domain:city-journal.org
odd_primes
2hr ago
TracingWoodgrains has a thread on the topic here: https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1957878299146993821
Terence Tao, signing an open letter in 2020: "We are enraged at the everyday operations of a white supremacist society. ... Complicity with these systems of oppression is deeply rooted in the origins of this country."
He also wrote a blog in 2016 entitled "It ought to be common knowledge that Donald Trump is not fit for the presidency of the United States of America". He might want to put forth the image of a politically neutral mathematician now that his funding is at risk, but that does not reflect his previous behavior.
anti_dan
2hr ago
The nuance was available for Tao and other academics doing "good" work to police their own and not let their own research to be used to launder pure advocacy and propaganda under the guise of research. You can't be a part of "no enemies on the left" for the better part of your career and then act shocked when people put weight on your words and actions.
At the species level, at the level of the collective, we can allocate resources to everything. My post was more about asking why, at the individual level, space colonization becomes such a powerfully attractive symbol for some people and not others.
I think space colonisation has become an attractive symbol because it's an indisputable display of human advancement, and it requires a whole lot of technological know-how in a wide range of fields, possibly more so than any other goal. Developing technology that's both speedy and durable enough to cross light years' worth of distances, keeping humans in stasis or sustaining a viable colony during these prohibitively long travel times, setting up a workable society in a completely alien environment etc are insanely difficult goals way beyond anything we've attempted before.
Every step of the way you're straining against the laws of physics as much as possible - finding a propulsion method that can feasibly bring you anywhere near relativistic speeds is difficult, and if you do, there's the interstellar medium to contend with, which at these speeds basically becomes hard radiation bombarding your starship, its travellers, and all the equipment aboard. And keep in mind, deep space has no significant energy source to speak of, meaning you have to carry all your fuel with you if you want to power a ship (Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, anyone?). Don't even speak about Bussard ramjets that harvest hydrogen from the interstellar medium for fusion, because that's undoable too. Once you reach your destination, you've likely landed on a planet that's nothing like Earth and where the raw physical environment threatens to kill your colonists every step of the way.
I can't think of another goal that's nearly as difficult or aspirational as space colonisation. Not even "understanding how the human mind functions" feels as infeasible to me as colonising another star system or galaxy (and, unlike setting up a colony outside our solar system, there's no clear and hard condition you can point to as proof of success). Space colonisation just runs up against a whole lot of sheer physical limits that are difficult to overcome, and I don't think size and expansion is the only reason for why a lot of people romanticise it - rather, I think it's the fact that large-scale space colonisation requires bending the infinite, indifferent, uncaring universe to your will. It is an assertion that we matter.
Then there is also the possibility of discovery and finding ayy lmaos. That's cool too.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
I feel like it is worth noting here that the results of any valid scientific investigation don't depend on patriotism?
I can understand how, particularly in the humanities, the results of any given study can be more pro or anti America, or whatever other nation. A subject like history is as much about framing a narrative of the past as it is about objective facts, so you might have great reason to worry about bias.
But science or mathematics, at least if they are carried out in any kind of reasonable good faith, are hard to skew like that. It doesn't matter whether such-and-such the physicist is a rootless cosmopolitan because the results of theories of physics do not depend on the character or values of the theoretician. The maths work out or don't work out regardless, and a country that deprives itself of genuinely useful knowledge because of concerns about the character of scientists is needlessly crippling itself.
Goodguy
2hr ago
Whew boy, now this is really some waging of the culture war.
Has Terence Tao actually engaged in any political activism other than sharing his opinions, or are you purely criticizing him for having anti-right political opinions and working for a California university?
Saying that being a professor at a California university is like being a soldier of the new Red Army is hyperbole. It's the same kind of hyperbole that committed Soviets used against their own ideological enemies in the Soviet academic system.
Sure, I don't think that Terence Tao is entitled to taxpayer money. I don't think even he is trying to claim that he is entitled to taxpayer money. Surely there's some room for nuance in looking at this situation.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
2hr ago
The whole thing has taken on an increasingly ridiculous energy
It's really not ridiculous at all. The 2016 Alt-Right, despite its overt anti-semitism, was willing to look the other way and support Trump regardless of his obvious inclinations towards Israel. But experience has proven MAGA was played like Cultural Conservatives were played by the Neocons- "White America" received its worst ever cultural hostility and abysmal political achievements from the Trump administration while Israel was given everything. It is a Zionist tactic to use their substantial influence in US media and politics to commandeer nascent political movements and maneuver them in favor of Israel. This has clearly been done with MAGA, and Vance is their candidate.
As much as I criticize Nick, he is 100% correct that support for Zionism is not compatible with America First, you cannot have both, Vance is the obvious attempt to, as JewishInsider put it, Vance puts pro-israel spin on America First. I'm not falling for that again, I'm not going to look the other way on GOP support for Zionism because all evidence has proven where that leads every single time.
Lorian_Aristedes
2hr ago
Side note: I was unsure of what NaNoWriMo was, and after googling found myself tumbling down a rabbit hole of juicy controversy. What a ride!
ThenElection
2hr ago
That's pretty convincing that he wasn't merely coasting along but more enthusiastic (or, at least, more hopeful of positioning himself for more spoils) than the average. Quite disappointing: I had a recollection of him speaking against the new equity based California math standards, which improved my opinion of him, but I can't find that anywhere so I must be misattributing. Sad.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
Do we have a pretty good approximation for macro phenomena?
Absolutely not. Dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of the universe.
Being a professor at a California university is like being a soldier of the new Red Army. Terence Tao signed the open letters, took the government money, parroted the party line, and made the libations. He should not act so shocked that the other team is treating him as an enemy soldier, because he is one.
Hasn't he ever heard the saying, "And them that take the sword shall perish by the sword"?
The academic establishment has sinned against America and America must administer its punishment. Burn it all! Fire and sword and no mercy! Let the funding be cut, let the tenured professors be thrown out to seek work in the private sector, let the student loans no longer be backed by the government, and let the hollowed-out ruins of the academic establishment of the 2020's stand forever as a warning to future scientists about the dangers of taking sides in politics. Taxpayer money is a privilege, not a right.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3hr ago
I finished the book tonight (faster than I expected). Overall I think I came away from it less positive than I was a couple of days ago, but still generally positive. To me, the strongest part of the narrative (though the least interesting as speculative fiction) was parts 1&2 where Mike was a fugitive from a government trying to use him as a pawn. Once that got resolved and Mike turned into space Jesus, I found the plot less interesting (though the ideas Heinlein was exploring were more interesting).
I can certainly see how the book was a big influence on the hippie movement. The ideas Mike teaches are so in line with the hippie ethos that if I didn't know better, I would guess that the book is a parody of them. I read that Heinlein was unhappy that they latched on to his book as they did, though it's not clear to me why. Presumably he thought they didn't get it in some way, but I'm not sure what he might've felt they were missing. Regardless, the optimism of the book - that we would be much happier and better off as a species if we learned to love and share instead of hoarding things to ourselves - is somewhat charming to read, though I wouldn't say that I believe that humans are capable of such a feat.
From a modern standpoint, it is rather shocking to me that this book isn't more criticized than it is. None of it offended me personally, but there's so much in here that is starkly offensive to modern feminist thought that I would have expected people to decry how sexist anyone is if they read this book. In particular, Jill's line about how 9/10 times if a woman is raped, it's partly her fault is the sort of thing for which I would expect Heinlein to have been thoroughly un-personed retroactively (as indeed would happen to anyone today who dared to write such a thing). Forget Starship Troopers, this is the book I think is most subversive to modern day politics, but nobody seems to really talk about it as such.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
Very.
The problem with the 'technological approach' to human capital is that its embracers never actually get around to it. They insist on Just One More Master's Degree and reason that they can mass produce geniuses eventually so why worry about it. In contrast, Sex Is Fun(go ahead, dispute it if you want), and women like babies. We had an AAQC recently from a woman who wanted another baby and thought it was a horrible idea, she just wanted one anyway. Making young women take care of robotic babies designed to discourage them from motherhood raises the teen pregnancy rate.
But go ahead, try to mass produce geniuses through technology. That's what South Korea thinks it's doing(yes, hangwon is pointless zero sum competition. They don't know that). The single digit number of their young will attain impressive credentials if they don't kill themselves first. No, you cannot avoid hangwon and gaokao if you have designer babies. Or expect AI to replace us until they paperclip maximize in their own solar system until the collapse of the local civilization turns it into something like Golgafrincham or Magrathea or Frogstar B or in fact most of the rest of Douglas Adams' cautionary tales because no one can figure out how to program common sense. Maybe AI fueled economic bubbles is the great filter of the fermi paradox, or maybe uber-k selection until the kids kill themselves rather than subject their own children to 18 hours a day of school is the great filter. Either way, the alien civilizations which make contact with us will be empire builders that seek to integrate conquered races into (a lower tier of)their power structure; the other alien races would just wipe us out rather than landing.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
3hr ago
Most people here, including me, are not.
Yes, I'm quite conscious of this distinction! And this appears to be something of an inborn preference (or at least, it's a preference that's sedimented relatively early in life). So I didn't presume that I would be able to "persuade" anyone.
Porque no los dos?
At the species level, at the level of the collective, we can allocate resources to everything. My post was more about asking why, at the individual level, space colonization becomes such a powerfully attractive symbol for some people and not others.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3hr ago
Xenocide is probably my favorite book in the series, based solely on the strength of the Han Qing-Jao story. I think it's the best thing Orson Scott Card has ever written, and while the other half of the book isn't as good (it's still good), that still averages out super high.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3hr ago
I read (some) books more than once because I love them and enjoy them just as much the second time. Sometimes more, because I will notice new things about the text I hadn't previously. It's not pointless to me, because I read for the enjoyment of the book, not just for novelty. Novelty is nice, but not a requirement. It doesn't even necessarily enhance the experience, as there are plenty of books I enjoyed reading the first time less than I would have enjoyed rereading something else.
I would also say your argument about opportunity cost can easily cut the other direction: if I read a new book, and I dislike it (which certainly happens), I have paid an opportunity cost versus just rereading a book I already liked. So either way, it seems to me that there is an opportunity cost to be paid.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3hr ago
Earth is large, but finite. Eventually you'll squeeze all the novelty out of it.
If you are suggesting that this is possible for any one person, I would be extremely surprised if you believe it. There is such a vast amount to be experienced and learned even within one town, to say nothing of a larger city, a whole country, bordering countries, or faraway countries--and this is just in the natural world and not even considering the variousness of people--that there isn't any way for a singular individual in one lifetime to "squeeze the novelty" out of it all, unless one is very very quickly given to boredom or incuriosity. I understand though that this is a matter of personal disposition.
Quantumfreakonomics
3hr ago
If Terrance Tao wants my support for his academic research, he can start by writing a substack comprehensible to a STEM undergrad explaining what the deal is with inter-universal Teichmüller theory. Until then, have fun in the private sector buddy. Meta is hiring.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
If they can do interstellar warfare, they should be capable of ASI or at least mass-cloning of geniuses with the same biology. Maybe they have 'ethics' that block those two and they're trying invade-the-galaxy, invite-the-galaxy for political reasons?
But how likely is it for an advanced civilization to have such a flawed system of govt?
JTarrou
3hr ago
The tree needs to go, dig up the dirt, salt the hole and burn anything still crawling.
There are no good branches. APAB.
JTarrou
3hr ago
Anything that harms "higher" education, the NGO complex and the politically captured "scientists" is good by me. This guy checks all three.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3hr ago
Ten years ago, I read a lot of books multiple times, because I found them to be highly enjoyable experiences and finding new stories that interested me (mostly on fanfiction.net) took a lot of effort. For example: IIRC, I read Time Braid six times and The Three Musketeers four times.
Nowadays, though, I feel obsessed with novelty (mostly on royalroad.com) and re-read books only rarely. I don't know why my tastes have changed.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3hr ago
If it helps you to perservere, Xenocide and Children of the Mind both are not quite so slow.
Also the mystery reveal as to why the piggies killed the guy is pretty kino.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
OK, how about losses or profits? Or 20008? I cited pubic law because it's funny, the other two are actually real examples from what I was getting it to do.
the Prime Minister's name is "Morrison" not "Morison"
I highly doubt Google docs could do tasks that require contextual understanding without some kind of LLM.
When you’re a marine in Iwo Jima, you light fires at every cave entrance after you’ve thrown 3-4 grenades in. Then you move onto the next one. And the next one.
There’s nothing worth saving in there that just won’t slow you down and get your people killed.
That’s just where we are in the culture war. How could anyone be surprised at this point?
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