domain:ashallowalcove.substack.com
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
4d 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.
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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
4d ago
Dude, chill
Corvos
4d 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
4d 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.
thejdizzler
4d ago
Foot is hurting after running too much. Serves me right for trying to cram in the miles when I know (and have known since I was 17) that I do much better when I'm biking and swimming and holding my mileage around 60 a week. I'm just too big (which is probably a crazy statement on this forum) to run 80 miles a week without getting hurt.
WandererintheWilderness
4d 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.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
You have been warned repeatedly to stop putting words in other peoples' mouths. Especially when it comes to low-effort dismissals like this. Or like half of your comments over the last month.
Three day ban.
WandererintheWilderness
4d 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?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
4d ago
I mean I agree with you, and I'm not involved in the field of robotics.
I have seen interesting videos of robot berry pickers (Dyson has a cool experimental farm), I hope commercially viable ones are invented and scaled
I'm just commenting on what I've picked up as an interested observer of the space
The lack of massive robotic automation indicates to me it's quite hard, if it wasn't, we'd see more of it
I hope LLMs help smooth over the "fuzzy" parts that make this so hard
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
You aren't on Iwo Jima. You're on an Internet board with rules against waging the culture war.
Dial it back, please.
07mk
4d 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?
This appears to be a dilemma. We can have universally-beneficial/long-term scientific research, or we can have politicization of science, but we can't have both at the same time. And this isn't a black-or-white thing, but rather a spectrum where one trades off against the other. I don't think the politicians and ideologues can be counted on to keep their grubby fingers off the superweapon that is the credibility that comes with the label "science," and so if such research is a higher priority than politicization, then the way to accomplish this would have to be from the scientists and academics rejecting the politicization from within. The only alternative is that it doesn't get accomplished at all, and we get corrupted non-credible "research" that serves some ideology at the cost to society at large.
Thoroughlygruntled
4d ago
My personal experience is that, with the exception of a handful of autistic math and econ professors, the academics are 100% complicit. The entire history department at my major state university was made up of proud, self-professed marxists. Professors would regularly stop teaching in the middle of class to go on political rants. 80% of surveyed academics admitted to engaging in deliberate discrimination against conservatives.
I don't buy the poor, hapless academic argument. They've been happily leading the charge for the politicization of the academy for decades.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
4d ago
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.
I mean, what do you want them to say instead?
They're literally not allowed to say "yes, we are going to take your tax dollars to fund this work because it is intrinsically valuable, and our ability to carry on with this work is more important than your ability to eat at Chipotle for the 5th time this week or whatever else you were going to do with that extra $20". They think that, but they're not allowed to say it. It's not in the Overton window, it wouldn't be egalitarian, it wouldn't be democratic, etc. So they have to lie about "practical benefits" to the grant managers, and ultimately to themselves.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
I agree! And I agree that the open letter is pushing it, and I find the letter pretty obnoxious.
A few posts ago you said it was "pretty innocuous behavior".
Sunshine's post is way over the top. But it's a lot closer to the truth than "UCLA, Tao, and his colleagues did nothing wrong"
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
4d ago
Terence Tao is guilty of the same level of complicity as Havel's greengrocer - he mouths the enemy's words in order to pass the enemy's loyalty tests and prosper under enemy rule. Kolmogorov went beyond that - he testified as a witness for the prosecution at the show trial of his PhD advisor. Under ordinary western liberal ethics, that is bad. If you think that "traitors to lords and benefactors" (Dante's words for the group he selected for the very lowest circle of Hell) share the basic nature of Judas (as Dante and all the ancients did), then it is unforgiveable. A new regime that is for maths but against Communism offers Tao his job back, but not Kolmogorov. I suspect part of what is going on here is that the MAGA base is against maths as well as Communism.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d 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.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d 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
4d 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.
To prevent the academy from being used as a political weapon against oneself. Which does not require rescuing anyone.
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