domain:theintrinsicperspective.com
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Heh, I'm pretty sure I've used software packages more expensive per seat than the engineers to run them. But yes, salaries are generally the largest. I'm sure pure mathematicians use a lot of chalk too.
Nonsense, academics have to walk on eggshells when publishing on topics related to things like biological sex and gender identity, race, and many more topics lest they face consequences to their careers.
An example that comes to mind that I read a few years ago (and will try to dig up) was an economics paper that worked together with a utility company in some third world shithole. The research in question: whether cutting off water to non-paying customers would result in more payments to the utility company, resulting in the utility company being able to invest in their infrastructure and provide more and better water service overall, leading to fewer people being without water service overall than a system that treats water access as a "human right".
The research reached the obvious conclusion that anyone who has taken econ 101 would have expected, and the researchers didn't lie about this, but they couched everything they said in tons of trigger-warning type language to avoid conflict. It absolutely had an effect on the strength of their conclusions, how strong of a stance they were willing to take, etc.
Edit: Turns out it was Kenya. Found the paper with its milquetoast conclusions that any econ 101 student could have told you - https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27569/w27569.pdf
And here's one (of many) articles from the "water access is a human right" faction going after the paper and its authors: https://developingeconomics.org/2023/12/11/when-economists-shut-off-your-water/
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
You can't (in a morally consistent way) nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then call "no nukes" when the Japanese take out New York and Chicago.
But I can object when the previously-nuked side runs on a platform of nuclear disarmament (i.e. cancel culture is bad, free speech must be protected), and then, the moment it wins, starts nuking its enemies instead (i.e. just try to cancel the left harder)
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
1d ago
I am not a “Rationalist” and my habits are very much my own.
I approach every text with the level of respect it deserves. Nothing more, nothing less.
Long term, a truce. For a long time we had free speech because everyone understood that policing speech was a double-edged sword - even if it works for you today, it’s going to cut your head off tomorrow.
When everyone understands this, then you’re safe because nobody seriously demands loyalty tests because everyone understands how that ends. All of this came about because the woke thought they were able to escape that and win permanent victory.
MAD requires demonstrating that you are actually willing to fire off your nukes.
(Note also that Trump isn’t demanding a loyalty test. There is no requirement that universities be Trumpist, only that they not openly discriminate against white, Jewish and Asian students. Which seems fair to me.)
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Inflammatory claims require evidence. This is still not a place to air your grievances without doing any work to back them up.
Your mod log is a long, long series of similar comments. One week ban.
ThenElection
1d ago
I learned analysis from his excellent textbook on it. Felt it gave me much more solid intuitions than Rudin, which I was struggling with. (To be fair, I don't glaze Axler, so there's still a gap.)
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
That wouldn't rule out me or any of my research advisors. I don't think it would get Terence Tao, either. It's a cute motte for what is obviously a much more expansive bailey.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
This is isomorphic to left-wing cancel culture, equally morally bankrupt, and equally un-American. The only ethically justifiable mandate for fighting cancel culture is to restore intellectual freedom and freedom of speech. If you abandon that justification then you are as hypocritical and craven as your enemies, and, if nothing else, you have no high ground from which to criticize Tao.
PatellaFarmer
1d ago
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.
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.
Yes, there were a number of things he could have done to make his comment more accurate, charitable, or defensible.
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