domain:pedestrianobservations.com
I_Smell_Mendacious
1d ago
With respect to lobotomies, I think the medical industry managed to restore quite a bit of public trust with the polio vaccine. Right around the time people were realizing what a terrible idea lobotomies actually were, along came this absolute miracle of modern science. If public opinion swings towards "puberty blockers in children are horrific, actually" and then a universal cure for cancer is developed, I think people will be a lot more willing to overlook the misstep.
Throwaway05
1d ago
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.
From a right-wing perspective, all the stuff you're worried about already happened
I'm well aware, and I'm against it. I'm a leftist at the object level while strongly disavowing cancel culture and persecution. This is an awkward position, awkward enough that I am not optimistic about the Left reforming itself from within. Hence, I view the anti-woke Right as potential allies in the shared project of bringing an end end cancel culture, with the aim of restoring a status quo that's better for everyone than a crab bucket where everybody is constantly persecuting everybody else.
And the thing is, this is an ideal that much right-wing rhetoric embraced; certainly much of the furore about Political Correctness/SJWs/cancel culture/Woke, over the last fifteen years, was pitched in terms of "these are dirty tactics, and our enemies are inherently rotten for using them, never mind whatever crazy stuff they're fighting for", not just of the more cynical "these value-neutral, highly effective memetic weapons happen to be in the hands of our enemies whose goals are crazy, and that's bad". Right-wingers who are dragging the anti-woke momentum in the direction of "we need right-wing cancel culture to even the odds" as opposed to "cancel culture delenda est" are defectors to the broader cause of principledness and civilization (within which the entire political Overton window should squarely sit, in a healthy body politic). I understand why they're doing it, at an emotional level, but they are, and I can't condone or excuse it, even as I sympathize.
In short: some very reproachable people on my side started using intellectual weapons whose use inherently degrades civilization; they're sure as hell not going to stop on their own, so the only hope was that the opposition would provide a credible alternative; for a while it seemed as though they might; but now they look like they're just content to stoop down to their enemies' level, abandoning all the high-minded principles they rightly criticized their enemies for flouting ten years ago. And thus we sink a little further towards total collapse. It is what it is, I'm not saying it's a surprising outcome, but there was hope of something better, and perhaps there still is, so I'm doing my bit.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
His public political beliefs have been mentioned because the article claimed he tried to stay out of politics. He did not, not even in his official capacity.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Yup. This is what I proposed six months ago. Later, I got showered in downvotes when I said maybe, perhaps, they should do something like this, targeting the institutions and policies in a way that could actually affect change rather than using 'indiscriminate chemotherapy' on academia. Tons of people here seem to have bought into the idea that the entire university system is 'enemy' and must be destroyed rather than changing their behavior.
I find that perspective mostly ignorant of theoretical premises, instead jumping in at the level of 'grunt'. That is, one should start by considering the conceptual nature of war. Clauswitz and all; politics by other means. Even modern political science treatments talk about war with the phrase "coercive bargaining". You actually have a goal that you want to accomplish. Usually that goal is not to simply genocide a people.1 It may be that war or the threat of war furthers that political/bargaining objective.
Now, it's only after elites think that war or the threat of war may further their political/bargaining objective that you start propagandizing the proles about the other side being the 'enemy' that must simply be eliminated. Their weak minds lap that drivel up, likely blind to the political/bargaining objectives that are underlying the entire endeavor in the first place. These are the 'grunts'.
Early on, from what I could tell from the grapevine, they were genuinely just blowing up shit randomly. From what I heard, there was no rhyme or reason that could be discerned; just some random things getting cut randomly, without any meaningful reason attached. Like if some private was suddenly thrust into generalship, not even knowing the terminology or how the systems worked to align efforts with the objective. Such a private would, understandably, make all sorts of random decisions with random and unpredictable effects. Some here were happy with that pathway, with the aforementioned analogy to 'indiscriminate chemotherapy'.
Now, it seems like the administration has either gotten up to speed or put someone in charge who actually knows how to be a general. They might still not be perfect at it, but I'm glad they're at least trying something more like my six month old suggestion. Concerning Tao, specifically, I wrote previously on how this affects individual incentives:
Moreover, it also changes the individual incentives. If you're a hard sciencer who doesn't give a shit about wokeness, you might still find yourself accepting a job at a woke-ass uni, because that might be the place that really enables you to get grants, have equipment/space, top students, whatever. If suddenly, it doesn't matter what you personally do/don't do in your research, but staying at a woke uni means you're forbidden from getting grants, while moving to a cleaned up uni means gravy train, the unis that manage to clean house are going to get showered in top tier talent. No more unis managing to somehow attract some set of possibly politically-neutral, bank-making talent that they skim from to fund their crazy wokies.
1 - Possibly one might have a goal for which genociding a people is the most effective means by which to attain one's goal. Without getting into that conversation too deeply, the actual end being served is still not the actual genocide.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
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.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
No new restrictions on those people based on speech are being added. The grants were all suspended (some are now unsuspended) and new grants aren't currently being made.
There’s already a war going on, one that the universities have been waging since long before the funding cuts. The difference here is whether that war should be a limited war or a total one. Even putting aside the fractions of people implicated—conservatives are ~50% of the U.S. population, while academics are a fraction of a percent (or maybe slightly larger)—there’s a difference in the purpose of cutting funding to progressive universities versus cutting funding to conservative Americans.
Even if I want funding to these universities to be cut, I still don’t want some PhD student, writing their thesis on the inescapable legacy of white male oppression or whatever, to be unable to find a job, or to be unable to be treated for disease. I just don’t want to pay money for the purpose of letting people who hate me spread that hate. They can do that on their own time, with their own money, and even if taxpayer-funded infrastructure helps them do that on their own time better because money is fungible, so be it; it still is qualitatively different from me directly funding their Hate Whitey theses.
[EDIT: I realize that this might seem like a bit of a motte-and-bailey, since there are lots of people whose funding is getting cut whose research is not the maximally-inflammatory Hate Whitey thesis. Here we’d have to get into specifics about whether we’re talking about funding cuts for specific projects or funding cuts for the entire university. The former seem entirely defensible to me. The latter does seem a bit more morally fraught, since there’s more “collateral damage”, but only a bit, in part because there is far less collateral damage than targeting literally all American conservatives, and in part because the collateral damage is not the whole point (whereas it is in the case of targeting literally all American conservatives).]
Can’t you see how that’s qualitatively different from me saying “I don’t want these people to be happy, work, or live at all”?
(P.S. This whole discussion is assuming that we should be funding things federally at all. If you want to argue that we should end all federal taxes, then that’s a whole other story.)
This hasn't been a problem for me (6'6) for the last decade or so at least, there are so many brands with long t-shirts. What I do is go to some online retailer and look specifically for extralong shirts and order a bunch. With the generous return policies this easy and without any real cost. For dress shirts I just have them tailored and always have, there has never been a brand that fit me well. Furthermore, if you buy in bulk they're more or less the same price as decent quality standard sizes. There is not really a reason to not get them tailored.
While I'm big, strong and have naturally wide shoulders, I've never done steroids so perhaps we're talking about different things?
themig
1d ago
What conservatives are there? Certainly none in academia. The left already uses its power to purge conservatives as much as they possibly can.
The administration is not going to get anywhere with a carrot. They might get somewhere with a stick.
I'm not going to advocate for it, but I'm not going to shed a tear if the guy at the end of my local bar who said "I think it would be better if they all just died" back in in 2020 doesn't get more grant money.
07mk
1d 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?
I mean, I'm assuming Dase is Republican or anti-Dem, and I'd guess they'd be absolutely for this, though I'm not sure "should" is the right term to use. As a Democrat, I would say they absolutely shouldn't do it, at least from a completely cynical and selfish perspective. Woke ideas are unpopular enough nationally that Dems adopting an undeniable "any government function that's not woke must be destroyed" policy would severely hamper their electoral prospects nationally.
Please forgive me for dog-piling you. The thing is, I think there's a big case of 'two screens' going on here.
The impossibility of neutrally adjudicating which [ad-hominem arguments about who is incompatible with academia] 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 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.
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.
TheLoser
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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.
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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.
Whenever I hear cries of "help help I'm being repressed for my speech" from the left, I think about Masterpiece Cakeshop and the neverending litigation the owner has been put through, the mocking phrase "freeze peach," the national ACLU changing its guidelines for case selection to avoid representing right-wingers (that internal memo from way back in 2018), state chapters of the ACLU refusing to represent right-wing groups, and the infamous xkcd comic about being shown the door. They demonstrated their true principles when they had power and I have no reason to think anything has changed.
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