domain:slatestarcodex.com
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
hose collaborations have laid the groundwork for both theoretical breakthroughs and practical technologies. My own research at IPAM, for instance, helped lead to the algorithms that now cut MRI scan times by a factor of up to 10.
This is indirectly related to the main culture war topics.
I despise when theoretical or "pure research" academics try to launder their work as being "practical." Even before I get into the (quick) research I did, let's parse out that last sentence.
My research ... helped ... lead to ...
How much did it help? Was it the breakthrough needed to make the tech work? Was it just a novel approach to something that already had a solution? Did the person / organization who made the MRI tech just read one of your papers?
Algorithms
Dude.
cut MRI scan times by a factor of up to 10
What was the baseline time? I believe most MRIs are between 30 - 60 minutes. I don't think they were ever 300 - 600 minutes. "Up to" means it could also be lower. Is this shaving off 15 minutes?
The quick googling I did produced these two items:
A quick patent search - Terry Tao has four, which are all versions of each other
"peOplE aRe LITeraLly DyiNG!" is what we're supposed to feel when we read Terry Tao's sob story. But they aren't.
I can more than appreciate when gigabrained pure mathematicians and physicists honestly tell us "Yeah, we're working on this bleeding edge theoretical stuff. It might unlock the secrets of the universe, but, it's not actually going to be useful day-to-day for ... a while ... or maybe ever."
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.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Sure, but I have trouble believing that picking vegetables has as much profound randomness as self-driving cars: part of the reason the latter is hard is that it encompasses a huge range of general human knowledge ("Was that a shadow of a bird or an animal running across the road? I should watch out for deer in this sort of stretch"). Even sewing a shirt (I've done it) doesn't have that wide a range of random appearances.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2d ago
@OliveTapenade said "hard", not "impossible", and even then I'm not sure that that was published as a physics paper even if it seems to have been (arguably fraudulently) funded as one.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
Affirmative action is a bad thing. One might argue that forcing universities to adjust admission rules through threats of withholding research funding is also bad. OTOH, this is something I could have seen the Obama administration doing as well if the admission rules were against their ideology.
Your last sentence is the most relevant. I'm fairly sure there are actual rules (if not statutes) under Title IV of the Civil Rights Act which disallow Federal research funding to schools which engage in racial discrimination. This is not some new thing; it's just Trump using it against schools who discriminate against whites and Asians and Jews instead of just "underrepresented minorities". 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. Of course, the Japanese didn't have any nukes, and the affirmative action people thought the Republicans didn't have any weapons either. They were wrong.
UCLA fails to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias;
"bias" seem extreme weak-sauce. Everyone is biased. Of course, sometimes biases are bad, but that would require going very much into the specifics.
I expect you'll find that "bias" here has some specific technical meaning.
The antisemitism thing is more plausible. Of course, for Nethanyahu, anyone who criticizes him is an antisemite, which is a great way to get people not to care about antisemitism.
I'm pretty sure nobody's being called an antisemite by the Department of Education for criticizing Bibi. There may be questionable cases but they won't go that far. I suspect the antisemitism thing is largely because the institutions (both universities and enforcement bureaucracies) haven't been purged of Jews nor even pro-Israeli Jews (though the latter has likely been keeping its head down at the worst places), so it gets Trump some internal support. Of course, Trump's personal connection to pro-Israeli Jews is also part of it.
Discrimination in sports? Like 73% of the NBA players being black?
UCLA is not, of course, responsible for the NBA. Trump here is referring to Title IX gender discrimination, not racial discrimination, anyway. The rules (again, not statutes -- Title IX has been extended beyond reason by rulemaking and court decisions) require as much money to be spent on women's programs as on men, so Trump is on pretty solid ground if men are taking advantage of women's programs with the university's connivance.
alsfhwe
2d 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.
What about the NIH scientists working on treatments for cancer and other diseases, and those running long-term experiments that will have to be cancelled without funding?
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?
Industry has been embraced by both sides, but doesn't seem keen to host anything "universally-beneficial" or "long-term". Providing upfront funding for decades-long experiments, especially if it's coming from grassroots organizations (since no government or industry), seems infeasible.
bolido_sentimental
2d ago
Often I understand a book differently because of the way I've changed in the intervening years. Sometimes I enjoy it much more, sometimes much less.
Also, after 10 years or so I've often forgotten much of what happened. So, for books where I remember there being some wonderful, moving scene, I can re-read it knowing I have something good in store, but not clearly remembering what it was.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2d ago
I'm just vibing based on what I read and observe
There's a snappy "X's name law" about this. Basically getting robots to do rehearsed and consistent activities (a backflip) is now "easy", somewhat independent of the complexity of the action itself.
But having them able to handle the profound randomness of life at a 99.999999% accuracy level is really really really hard (see: self driving cars).
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Silicon Valley VCs seem hugely reluctant to back hardware startups, and even then, those take longer to come to market. It's not my wheelhouse, but I feel like we've seen lots of robotics demos recently that were previously the domain of Boston Dynamics. I've assumed those were driven by machine learning and neural models, as opposed to cheap MEMS sensors that have been around at least a decade now, but I'd be curious to learn more if you have links.
Soteriologian
2d ago
He's not being thrown in prison. As fond as I am of defending free speech, free speech is not the right to receive a check from the government to subsidize your tongue.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Aren't the head "admins" typically drawn from the tenured faculty (sometimes hired across institutions)? I doubt there is a college president (or provost, or dean, or department head) out there without a doctorate. Maybe not all the mid-level admins ("Deputy Title IX Coordinator"), but those aren't intended to be steering the ship.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Snarkly: As I've heard it described, it doesn't include freedom from consequences.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2d ago
There was an automatic suspension for «quotation marks» on /r/TheMotte already, near the end of its life cycle. But manual permaban on /r/slatestarcodex preceded that.
birb_cromble
2d ago
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?
persuade them that conservatives are actively dangerous to scientific research.
That ship has sailed.
I live near a college town these days. At this point enough professors hate the right enough that they can't really hate them more than they already do. The shit they say around me after a few drinks because they think I'm "one of the good ones" is disgusting.
They've hated them at a red-lined 10/10 level since at least the Reagan administration, and nothing short of absolute capitulation from the right would mollify them.
Given all that, why bother?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2d ago
even I've been permabanned from /r/slatestarcodex of all places, because I've been too discourteous commenting on Kevin Bird's successful cancellation of the "eugenicist" Stephen Hsu
Oh, I thought you were banned for using Russian punctuation, ((saying something like this.))
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
Have you heard of this little thing called freedom of speech?
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
There is a fundamental misunderstanding between two very closely related but irreconcilable positions on the state of academia, both of which can be summarized as "it's been captured by woke and that's bad". One position is that the academics themselves are culpable because this makes them complicit in nebulous sins against the American people. The other position is that the academics forced to parrot spurious diversity statements to keep their jobs are, you know, the victims, with ideologically-captured admin as the bad guys. The second position seems trivially the correct framing to me, and wanting to punish the academics as collaborators looks about as absurd as saying you're going to topple a tyrant to liberate the people, then executing anyone who ever saluted the tyrant at gunpoint.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
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?
Observably, the medical industry seems to have been able to successfully walk back from several scandals of seemingly similar magnitude (on a logarithmic scale). The lobotomy as a procedure won a Nobel Prize in medicine. The sister of a future president had one! It had similar arguments over its ethics and efficacy, but in the end we don't do them anymore (I hear there are some rare similar procedures, with much more oversight and gatekeeping). It's largely been swept under the rug, though there wasn't zero introspection on the topic. At smaller scales I could point to "repressed memories," Freudian analysis, and such.
But it might take a decent fraction of a generation.
07mk
2d ago
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.
Many - not all, but certainly many - scientists and academics in general care about discovering the truth and thus understand that being forced to add such a line to their grants (among many, many other things) fundamentally corrupts their ability to ascertain the truth in a way that lack of funding doesn't. Funding is a real problem, but money is fungible. Principles aren't. Different people will have different lines where they're willing to betray their principles for money.
Optimistically, academia has enough people committed to truth that they transform academia from within so as to earn credibility back enough to justify public finding. Pessimistically, there are enough ideologically committed and/or unprincipled in commitment to truth that academia will choose to self-immolate. Which would be bad for everyone, but still better than pouring money into nonsense production that gets laundered as true due to inertia of pre-existing credibility. That's actively malignant to society in a way that dried up funding isn't.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
It's not where they stop as regards the world is general, but it's the only demand that's relevant to a researcher who's already got a job in academia.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
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.
Doubly so because Science™ claims to be the process by which we find "strongest ideas" generally. It's both a direct and a meta-level failure.
Throwaway05
2d ago
The "left" ran a profoundly successful multi-decade propaganda campaign to convince the entire country that racism is quite close to the worst possible sin. Obviously not everyone has bitten, but overwhelmingly the general population on the left AND right buy it. Now the left doesn't think what they are doing is racist, but a good chunk of the middle and the right do - and they've been trained to tear down people and institutions that support racism by the left.
This some combination of not accepting immoral behavior, being held to your own standards becoming a problem, and inevitable consequences of your decisions.
If someone believes that anyone who holds the belief that an ethic group is scum deserves what's coming to them and believes an ethnic group is scum....you are doing what they asked when you come for them.
Add in the meta game aspect of tanking trust for authority leading to bad outcomes in society? These people deserve what is happening to them, and more.
Corvos
2d ago
They're... otherwise occupied. And indoors.
(The jokes are usually about Wales rather than Scotland, and of course not fair in either place, but occasionally I can't resist proving the hinterlands right about how oppressed they are.)
07mk
2d ago
Signing an open letter and writing an article that attacks Trump is pretty innocuous behavior, in my opinion.
Surely the contents of the open letter would matter, wouldn't it? Would signing an open letter committing oneself to help the 4th Reich take over the United States also be pretty innocuous?
Of course, this letter isn't that. Rather, it's an open letter espousing an ideology that's specifically anti-logic, which I don't think is innocuous for a mathematician. The most innocuous and, IMHO quite likely, explanation for his behavior is that he unthinkingly followed sociopolitical pressure to sign that document. And caring so little about what he puts his signature on that he's willing to sign off on a belief system that rejects the very basis of what he's studying is at least as concerning as it is innocuous. If a bus driver was known to openly support an ideology that rejected the notion of left and right or red and green, the bus company would be justified in not considering that all that innocuous, even if the bus driver was merely doing it to look cool for his peers.
Corvos
2d 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.
More options
Context Copy link