domain:aporiamagazine.com
Even if your portrayal of what he said was accurate, that is not "a whole nother level", it's "more of the same", and perhaps even "way more mild". In fact I could make the case that it would be a good deal more kild than But it's not accurate. He wasn't punished for his political views, his university was for their discriminatory practices. Tao was portraying himselfnas politically neutral, and the above comment was pointing out he's lying.
ResoluteRaven
5hr ago
Most of the DEI requirements I am aware of are additional diversity statements tacked on to the ends of grant applications that could easily be eliminated by the funding agencies. That and getting rid of all the unncessary scholarships for women and minorities, which are easy enough to identify, would have achieved more or less the same results as far as fighting wokeness is concerned with minimal collateral damage.
magicalkittycat
5hr ago
Are you saying the government should punish one of the greatest mathematicians alive because he expressed his political opinions on things and the current leader doesn't like it?
Man I thought woke cancel culture was insane in their assault on academic freedom and free speech on campuses but this seems to be going up a whole nother level.
Punishing legitimate and important academic work is the best way to go about deterrence, as it motivates normal academics to police their extremist colleagues, rather than acquiescing again.
Doesn't that just incentive all the smart intellectuals (including those who just want to grill research) to hate you for being the worse of two evils? If one is saying "just add this line of text to your grants" and the other is saying "we will destroy you and your ability to do science and math", I'm not sure why they'd start siding with the second.
“Conservatives will harm valuable research” is an argument that will persuade an elite and effete academic,
Yeah, seems like it will persuade them that conservatives are actively dangerous to scientific research.
The response to Tao's article pointing out times he's talked about politics before in the past is interesting to me, because nowhere at all (that I know of) has Trump or his administration stated that he is targeting funding over a professor's personal beliefs. And yet somehow it seems everyone just takes it for granted, of course it's targeted government punishment coming down over personal wrongthink they say, Tao's beliefs are definitely relevant to the cuts.
Very odd, I don't think I've seen this happen much before where even the main defenders are like "ok yeah we all think Trump is lying but the libs deserve it. It's obviously angry revenge first and foremost"
ResoluteRaven
5hr ago
Science's first loyalty is to academia, not the country. And academia is dominated by a culture of rootless cosmopolitanism, which doesn't see any special value in any particular country (least of all America). I have extreme doubt as to The Science's commitment to America being a world leader in anything when they only ever kowtow to their humanities overlords in lieu of fact-finding - overlords who typically hold America in absolute contempt.
Do you expect demands of political loyalty to result in better science when they are coming from the nationalist right rather than the woke left? What would it even mean for academia to place America first? Only working on research projects that increase national power in some tangible way? Refusing to use foreign inventions or admit international students? Making every PhD go through the security clearance vetting process?
I kinda gotta hand it to Irigaray for having the chutzpah to suggest that we haven't fully characterized the solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations because of men's fear of menstruation and "feminine" fluids,
You left out that mechanics of hard, rigid, phallic objects have been solved, also because men run the world..
As an aside, Irigaray is someone I have mentioned to progressives in private discussion, and asked them to answer for her. The response I get is universally that that her fluid mechanics quote is crazy, and it doesn't really represent the feminist or progressive movements. I mean, at least the people I deal with are sane enough to recognize that level of insanity and disavow it in private. However the wider progressive movement has not disavowed her assertion, and in fact seems to promote ideas that are just short of said assertion. While it is important to consider the strongest ideas of a movement, so as not to be knocking down straw or weak men, the insistence on that coupled with the lack of disavowal on their end makes for an insidious motte and bailey.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
6hr ago
No progress. Thanks for asking anyways.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
6hr ago
But science or mathematics, at least if they are carried out in any kind of reasonable good faith, are hard to skew like that.
You need the word "hard" before "science" for this to be especially accurate. Because, well, Social Psychology is a Flamethrower.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6hr ago
If the dude was able to write diversity statements, or whatever was the requirement for his old grants, without becoming a different person, why would they speaking up to say "this is retarded and needs to stop" suddenly change their core personality traits?
ResoluteRaven
6hr ago
Researchers might have to carefully consider the political leanings of their funding proposals in election years.
This has always been the case. I learned years ago from my professors that when writing a grant proposal under a Democratic administration you say "by improving the electrolyte in this battery we will increase diversity in STEM, lower carbon emissions, and promote gender equality in developing countries" and when writing one under a Republican administration you say "by substituting this zeolite catalyst we will bring jobs to rural areas, ensure American energy independence, and strengthen our national security." While for some (mostly American-born) the former is what they really believe and the latter is just a game they play to hide their power level, for others (many of the foreign-born researchers the current administration seems to want to get rid of) the whole process is just another hoop they need to jump through to continue autistically pursuing their niche interests and they have no true political allegiance.
JarJarJedi
6hr ago
Israel says UN undercounts aid entering Gaza by almost 3x.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
6hr ago
Selling purchasing data by credit card companies is probably super-duper illegal
Is it still super-duper illegal if they "anonymize" the data before selling it?
Tell me precisely what would stop you from producing food that is identical to back home, same ingredients, same process, in your current country, other than "I've got other things to do with my time."
Lack of experience, for one (so yes, I have other things to do with my time). Also a lot of Malaysian food requires exceptionally high heat to get proper wok hei, and the stove in my apartment and in fact many Western kitchens does not allow for that.
In addition, it is easier for me to recreate Malaysian dishes having tasted it before. If you don't, how in the world would you ever be able to recreate a food you've never tasted an authentic version of? Note a lot of Asian food also does not rely on strict codified recipes and often rely on the chef to improvise until it tastes "right". Cooking Asian food is traditionally something you just gain a feel for overtime by tasting and replication, and most internet recipes won't get you 100% of the way there. In practice I would say it's not going to be easy to make authentic Malaysian food without actually having tasted an authentic version before.
If you have someone with you who possesses the ability and equipment to cook authentic Malaysian food, then yes it's trivially easy to obtain. In practice this condition does not typically hold. Maybe you think all these differences are minimal and that you can get most of the effect of a food tasting an inauthentic version of it, and that they're not meaningful enough to travel for (as a bona fide foodie I disagree, but that's a claim I can't contest by virtue of it being a value judgement).
But then there are foods I just straight-up haven't been able to find in Sydney, and I find nothing else scratches that itch in quite the same way.
Is there any intrinsic reason that "authentic" Malaysian food can only be made in Malaysia, if a person who knows the recipes is available?
Of course there's no intrinsic reason, but authentic Malaysian food in other cities is just nearly impossible to find in spite of the theoretic possibility of its existence. And no, the amount of flavour and texture combinations in existence isn't infinite, it's just way larger than you will ever be able to experience in your lifetime. Which means @George_E_Hale's assertion that the variety on Earth is enough to satisfy most people is correct.
And there are indeed some foods where the taste relies on it being made in a specific place. Korean makgeolli has a lot of variation and since it is a fermented drink made from a wild starter, at least some of its taste is reliant on the regional climate it's produced in. You also can't import it and expect to get the best version of it, since it then needs to be pasteurised to improve shelf life and this shits up the taste. As someone who has been to Korea and tasted the nectar of heaven that is makgeolli, then tried to get one in Sydney and found it tasted like watered-down piss, I can attest to this, seriously makgeolli overseas is so fucking bad I swear to god.
The world has gotten smaller as time has gone on. Globohomo is quite real. That doesn’t mean that travel won’t yield you new cultural and sensory experiences.
It's really too bad, then, that East Asians are self destructing by failing to reproduce. I'd like these cultures to survive and persist as unique societies. But they don't seem to want to.
I actually took the time to subject that to further analysis.
The major Asian countries with low birth rates relative to death rates are, unsurprisingly, the hyper-modernised ones: China (death rate 8.3, birth rate 6.3), South Korea (death rate 6.7, birth rate 4.3), Taiwan (death rate 8.8, birth rate 5.7) and Japan (death rate 12.3, birth rate 6.0). Interestingly enough, Japan's birth rate is the most unfavourable compared to its death rate across all East Asian countries, in spite of all the focus on SK. These results are largely consistent with your article. But I will note there are a small handful of Asian destinations which are actually quite wealthy and also have higher birth rates than their death rates; e.g. Singapore (death rate 4.8, birth rate 8.2) and Macao (death rate 4.8, birth rate 6.3). Southeast Asia is doing pretty good in general, with Malaysia clocking in at a death rate of 5.2 and a birth rate of 12.4 (I can testify that Malaysia isn't that much of a shithole, in spite of people's perceptions, and it doesn't seem to be disappearing any time soon). This is all still not great, and I agree that East Asia faces a lot of challenges regarding that in the future.
What I think is illuminating about this is that large swaths of the west seems to be depopulating as well. Many places in Western Europe possess birth rates well below their death rates, for example Austria (death rate 10.2, birth rate 8.2), Finland (death rate 10.7, birth rate 7.8), Spain (death rate 9.3, birth rate 7.0), Italy (death rate 11.2, birth rate 6.5), Portugal (death rate 11.1, birth rate 8.3) and so on aren't doing so good. Oh and don't look at Eastern Europe unless you want to see horrific depopulation. Even where they seem to be doing okay, this isn't the full picture. For example, I notice your article states that US births still exceed deaths and that its population is set to increase. This is trivially true on its face but it's misleading since that obscures a shit ton of heterogeneity - non-Hispanic white American deaths exceed births, and this has been true ever since 2012. The fact that the US still has a higher birth rate than death rate is being driven by the immigrants they have brought in. Does this bode well for the survival of "American culture"?
Western countries are depopulating, and have been for a long time. Unlike Asia, they're just stemming that by bringing in immigrants who don't hold the same culture and values who breed like rabbits, so their overall birth rates look better. But that does not imply cultural survival, and this tactic certainly doesn't allow Americans to escape reproductive oblivion just because they've decided to replace the kids they're not having with a bunch of people who have as much relation to them as they do the Chinese.
I agree we're gonna lose a lot. We may all be boned. Except for maybe Africa, who - if they ever modernise - will also face the same issues, and begin to go gently into that good night.
anon_
6hr ago
as it motivates normal academics to police their extremist colleagues, rather than acquiescing again
Ah, but in doing so you changes the very nature of the person in question. Serious academics like TT aren't interested in the prior step of acquire enough institutional power to be able to police their extremist colleagues as they have better things to do like discover new math. The person interested in university politics just isn't the same person.
Of course, you do see serious academics that have taken up the task of working university politics. Whether out of duty or necessity or simply inertia. And every single time I've seen it (and to be fair, I wasn't in academics that long, I bailed on it for private industry), it fundamentally changed how they related to the world.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
6hr ago
There's a colourable argument that trying to sort the good from the bad - particularly within the uni bureaucracy as it exists - is a poor cost-benefit.
There's not a colourable argument that there is no good. That's just pretending the debate is one-sided. A third of voters with postgrad degrees voted for Trump. Those people are probably not on-board with the SJ agenda. There will also be SJ-opponents among those who did not vote, and even among those who voted for Harris; if I were a US citizen, I would probably have voted for Harris simply because I think Trump is too old to lead the free world in a potential WWIII and because WWIII almost certainly implies the semi-permanent fall of SJ anyway.
The institutions are weaponised against you; that's true. Many, perhaps most, of the people there are your enemies; that's true. God knows I feel like I'm in enemy territory every time I pass a bulletin board in a university and it's plastered with SJ signs. But that's just it; I do pass bulletin boards in universities, and I despise those signs. Not literally everyone in academia is your enemy.
phosphorus2
6hr ago
Terry Tao gives all of the great reasons why we like science. And hes right on those reasons. But he does not give the reason why his funding was cut. Which is odd, he is a smart guy, but reading his letter you get the impression that Trump / the NSF just came in and randomly cut his funding. He actually say this himself:
This is not because of a negative scientific assessment of the work, but instead by seemingly arbitrary justifications.
[Side note: very lame Terry. Your entire funding just got gutted, and you can't even nut up enough to say it was "arbitrary", just "seemingly arbitrary". Weak.]
Anyways, it just seemed odd that UCLA got its funding cut for no reason, the admin has been sending letters to colleges outlining its reasons. So I looked, and this is what I found. I took it from the link to the lawsuit below, where the Trump NSF letter to UCLA is reprinted.
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has undertaken a review of its award portfolio. The agency has determined that suspension of certain awards is necessary because they are not in alignment with current NSF priorities and/or programmatic goals. NSF understands that [UCLA] continues to engage in race discrimination including in its admissions process, and in other areas of student life, as well as failing to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias. We have considered reliance interests and they are outweighed by the NSF’s policy concerns.
Effective immediately, the attached awards are suspended until further notice.
NSF is issuing this suspension to protect the interests of the government pursuant to NSF Grant General Conditions (GC-1) term and condition entitled ‘Termination and Enforcement,’ on the basis that the awards no longer effectuate program goals or agency priorities. This is the final agency decision and not subject to appeal.
Costs incurred as a result of this suspension may be reimbursed, provided such costs would otherwise be allowable under the terms of the award and the governing cost principles. In accordance with your award terms and conditions, you have 30 days from the suspension date to furnish an itemized accounting of allowable costs incurred prior to the suspension date.
The lawsuit gives details on claims/allegations from a second NSF / Trump letter:
• UCLA engages in racism, in the form of illegal race-based preferences in admissions practices;
• UCLA fails to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias;
• UCLA discriminates against and endangers women by allowing men in women’s sports and private women-only spaces
What does Terrance Tao say about these allegations? Nothing. Totally ignores them. Doesn't acknowledge them.
I am sympathetic to the argument he makes. But he is willfully blind to the larger systemic issues in his employer and university system at large. UCLA has been told over and over again to stop doing affirmative action. Its the law. And in response UCLA just sticks its fingers in its ears and mumbles something about holistic admissions and does it anyways. Which, to be fair, got them by with doing what the wanted to do for the last few decades.
But not anymore. Sorry Terry.
https://calmatters.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/9e9d118f-51fb-4e98-a9c0-fa060ea131ad.pdf
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
7hr ago
Much to consider here. IMO (1) you need to implement serious deterrence to prevent something like the social justice craze of 2020 from ever happening again. Punishing legitimate and important academic work is the best way to go about deterrence, as it motivates normal academics to police their extremist colleagues, rather than acquiescing again. “Conservatives will harm valuable research” is an argument that will persuade an elite and effete academic, where arguments based on logic and statistics obviously failed during the last mania. (2) Now is not the time, because of the threat of China, to be alienating STEM academics. We should want America to be the most reliable and rewarding place in the world for top tier foreign STEM research. The best mathematician in the world criticizing the academic environment is a big deal.
I'm a Malaysian who now lives in Sydney and no, the Malaysian food joints in Sydney are not the same. I have lived here for six years, and in that span of time I have only managed to find one authentic restaurant (which I only found last week. Yes it took me six years to find one). Not gonna lie, I nearly teared up when eating the food.
Tell me precisely what would stop you from producing food that is identical to back home, same ingredients, same process, in your current country, other than "I've got other things to do with my time."
Is there any intrinsic reason that "authentic" Malaysian food can only be made in Malaysia, if a person who knows the recipes is available?
The amount of variety your city offers may satisfy you, but no, it isn't a representative sample of what the world has to offer.
What possible ingredient(s) can not be shipped to any other given country, on ice or otherwise, so as to produce them the exact same way they are back home. We can overnight any package from any first or second world country if needed. There is no physical limitation on this factor under current tech.
And more to the point, what possible combination of ingredients can produce a truly unique sensation that isn't similar to some other dish that you're familiar with?
Humans have a finite capacity for taste. There's only so many combinations of salty, sweet, sour, spicy, bitter, umami one can produce. I'm familiar with the basic 'philosophy' of cooking, but also that flavorspace is pretty strictly bounded by what humans are capable of sensing.
You can vary the textures, the consistency, the 'mouthfeel,' the temperatures and acidity and crispness. Indeed, I get the sense this is precisely what the best chefs on the planet are doing to come up with 'new' dishes.
But these foods aren't breaking the laws of physics. They're utilizing mostly the same constituent parts, just in different configurations.
Is there any evidence that there's anything resembling a truly 'infinite' diversity of possible food experiences available?
Is there some food experience out there that I can LEGITIMATELY only experience if I take a trip to some other country?
Things are clean, and generally quite safe - safer than in many Western countries to be honest (look up the crime stats in a city like Beijing and compare that to say London. There's no comparison
It's really too bad, then, that East Asians are self destructing by failing to reproduce. I'd like these cultures to survive and persist as unique societies. But they don't seem to want to.
This is my larger point. We're going to lose so, so much in the short term because we just decided hedonism was preferable to exploration.
srf0638
7hr ago
I've seen that article (and e.g. https://www.slowtwitch.com/running/we-often-run-faster-off-tri-training/). Best I can tell, Couzens has appallingly bad epistemics, but I think he's pretty close to right on this point.
While that would probably be a better outcome (to those who value American interests (me)), I don't think it would work. It's too deeply entrenched. I really don't think there's any coming back from it when you look at issues like transgender beliefs. Do you think biologists are about to walk all their support of that back, in favor of what used to be (and, in my mind, still is) an unquestionably obvious conclusion? I don't think it could happen. There will be no surrender on that front of the culture war, especially when you consider the immense reputational damage they'd incur from changing their story like that. It doesn't even matter if it's left wing or whatever at that point, they'd look absolutely retarded to come out and say "Oh, we were wrong about not knowing what a woman is."
Maybe the issue is that, despite a subject mentality, they're absolutely unable to contend with the fact that they are bleeding reputation to people who matter and can exercise control over them. They see the looming threat of admitting failure, and they clearly understand the damage that could incur, but they don't realize that doubling down on what many people see as overwhelming stupidity is causing them to lose substantial trust day after day. All they need to do, they think, is preach endlessly to the choir, those who have already given heart and soul to expert worship and could not think to question them, blind to the irreplaceable losses that their endless march incurs.
They just don't get it. They don't realize that they have a reputational standard that needs to be maintained. You get the certs, you wave a paper, and the people obey. If that's what you're used to, why shouldn't you fight to keep it that way? But any ruler can take things too far. I think there was a perception of invulnerability, that it would not matter what peasants who doubt The Cause think; you just have to yell at them again and again, and reinforce the need to Trust The Science, and all sorts of other patronizing measures. The idea that the experts could be in error is unthinkable, even as Trump hits them in the face with a sledgehammer over and over again while giving them very easy outs. Any mistakes can be corrected, any challenge from the opposition can be waited out (as they are too valuable to be dispensed with, clearly), and anyone noticing their repeated failures can only cause harm by going above their stations to cast doubt on the methods of their betters, who need to remain unchallenged for the ultimate good of America (which they often seem to hate).
I don't want to sound like I am enforcing a consensus, but it is funny. The way you frame the recapture of academia feels to me like The One Ring. You can claim it for yourself, but it will either unmake you into just another dark lord, or it will make you an unwitting pawn of the Enemy himself. Only by destroying it, perhaps, can what's in motion be stopped - and that is the only challenge that has not entered their darkest dreams.
When people with the opposite politics get in power, it is perfectly reasonable for them to decide that no, they do not want to provide government funding for institutions that are fighting them politically.
I agree! And I agree that the open letter is pushing it, and I find the letter pretty obnoxious.
I think that Tao by signing the open letter was, deliberately or not, unfairly taking advantage of the fact that non-leftist academics who signed an open letter supporting different politics would possibly expose themselves to career-endangering consequences.
That said, I still think that @Sunshine's take goes overboard. Identifying your own political side with America as a whole and calling for the wholesale demolition of the other side is a bit much of a reaction to what amounts to an academic most people have never even heard of putting his name on a politicized open letter.
faceh
7hr ago
If the moon was full of gold nuggets which you just had to pick up, that would still not pay for the expense to bring them to Earth.
Rookie mistake, you can usually make better use of those by manufacturing things in space anyway. (there's an Isaac Arthur video for everything).
Just imagine the settlement of the Americas in a world where every plank of wood had to be shipped in from the old world for the first 100 years.
Yep. But when the boats got big enough, now we can import whole fucking bridges from China.
We're really just quibbling about scale here. If enough industrial capacity gets built in space (robots probably a necessary step here) it brings the cost of operating in space down rapidly.
The question is why would humans 'prefer' to edge out into space and expand horizons for everyone.
And my point is, as stated
I look around and realize that the mindset of people who both appreciate why space is important AND have the chops to actually build the industries necessary to realize an outer space economy is incredibly rare, especially on a global scale. I'd guess a majority of humans are focused on/optimized for bare survival on the day-to-day, another huge chunk, especially in the West, are in a distracted hedonism loop, and of the remaining who might otherwise learn towards space exploration, many (half?) have been mindkilled by lefty politics, effective altruism, or some other nerd-sniping ideology or political orientation that diverts their focus.
So its simply a matter of lack of humanity's real will to do something, to sail beyond the horizon without any guarantees of what was out there, or if they'd survive or ever return.
But as stated, EVERYTHING ELSE is out there. Its pretty much self explanatory why someone would want to leave earth to check it out, unless they just felt too comfortable to be budged. But that only lasts as long as our sun does. So once again, we either get off this rock, or we die, never knowing the answers.
Okay I'm quite bullish on space exploration, but I really don't agree with this. At all. Even a little bit.
EXCEPT that the magic of internet recipes and globalization means that pretty much ANY COUNTRY'S CUISINE is available to me in at most an hour's drive in my own state! There is no such thing as food that is truly 'unique' to a single geographic area anymore!
Globohomo is a thing but this is seriously overstating the point. I'm a Malaysian who now lives in Sydney and no, the Malaysian food joints in Sydney are not the same. I have lived here for nine years, and in that span of time I have only managed to find one authentic restaurant (which I only found last week. Yes it took me nine years to find one). Not gonna lie, I nearly teared up when eating the food.
Of course, it's a single restaurant, and it serves approximately 0.001% of Malaysian dishes. There is still no substitute for going to a country and trying their food there. The amount of variety your city offers may satisfy you, but no, it isn't a representative sample of what the world has to offer.
Something that's also becoming more evident is that outside of the West, especially outside of the tourist areas... most places are just shitty to visit. Beggars, pickpockets, scammers, filth, and aggressive cultures that would see me as a mark for exploitation.
Have you... actually been to East/Southeast Asia recently? Not 50 years ago. Not even 20. Recently. I have, and this is usually not what it's like there. Hell it wasn't even like that when I grew up in Southeast Asia. Things are clean, and generally quite safe - safer than in many Western countries to be honest (look up the crime stats in a city like Beijing and compare that to say London. There's no comparison). In addition, I routinely see more homeless in Western cities than I do in Asian ones, and more insane people who just do crazy shit on the subways and streets. There's a real sense of hope that things are getting better in many Asian countries.
In contrast, many areas in the West feel like they're stagnating. My recent trip to Toronto was eye-opening - the sense of torpor was palpable, the subways were fucking falling apart with water damage and exposed wiring in a lot of areas, and homeless were so common that it was hard to walk a kilometre without encountering one of their encampments. I would much rather go home to third-world Malaysia than visit Toronto again. Really, it's funny - I used to want to leave Asia, and now I really yearn to go back.
That chart is already age-adjusted, which is the biggest factor. Red Americans probably are less healthy, but the death rates for unvaccinated people are ten times those for vaccinated. The effect isn't subtle.
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