domain:city-journal.org
ThenElection
5hr ago
Isn't UCLA's math department built on ancestral and unceded land violently stolen from the Tongva by white settler colonialists? By actually dismantling oppressive structures instead of just giving lip service, Trump is implementing the woke program.
I'm a bit more sympathetic to Tao: he lives and works in a milieu where not signing that letter would have made many of his colleagues and students (maybe even his wife) shun him; and if he didn't, he would absolutely have been hounded and targeted to to make some statement because of his stature. He still had more agency in the matter than most, but it's a mitigating factor. Do we condemn Kolmogorov?
there342
5hr ago
The Science chose to align itself with wokeness, and it put itself in the crosshairs. How many people who knew better, within this scientific infrastructure, held their tongues when we were told covid would not spread if you were protesting for racial justice? How much serious rigor goes into racial justice narratives that justify a need for more black doctors, damn the merit? Science is subject to pressures that betray its very purpose, and there seems to be no interest in stopping these threats from within. Eventually, you're going to draw attention from an outside force, when the corrupting element becomes a driving force.
With that in mind, the fact of the matter is that anyone who's pro-America and pro-"Science" just doesn't seem to have much in the way of common goals these days. 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. There's obvious value in science and all, but if they wanted America's unconditional support, they should have been more willing to bat for America themselves when they had the chance.
birb_cromble
5hr ago
I finally got a body with an appropriately specced neck pocket for my parts bass project. It's a fairly light mahogany three piece.
Now I'm on to the neck itself. I'm going back and forth between an inline four headstock or a 2+2 setup. I think I prefer the latter. Does anyone here have experience with roasted maple? The claims on stability in shifting temps and humidity sounds fantastic.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5hr ago
The write up is almost completely dishonest in its spin. Here is a copy of the report itself. Don’t consider this any kind of actual statistic, even the authors hide behind “directionally accurate” and contradict themselves within a single paragraph.
“Only 5% of custom enterprise AI tools reach production” becomes a “95% failure rate for enterprise AI systems” a paragraph later and then there’s the so-called “research note” that says “We define successfully implemented for task-specific GenAl tools as ones users or executives have remarked as causing a marked and sustained productivity and/or P&L impact”.
These three statements are not the same and occur within three successive paragraphs. I think if you read the report there are some useful broad strokes stuff but any specific claim is methodological trash.
Well of course you think that. I imagine that on the EQ and SQ tests, assessing interest in people and interest in things (linked here due to your previously stated interest in psychometric testing) you would probably be very strongly skewed towards the former. Most people here, including me, are not.
I'm personally not interested in effervescence or projection or power for power's sake, I'm interested in knowledge; I find the idea of understanding more about the universe we live in to be an inherently interesting and valiant goal, the existence of other minds not necessary. And unlike faceh I don't take it as a given that we're probably alone (and in fact think it is likely we are not). It just so happens that this lofty scientific goal dovetails well with the imperative for expansion, and hedging against X-risks.
That being said I see the study of human minds, human biology, etc as being of immense value as well. Porque no los dos? There's value in expanding one's sphere of knowledge in more than one domain at a time.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Did they have buddies with them?
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Did you pay with a credit card? Selling purchasing data by credit card companies is probably super-duper illegal but I'm pretty sure it happens.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
If I can tell it's AI I refuse to read it. I would prefer a hard ban on non-spoilered AI content and stringent restrictions on spoilered AI.
birb_cromble
5hr ago
rather than something that genuinely would be the best move for the country
professors and students who tried to make the department officially pro-Palestine, admit a bunch of diversity PhD students who aren't up to snuff, and antagonize the administration
This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research.
So to avoid politicizing scientific research, we should water down the quality of the researchers and let a bunch of activists take over the institutions, and that would genuinely be the best move for the country?
Am I reading that right?
anti_dan
5hr ago
The problem is the whole ecosystem is corrupt and tries to launder political propaganda by citing to things like Tao's work and other stuff like it. This is what happens when good people operate within a bad system, they become part of the problem.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5hr ago
The headline is almost objectively a lie. It’s completely incompatible with the stat you quoted and so I suspect they are gaming the word “failure” to mean something most people don’t consider it to mean.
ThenElection
5hr ago
If you're anticipating capex in the 13 figures, it's still surprising that large companies don't do more research on fundamentally different learning algorithms and hardware. Which isn't to say they don't (e.g. there are a couple researchers at GDM doing excellent work in neuromorphic and more brain-inspired learning), but I'd be surprised if the aggregate research spending among the big three on this (as opposed to tweaks to make transformers perform incrementally better) exceeds $1B/year. Any given research path is likely to not lead to anything, but the potential payoff is enormous.
zoink
5hr ago
This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research.
If it's paid for by taxes it's political.
thejdizzler
6hr ago
As someone in the sciences (doing my PhD at Hopkins) these cuts have hit us quite hard. The NSF has basically been dismantled, and the NIH funding system has become much more restrictive. To me, none of this makes a whole lot of sense. These grants were pennies on top of the giant stacks of dollars that the military, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security represent. Yes you get a bunch of duds, but a lot of the research funded has an extremely high ROI. I get that Trump wanted to shut down "woke" research, but he could have done that without cutting overall funding (just mandate that the NIH can't fund transgender research, shutdown the diversity grants, etc.).
This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research. Which I can't really blame the Trump administration for. It was the idiot professors and students who tried to make the department officially pro-Palestine, admit a bunch of diversity PhD students who aren't up to snuff, and antagonize the administration because they thought Trump was a fascist who started this whole thing.
So it seems to me once again a case of Trump punishing the people who tried to screw him over, rather than something that genuinely would be the best move for the country.
Supah_Schmendrick
6hr ago
as there is still a long and ugly history of nasty jewish pedophiles making use of their jewishness to evade justice.
Correct, insofar as pedos (and many other sorts of criminals) seek to flee overseas to countries without easy extradition to the US. The Saudis, for example, seem to have something of a state policy of bailing out and whisking away their nationals away from American justice.
But I strongly suspect that all of this a rounding error being blown out of proportion because of who's involved. If there are base-rate statistics showing that jews are disproportionately likely to commit sex crimes, that would clearly indicate a problem. If there are statistics showing that that jews accused of crimes have disproportionately lower rates of conviction once charged, then that's likely a problem whether or not they are abusing aaliyah as the mechanism.
Otherwise it's just chinese cardiologists.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6hr ago
· Edited 6hr ago
The main grant for IPAM is already unsuspended anyway (possibly because UCLA bent the knee).
Further, the grant DID fund DEI programs in the past, such as (from the latest annual report):
“PUNDiT: (P)racticum for (Und)ergraduates (i)n Number (T)heory” is a 2-day intensive program which will showcase number theory broadly interpreted at the introductory level. A goal of this program is to expose Southern California students traditionally underrepresented in number theory (such as women and historically marginalized minorities) to the beauty of the subject.
And as tracingwoodgrains points out, Tao already chose a side His complaints about "political directives" ring hollow.
Supah_Schmendrick
6hr ago
Because anyone can be a sensationalist?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
6hr ago
There are people who say "would" to Slaanesh daemonettes; fucking Eldar isn't even something they would blink at.
yunyun333
6hr ago
Terence Tao: I’m an award-winning mathematician. Trump just cut my funding.
In just six months, the United States has seen a wholesale assault on the scientific infrastructure that helped make it a world leader in innovation. Grants have been cancelled mid-project, fellowships for the next generation of researchers gutted, and federally funded institutes stripped of the resources they need to operate. These decisions are not the result of scientific review or Congressional debate, but of abrupt political directives that bypass long-standing norms, disrupt multi-year projects, and erode the independence of our research ecosystem.
In that time, I have seen first-hand how sustained federal investment—channeled through agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF)—powers the collaborations that link universities, government laboratories, and industry. At UCLA's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), where I now serve as Director of Special Projects, those 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 the America I chose as my adoptive home: a place where science is valued as a public good, and where researchers from around the world come to contribute their ideas and energy.
It is therefore stunning and devastating to discover that the new administration, in just its first six months, has deliberately attacked and weakened almost all the supporting pillars of this ecosystem. Executive actions have cancelled or suspended federal grants with unprecedented scale and speed, with billions of dollars worth of ongoing research projects and experiments disrupted. This is not because of a negative scientific assessment of the work, but instead by seemingly arbitrary justifications. Critical funding has been pulled for as insignificant a reason as the presence of a key word in the original proposal that is retroactively deemed unacceptable.
Federal support is, of course, a privilege, not a right; and Congress has the constitutional authority to set the budgets and rules for any expenditure of public funds and resources. But many of these executive actions have not waited for either explicit or implicit Congressional approval, and in some cases have even directly ignored past Congressional mandates for appropriations. Relative to the sheer size of the federal government as a whole, the amount allocated for supporting science is not massive. The NSF mathematics and physical sciences (MPS) directorate, for instance, is the largest of the subdivisions of the NSF, and has an annual budget of approximately $1.7 billion. This looks significant until one realizes that it amounts to about five dollars per US citizen per year, and less than a tenth of a percent of the federal budget as a whole.
He seems to be referring to how the admin took an axe to science funding by ctrl+F-ing for 'woke' dictionary terms: underrepresented, minority, diverse, etc. The problem is that the effects seem to be about indiscriminate regardless of whether you were a true believer or merely box checking. Will we see upgraded diversity science pledges in the next democrat admin? Researchers might have to carefully consider the political leanings of their funding proposals in election years.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
6hr ago
Well, one schmuck and a handful of carefully selected, credentialed experts. They had reasons for selecting the schmuck, but they didn't really expect him to deliver.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
6hr ago
Do you have any strong flashbulb memories from a fictional media experience? A video game, a book, a movie?
Flashbulb memories are memories for the circumstances in which one first learned of a surprising and consequential (or emotionally arousing) event. Hearing the news that President Kennedy had been shot is used as the prototype case. Almost everyone can remember, with almost perceptual clarity, where he was when he heard, what he was doing, who told him, what was the immediate aftermath, how he felt about it, and one or more idiosyncratic and often trivial concomitants
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
6hr ago
>space elf society starts debating the moral rights of monkes
>the alien women find monke men’s primitive ways irrationally attractive
>space elf company creates human dildos
>alien incels begin claiming that some fraction of space elf women would rather fuck a monke than an ugly space elf
>space elf women start fucking the humans
>space elf males’ sense of unearned status is irrationally compelling to human women
>women start fucking the space elves
>mfw alien interbreeding solves the fertility crisis
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7hr ago
I mean there’s a pretty big opportunity cost to things like mars colonies. I’d give a conservative estimate that it would probably cost several trillion dollars a year to build human colonies on Mars. Keeping in mind that it’s going to cost that per year as everything they need is probably coming from earth. Now if we’re spending $10 trillion a year just think of some of the other much more useful projects you could fund for that amount of money. The NHS costs about £3000 per person which is roughly $4050 per person. At ten trillion dollars, you can give everyone on planet Earth access to first world health care. Or we could give every human on earth clean water and electricity. Or work on carbon scrubbing technology to mitigate global warming. Send every child on earth to not just through K-12 but through university.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
There was no single 'invasion' of India, in any case, but control of India's europeanized human capital was part of the motive for direct British control over the subcontinent; that's why it happened after the sepoy revolt.
British culture was(and is) legitimately better at everything that matters compared to Hindoo culture; many castes performed close enough to Imperial par when properly anglicized.
Sorry I think my response was a bit confusing because I don't want to pin the blame solely on Trump for this. Universities have played with fire for a long time and somehow seem surprised to be getting burnt. I just lament that the administration seems to be cutting down the tree rather than pruning some of the worst branches. We can punish woke without destroying the research apparatus.
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