformed according to the ideology, it would no longer be academia in terms of the functions it serves our society (i.e. knowledge generation & education), but rather a church. And so rejecting ideologues of this stripe from academia isn't cancel culture in a symmetrical way to the now-traditional leftwing cancel culture, which has to do either with opinions that are orthogonal to the person's ability to do a job or with chains of "logic" that fall apart under the smallest scrutiny (e.g. this CEO disagrees with me on gay marriage, which means he must have bigoted antipathy, possibly subconsciously, against gay people, which means he cannot be relied on to be their boss in a fair way).
Now, one could argue that the benefits of these ideologues, given their ability to still pursue truth thanks to compartmentalization and cognitive dissonance, outweighs the harms of them also laundering ideological falsities under the label of truth, as well as the harms of the continued self-discrediting of academia due to placing trust in someone who's ideologically committed against fundamental principles of academia, and therefore, these people ought not be "canceled" from academia. The strength of that argument would depend heavily on the specifics of the benefits and harm. But that's a different argument than one around symmetry.
Goodguy
19hr ago
Would signing an open letter committing oneself to help the 4th Reich take over the United States also be pretty innocuous?
Yes, it would be. The United States is so far away from being taken over by either communists or by Nazis that an open letter in support of either of those groups would be innocuous.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
19hr ago
No. As I just said, the point is irrespective of if they should be punished. The point is that regardless of whether or not they should be punished, they have no right to object on principle.
If you willingly join an army that refuses to take prisoners, and just executes all surrendering enemy forces, then you don't get to cry when you get summarily executed instead of taken prisoner - regardless of the moral positions of the enemy forces.
This is pure "your rules, applied fairly".
If Tao objects to this, then perhaps dear Terry ought to evolve his moral universe beyond the level we expect from elementary schoolers. As far as complaints go, "He hit me just because I hit him first!" is the mark of a particularly dull and narcissistic child.
Sunshine
19hr ago
UCLA isn't being punished for its speech. The grants are being revoked in accordance with a long-standing legal precedent that allows the Federal government to take away public money from institutions that illegally discriminate on the basis of race. The only difference between previous applications of this strategy and the present one is the race of the people being illegally discriminated against.
The First Amendment does not actually guarantee the rights of large institutions to discriminate against Asian kids.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
19hr ago
Though actually, I suspect that what academia has, ultimately, is a supermajority of normie liberals - people don't like cancel culture or having to parrot meaningless diversity statements, but agree with the left more than the right overall, and with a deep-seated distaste for Trump.
Then they have chosen their side, and are correctly considered collaborators.
If everyone in academia is in fact a true believer in wokeism, then by definition cancel culture in academia would be a nonissue: there would be no wrongthink for cancel mobs to punish, and no free speech would be infringed.
Those who cancel are perfectly happy to go after those who are only perceived to commit wrongthink, or to change the definition of wrongthink to catch those who were formerly right-thinkers, and thus to even cancel true believers.
Attacking cancel culture in academia is only a worthy endeavor if you presuppose that there are, in fact, people currently forced to mouth insincere diversity statements that you want to rescue.
As I said above, certainly not. If cancel culture has already pushed out everyone who is not a true believer, or I can't rescue those who have not been pushed out, it is still good to destroy cancel culture in academia as a step in either re-populating academia with non-wokes, or destroying academia in its entirety so the wokes cannot use whatever power and influence academia has to cause trouble in other areas.
An attack vector which hurts such people as much as their oppressors - even if they are a minority - inherently loses its justification.
No, it doesn't. If there's one oppressed person per 1000 in academia, and they are hurt as much as the 1000 by some measure, this is what's called collateral damage. No one is required to use a perfectly precise weapon.
Say I, a closet conservative in academia, happen to believe he will fail, hard, with, say, >80% confidence. Wouldn't it be idiotic of me to throw off the mask now? You say craven, I say survival instincts.
Trump, however, must act as if he will succeed. And if he does, they were craven.
Don't online right-wingers tend to approve of hiding your power level?
A phrase I associate mostly with the dissident right/neo-Nazis, actually. But keeping your head down when you're totally outclassed may be merely prudent. Keeping your head down when you have a chance at success is cowardly.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
19hr ago
I don't think Trump was running as a classical liberal. Those guys were pretty much successfully extinguished by the last decade. The joke is no longer "imagine if the roles we're reversed", it's "we're going to kill you".
If you successfully destroy the disarmament party, you can't object that the nukemback party wins.
Goodguy
19hr ago
Just because I find it obnoxious doesn't mean that I don't find it innocuous. I observe obnoxious political activities all the time, coming from both the left and the right, without necessarily thinking that it is any sort of serious political threat.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
19hr ago
It would be nice if you answered his question before asking a follow-up. Particularly when it has nothing to do with the case we're discussing.
So do you think there should be a censorship arms war or do you want more academic freedom?
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