domain:ymeskhout.substack.com
WandererintheWilderness
1d 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 - 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. Such people, I would describe as living under the yoke of the cancel-culture regime as much as anyone. If you take free speech seriously, then they're archetypal examples of victims of cancel culture. But they have every reason to believe Trump sees them as enemies anyway, and thus, correctly refuse to welcome the Great Liberator because they identify any call to do so as an attempt to divide and conquer.
More to the point, to whatever extent there are conservatives in academia whom cancel culture is preventing from speaking up, they are the people Trump is/should be trying to save. 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. 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. An attack vector which hurts such people as much as their oppressors - even if they are a minority - inherently loses its justification.
Also, whether you describe #3 as "craven" or simply rational behavior depends a great deal on the object-level question of whether Trump will, in fact, fail. 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. Don't online right-wingers tend to approve of hiding your power level?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Even so - surely the entire point of being mad about the politicization of the academy is to rescue whatever fraction of professors do live in fear of cancellation. What else would even be the point?
To prevent the academy from being used as a political weapon against oneself. Which does not require rescuing anyone.
To prevent academia from leveraging the power that it has (to pronounce Official Expert Truth) in support of the Left.
Rescuing academics would be nice but the vast majority of people who weren’t at least lukewarmly woke left years ago, like me. And the ones who are left will find they can get a lot of mileage out of “of course I agree with you but if I say it in public Trump will pull our funding”.
Even if the admin have a woke score of 110 and the academics only have woke scores between 30-90, neither group actually likes me.
BahRamYou
1d ago
This may be low-effort but... why do so many people glaze Terrance Tao...!?
OK, he won a fields medal. Neat. Someone wins one every year.
OK, he won it at a super young age. Neat. There are tons of super-young math prodigies. I went to school with several, they all burned out.
OK, he's published lots of famous math papers. Like... uh... what....? Can you name them? Can you understand them, even a little? Even describe which field of math they were in? (no googling please)
I mean cmon, Einstein was famous too but at least people understood his work a little. Same with Stephen Hawking.
Terry Tao just seems to be a case where the nerd/math world needed a celebreity and they all descended on this one guy for arbitrary reasons.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
How are we, as a society, supposed to do any universally-beneficial or long-term research with politicization? When one side demands loyalty, then the other side attacks you for said loyalty, how do we ensure the safety of, if not ongoing, then at least future research?
Unless you can run the polity yourself, you can't, since a sufficiently hostile government can easily interfere with private funding and research.
That you can't solve this problem doesn't provide any obligation for a political entity to fund an organization of its political opponents. If the universities wanted to have a moral case for funding by both sides, they should have stayed politically neutral. That the Blue required they toe the line, and they did, does not impose a moral requirement on Red to keep funding them while they toe the Blue line.
ChickenOverlord
1d ago
Sure, but compared to other research (especially medical research trying to do double blind studies with human patients) the cost of doing math research is significantly smaller.
thejdizzler
1d ago
Cut federal grants for diversity, withhold federal grant money from universities that don't toe the line on controlling the woke issues on campus. This is the stance that the admin took with Harvard and has served to keep Hopkins from acting up too much.
Pair this with maintaining the levels of federal funding support and you get reallocation of funds to less woke universities and less woke academics at woke-er universities putting pressure on their departments to crack down on dissidents. This is what we had here at Hopkins where the pro-Palestinian protests were shut down by the President because he was scared that this would result in a Harvard-like situation.
I believe that it can be steelmanned
Perhaps the rationalist habit of steelmanning should be put to rest.
You can find something valid in pretty much any rant. But if the rant is bad enough, you're going to do it by ignoring the author's intentions, and by ignoring the other 80% of the rant that can't be made valid by any standard.
We've had Holocaust deniers here. Occasionally they come up with something I can steelman (like lampshades made of human skin probably not being real). But the effect of steelmanning this is to ignore and gloss over 1) what they're saying, and 2) what they're trying to do by saying it.
Corvos
1d ago
The biggest expense for almost anything is salaries, at least in the UK. I was costing a project recently and even with quite tricked out hardware and server costs, 70% of the final number was just salaries.
thejdizzler
1d ago
Dude, chill
Corvos
1d ago
Without “some BS” this seems like a clearly true and factual statement. I can certainly dig up a number of “‘political correctness’ is just basic decency” quotes.
ChickenOverlord
1d ago
Tao isn't the best example to defend academia because 1) he'll be fine (allegedly his funding was partially restored, but moreover he and his students have plenty of potential sponsors), and 2) his field doesn't have obvious, real-life impact.
Also, what kind of serious funding does a theoretical mathematician actually need? I could see the need for licenses for certain software like MatLab etc., and the need to rent time on supercomputers, and the need to buy research papers, books, etc. But all of those (except maybe supercomputer time) are things universities are already paying for so the marginal added cost of supporting Tao's research is going to be minimal. The biggest expense is going to be the salaries of Tao and his team.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
free speech is not the right to receive a check from the government to subsidize your tongue.
No, but it is the right to keep your non-political job whatever political opinions you espouse outside of that job. If Tao stopped midway through math lectures to rant to his students about his personal opinions, that'd be one thing. But if his political advocacy on his own time does not interfere with doing his job as an academic, then it is a violation of free speech to jeopardize his career on the basis of his political speech, no different from when left-wings cancel-mobs do it.
thejdizzler
1d ago
Foot is hurting after running too much. Serves me right for trying to cram in the miles when I know (and have known since I was 17) that I do much better when I'm biking and swimming and holding my mileage around 60 a week. I'm just too big (which is probably a crazy statement on this forum) to run 80 miles a week without getting hurt.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
You have been warned repeatedly to stop putting words in other peoples' mouths. Especially when it comes to low-effort dismissals like this. Or like half of your comments over the last month.
Three day ban.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Even so - surely the entire point of being mad about the politicization of the academy is to rescue whatever fraction of professors do live in fear of cancellation. What else would even be the point?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
I mean I agree with you, and I'm not involved in the field of robotics.
I have seen interesting videos of robot berry pickers (Dyson has a cool experimental farm), I hope commercially viable ones are invented and scaled
I'm just commenting on what I've picked up as an interested observer of the space
The lack of massive robotic automation indicates to me it's quite hard, if it wasn't, we'd see more of it
I hope LLMs help smooth over the "fuzzy" parts that make this so hard
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
You aren't on Iwo Jima. You're on an Internet board with rules against waging the culture war.
Dial it back, please.
07mk
1d ago
How are we, as a society, supposed to do any universally-beneficial or long-term research with politicization? When one side demands loyalty, then the other side attacks you for said loyalty, how do we ensure the safety of, if not ongoing, then at least future research?
This appears to be a dilemma. We can have universally-beneficial/long-term scientific research, or we can have politicization of science, but we can't have both at the same time. And this isn't a black-or-white thing, but rather a spectrum where one trades off against the other. I don't think the politicians and ideologues can be counted on to keep their grubby fingers off the superweapon that is the credibility that comes with the label "science," and so if such research is a higher priority than politicization, then the way to accomplish this would have to be from the scientists and academics rejecting the politicization from within. The only alternative is that it doesn't get accomplished at all, and we get corrupted non-credible "research" that serves some ideology at the cost to society at large.
Thoroughlygruntled
1d ago
My personal experience is that, with the exception of a handful of autistic math and econ professors, the academics are 100% complicit. The entire history department at my major state university was made up of proud, self-professed marxists. Professors would regularly stop teaching in the middle of class to go on political rants. 80% of surveyed academics admitted to engaging in deliberate discrimination against conservatives.
I don't buy the poor, hapless academic argument. They've been happily leading the charge for the politicization of the academy for decades.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
1d ago
But I can't appreciate when the same people (let alone the humanities professors) try to wrap themself in the flag (diploma?) and cry out that they are the only reason we aren't all living in pit toilets and dying of diphtheria.
I mean, what do you want them to say instead?
They're literally not allowed to say "yes, we are going to take your tax dollars to fund this work because it is intrinsically valuable, and our ability to carry on with this work is more important than your ability to eat at Chipotle for the 5th time this week or whatever else you were going to do with that extra $20". They think that, but they're not allowed to say it. It's not in the Overton window, it wouldn't be egalitarian, it wouldn't be democratic, etc. So they have to lie about "practical benefits" to the grant managers, and ultimately to themselves.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
I agree! And I agree that the open letter is pushing it, and I find the letter pretty obnoxious.
A few posts ago you said it was "pretty innocuous behavior".
Sunshine's post is way over the top. But it's a lot closer to the truth than "UCLA, Tao, and his colleagues did nothing wrong"
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
1d ago
Terence Tao is guilty of the same level of complicity as Havel's greengrocer - he mouths the enemy's words in order to pass the enemy's loyalty tests and prosper under enemy rule. Kolmogorov went beyond that - he testified as a witness for the prosecution at the show trial of his PhD advisor. Under ordinary western liberal ethics, that is bad. If you think that "traitors to lords and benefactors" (Dante's words for the group he selected for the very lowest circle of Hell) share the basic nature of Judas (as Dante and all the ancients did), then it is unforgiveable. A new regime that is for maths but against Communism offers Tao his job back, but not Kolmogorov. I suspect part of what is going on here is that the MAGA base is against maths as well as Communism.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Most of the academics didn't complain about being forced to parrot spurious diversity statements, nor even when those spurious diversity statements were made the foremost criteria in their hiring. They DO complain, loudly, when the Trump administration moves explicitly against those spurious diversity statements and other requirements. If they were really held captive by an ideologically captured admin, they should welcome the Trump administration as liberators.
If they don't, I see three possibilities
-
They actually agree with the admin. This is what I suspect is true.
-
They don't agree with the admin, but believe accepting the admin's dominance is preferable to the short-term pain Trump is imposing. If they believe this, they are, IMO, fools.
-
They think Trump will fail, and thus adhere to the admin in order to prevent later repercussions against themselves. In this case they are craven.
None of these cases demand they be given any sort of mercy.
Thank you! Seems very likely it was this thread https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/1462824227090976772
Not quite what I remember but hey, that's how memory works.
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