domain:parrhesia.co
TheLoser
23hr ago
In a roundabout way, yes. He signed a letter that was used to support policies that funneled money and grants away from non-progressives to progressives.
Throwaway05
23hr ago
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.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
23hr ago
There are tons of super-young math prodigies. I went to school with several, they all burned out.
Isn't the point that unlike your classmates, Tao didn't burn out?
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
23hr ago
Any other tall guys who lift here who have had success finding work or casual shirts? I'm getting tired of my two best options being "get everything tailored" or "mostly fits in the chest/shoulders/arms, but big enough in the waist for 2-3 of me."
State and Liberty used to be my go-to for short sleeves (their long sleeve shirts had sleeves that were way too short), but their fit and quality control has collapsed. Where the shirts used to fit well everywhere, they are now massive in the waist, and I've had Ls that were too big and XLs that were too small. Other companies I've tried seem to view "athletic fit" as "guy who lifts once a month and has a beer gut." "Slim fit" fits in the waist and nowhere else.
Obviously, when I was a gym-goer instead of a home gym guy, I should've been asking all the super-jacked guys where they were getting shirts.
Sunshine
23hr ago
People on this forum are arguing that Tao deserves to be caught in the blast radius because of his speech, but that's separate from the formal legal justification that the Executive used for its actions against UCLA. Freedom of speech is about what powerful institutions are and are not allowed to do, not about whether individuals who suffer misfortune did or did not have it coming.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
23hr ago
But there is a point when:
- This is not what happened here
- This is what happened in the past at the hands of the woke
07mk
23hr ago
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.
You could, but this would be a bad argument and fundamentally very different from the one I laid out. This is just an attempt at equivocating between very obviously different things. Believing in miracles indicates shoddy epistemology, but it doesn't explicitly commit oneself to rejecting the very idea of objective reality or logic. People can be shoddy in their reasoning, shoddy in their observations, etc. Academics can be and often are, because they're humans like anyone else. We should hold them to high standards, but not inhumanly high standards. Never making an epistemological error, especially when it comes to things in religious life that can be compartmentalized away from academics and profession, is an inhumanly high bar. Never signing off on a document that supports an ideology that explicitly rejects the very basis of one's professional academic endeavors isn't an inhumanly high bar.
I do guess that religious people likely, on average, make for less effective STEM academics, but I think empirical evidence indicates that whatever handicap they have isn't that severe, considering the achievements made by religious scientists and engineers. If we had enough qualified atheists on-hand to fully substitute current religious STEM academics with them, it could be worth the transaction cost, though I think the effects of introducing a religious test would generally be severely negative.
However, if an evolutionary biologist or astronomer or geophysicist loudly and proudly signed on to Young Earth Creationism, then that would be more analogous to this situation (though not quite, since YECs haven't practically taken over academia like this ideology has, and YEC is merely one "theory" (lol) about reality, rather than an entire epistemology of how we understand reality itself). The core beliefs of YEC is just fundamentally incompatible with our academic understanding of these fields in a way that does raise reasonable questions about qualification to do the job, in a way that merely "being religious" doesn't. Even then, one can reasonably argue that someone's ideological commitments to YEC should be excluded from consideration of their work as an evolutionary biologist, because of their ability to perform [task] that isn't hindered by YEC. But that's a different argument than saying that this is just as much "cancel culture" as firing someone for "being religious" or whatever.
bonsaii
23hr ago
Just standard winner-take-all dynamics. The number 1 player in any given sport isn't getting most of his sponsorships because of his absolute ability, but because he's number 1. Way easier to just say "the greatest" than "not Pareto superior but widely considered the overall best when measured along certain dimensions". It's less the math world needed a celebrity than the public needs someone to call the "smartest person on Earth" and by default they're gonna pick a mathematician or a theoretical physicist.
But for what it's worth, his blog explanations of math feel well-written and intuitive in the way only someone with a lot of breadth and depth can be.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
23hr ago
War is preferable to the one-sided "academic freedom" that previously prevailed.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
23hr ago
You must be well aware that comments such as yours are clear examples of "waging the culture war", something the thread rules explicitly ask users to avoid.
This also falls under the rule against making "sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike."
You've been warned in the past for doing this, but it's been a while, so I'll leave it at this.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
23hr ago
Partially I think I must have communicated very poorly, as most of this is way off track to what I was saying, and partially I disagree with some of the inferences you're making.
- I wasn't making a grand, universal, iron-law of anything-and-everything that can be vaguely described as Blue Tribe. While I am under the impression that western people with ideas belonging in the Blue Tribe cluster seem to be uniquely susceptible to the idea of "we cannot allow other people to suffer under the way of life we don't approve of" I explicitly said #NotAll.
- I don't understand how you're making the leap from "Commies" to "literally every communist that has ever existed, including (especially) the Soviets". I was thinking of a particular type of western marxist, please don't tell me you don't know the exact type I'm talking about.
- I disagree with the statement "If the actual (historical) Commies count as Blue, then surely their Yankee rivals should count as Red". If we consider American commies / marxists, as well as American liberals, "Blue", there's no contradiction in saying the USA was "Blue" during the Cold War as well.
- In any case I would generally be cautious about slapping a Blue/Red label on an entire country, especially ones as big as the USA or the USSR. Both had factions in power with quite different cultures. I'm not sure if the Blue/Red labels, the way we talk about them today, would fit into the USSR, but whatever I can bite that bullet for the sake of argument - yes, there were Soviet Blues, and Soviet Reds.
- Therefore by the time you're asking me "but then how do you disprove the same statement about the Commies?" all I can say is "but why should I?!".
- I don't know much about the American occupation of Japan, so can't comment, sorry.
- The way I remember it, for the Red Tribe, the invasion of Iraq was a war of revenge. "Muh democracy and freedom" was a neocon justification, and I don't particularly care about whether they were being utopian or cynical, as I don't recognize them as Red.
- If you wanted to throw a curve-ball at me, I'd pick radical Muslims. Hard to describe them as "Blue" and they have the same burning desire to bring the entire world under their way of life.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
23hr ago
It shows up in the moderation log as a one-day ban.
Throwaway05
23hr ago
Do we know Tao is just mouthing the words? Some of the stuff I saw linked made an argument he is 100% down with such things.
Throwaway05
23hr ago
This is by no means super important but usually when you guys ban someone you put the length of the ban in the mod tag comment, didn't see one here but he does have the "user was banned for this comment" flag.
Not sure if in error or what but wanted to call attention.
magicalkittycat
23hr ago
As others have already noted, Terrence Tao isn't specifically targeted here.
I agree! So it's really odd that everyone keeps seeming to mention his personal political beliefs. It feels like they want it to be a story of suppressing the wrongthinkers so they can justify why their censorship is special.
Corvos
23hr ago
But AFAIK that's not what this is. I have complicated feelings about that and will happily discuss another time, but that's not what this is.
wemptronics
23hr ago
Maybe not on the Continent, but there is some limited demand for this American export in the UK. This guy found space at the University of Edinburgh and got to work Confronting The University of Edinburgh's History and Legacies of Enslavement and Colonialism.
I don't think anywhere is going to welcome a significant influx of Very American academics. "They're taking our jobs!"
magicalkittycat
23hr ago
I believe in free speech and other such natural rights, so it should not happen. I also think that
Well you say that and yet nothing in the following sentences expresses any idea that it is wrong to target researchers and scientists for their personal political beliefs. In fact all the effort seems dedicated to defending the idea of targeted wrongthink suppression.
magicalkittycat
23hr ago
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.
So it's wrong to cut funding to conservative areas for wrongthink because it's a prelude to civil war but in your example where the right wing literally attacks the left in a war analogy it's okay?
magicalkittycat
23hr ago
So do you think there should be a censorship arms war or do you want more academic freedom?
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
23hr 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
23hr ago
and may include the vice president
Is this facetious or did I miss something?
magicalkittycat
23hr 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.
Please forgive me for dog-piling you. The thing is, I think there's a big case of 'two screens' going on here.
I respect your personal commitment to not discriminating against academics on the basis of religion, but the few Christian academics I knew when I was a PhD in STEM hid it very carefully even 10 years ago. Precisely because they knew they'd be discriminated against if their religion became widely known. And I have other stories about how academics were made to feel in danger, though relatively few smoking guns because people were in the closet already so I can't point to explicit discrimination.
From a right-wing perspective, all the stuff you're worried about already happened. It's been happening for years and it's been coming from inside the house (i.e. not just admin). This is the backlash.
You don't have to agree with that, of course, but I think it will help you understand where I and perhaps others are coming from. And it might explain why 'Trump's administration should stop people discriminating, without discriminating themselves' isn't seen as enough by many people - if you believe as I do that most academics lowkey want to discriminate, then a pause on discrimination will work only until Trump's power and attention wanes even slightly.
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