The American science funding catastrophe
It’s been almost impossible to get reliable information this week, but here’s what my sources are telling me:
There is still a complete freeze on money being disbursed from the US National Science Foundation. Well, there’s total chaos in the federal government much more broadly, a lot of it more immediately consequential than the science freeze, but I’ll stick for now to my little corner of the universe.
The funding freeze has continued today, despite the fact that Trump supposedly rescinded it yesterday after a mass backlash. Basically, program directors remain in a state of confusion, paralysis, and fear. Where laws passed by Congress order them to do one thing, but the new Executive Orders seem to order the opposite, they’re simply doing nothing, waiting for clarification, and hoping to preserve their jobs.
Hopefully the funding will restart in a matter of days, after NSF and other agencies go through and cancel any expense that can be construed as DEI-related. Hopefully this will be like the short-lived Muslim travel ban of 2017: a “shock-and-awe” authoritarian diktat that thrills the base but quickly melts on contact with the reality of how our civilization works.
The alternative is painful to contemplate. If the current freeze drags on for months, tens of thousands of grad students and postdocs will no longer get stipends, and will be forced to quit. Basic science in the US will essentially grind to a halt—and even if it eventually restarts, an entire cohort of young physicists, mathematicians, and biologists will have been lost, while China and other countries race ahead in those fields.
Also, even if the funding does restart, the NSF and other federal agencies are now under an indefinite hiring freeze. If not quickly lifted, this will shrink these agencies and cripple their ability to carry out their missions.
If you voted for Trump, because you wanted to take a hammer to the woke deep state or whatever, then please understand: you may or may not have realized you were voting for this, exactly, but this is what you’ve gotten. In place of professionals who you dislike and who are sometimes systematically wrong, the American spaceship is now being piloted by drunken baboons, mashing the controls to see what happens. I hope you like the result.
Meanwhile, to anyone inside or outside the NSF who has more information about this rapidly-evolving crisis: I strongly encourage you to share whatever you know in the comments section. Or get in touch with me by email. I’ll of course respect all wishes for anonymity, and I won’t share anything without permission. But you now have a chance—some might even say an enviable chance—to put your loyalty to science and your country above your fear of a bully.
Update: By request, you can also contact me at ScottAaronson.49 on the encrypted messaging app Signal.
Another update: Maybe I should’ve expected this, but people are now sending me Signal messages to ask quantum mechanics questions or share their views on random topics! Should’ve added: I’m specifically interested in on-the-ground intel, from anyone who has it, about the current freeze in American science funding.
Yet another update: Terry Tao discusses the NSF funding crisis in terms of mean field theory.
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Comment #1 January 30th, 2025 at 9:36 pm
Yeah, NOW would actually be a great time for someone who knows him to reach out to Elon.
Comment #2 January 31st, 2025 at 3:05 am
There is no need to scramble and organize in panic. Freedom of association means that everyone who has done their minimum as a citizen is already part of several relevant established advocacy groups and knows what to do because organizations organize.
Everyone has been doing this for years locally, professionally, globally, right?
Comment #3 January 31st, 2025 at 5:51 am
Honestly, if you voted for Trump and never saw this coming you’re almost too gullible, blind, and brain-dead to even address…. and this, as Scott says, is only his little corner of the universe — what Demented Donald is doing to the entire government, country, and world is far far worse, and leading, I think inevitably, to a form of civil war — those who scoff and say that’s hyperbole are merely sitting in water about to boil flailing their arms thinking it accomplishes something. The Founding Fathers never foresaw nor planned for this unprecedented circumstance. (Kurt Godel did, but not the Founding Fathers ;))
Comment #4 January 31st, 2025 at 6:03 am
The spaceship that you are ably and energetically crewing, to many appears to be of a particular kind – the imperial Death Star.
Comment #5 January 31st, 2025 at 6:24 am
Why would anyone think that Elon Muskolini would do anything but pour more gaslight on the trumpster fire ⁉️
Comment #6 January 31st, 2025 at 7:09 am
I’m surprised that there don’t appear to be any prediction markets on this. Seems like it would be an ideal way to extract info from the inside in this situation.
Comment #7 January 31st, 2025 at 7:41 am
Mikhail #4: The National Science Foundation is part of the Death Star? What about PEPFAR (the program started by George W Bush that’s saved millions of kids from AIDS)?
“Burn everything down and hope something better emerges from the wreckage” is a strategy often associated with the radical left, but whatever it is, it certainly isn’t conservative.
Comment #8 January 31st, 2025 at 7:44 am
Playing the devil’s/libertarian’s advocate: why should the taxpayer be forced to fund opaque scientific projects that may or may not be useful, especially non-STEM fields?
Comment #9 January 31st, 2025 at 7:44 am
Jon #5: it’s true. My comment in #1 was mostly meant to be tongue-in-cheek.
Comment #10 January 31st, 2025 at 8:00 am
Anonymous #8: good question, but why restrict to non-STEM fields? Why bother funding pure math, the vast majority of which will never be “useful” to the average person? Perfectoid spaces are just never going to be used to build a rocketship. I’m a pure mathematician, and I have my own answers to that question, but I’ll leave it as an exercise.
Comment #11 January 31st, 2025 at 8:07 am
Anonymous #7: Well, does this taxpayer want the US to be the world’s superpower, or China? Do they understand that the technology that changes the world today (the Internet and generative AI are two obvious examples) grew out of the academic basic research of decades past? Do they realize that private companies, unless they have monopolies like the old Bell Labs, will almost never fund basic research adequately, simply because they can’t capture enough of the gains? These are not abstruse insights, just really basic public policy and economics—which might be why the American public actually strongly supports basic science funding in polls, even though it’s essentially never a salient election issue.
Comment #12 January 31st, 2025 at 8:10 am
Scott #7: Many of the people around Trump don’t claim to be “conservative.” The so-called new-Right is pretty explicitly anti-traditional-conservative. They think of themselves more as populists. Some of their observations (e.g. a lot of the tech that’s wormed its way into daily life–phones, social media–is making it harder for us to flourish as humans) ring true, but their prescriptions are clownish leaps across logical chasms that can’t be filled.
Comment #13 January 31st, 2025 at 9:00 am
This is silly in the same way that complaining about Brexit chaos was silly. There’s an entrenched elite trying to make changes hard, so radical change is going to be hard, because the people currently in charge of implementing it are going to be doing it wrong on purpose as sabotage. And the right reference class isn’t narrow technocratic adjustments, but revolutions; this is a remarkably clean and smooth one! You could argue that a revolution was not needed because things were going fine, or you could make specific constructive suggestions about how to do one better, but you’re doing neither.
The idea that all “basic research” is frozen is particularly jarring given how much groundbreaking work happens outside the NIH/NSF system. The Polymath projects showed how mathematical research can thrive without institutional backing. Zhang’s twin primes breakthrough came while he was working at Subway. Do you really think someone can’t explore the world, make formal inferences about it, do experiments to falsify their hypotheses, and publish their findings without a government grant?
Consider the nonsense revealed by the Reproducibility Project, itself originally an unfunded amateur effort. Major replication projects have found that only about a third of psychology studies (OSC, Science 2015) and less than half of landmark cancer biology studies (Errington et al., eLife 2021 ) successfully reproduce their key findings. Sixteen years and over $1.6B in NIH funding were wasted on Alzheimer’s research following fraudulent published results that established a false paradigm (Science, 2022). My mother’s friend died of Alzheimer’s during those lost years – how many lives could have been saved if those resources had been directed toward legitimate research? And consider the substantial probability that we just experienced a global pandemic caused by reckless gain-of-function research funded by the NIH.
The “drunken baboons” comment is both insulting and unsupported by evidence. You can do better. Especially if you’re trying to address a problem you perceive as bullying, better to stick to arguing for your perspective and for actions that would be helpful, rather than trying to hit back in the “bullying” register that doesn’t know or care about science.
Comment #14 January 31st, 2025 at 9:02 am
This is so painful to watch.
Like somebody said already (I don’t remember if it was on this board), it’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
The train is our country and we are onboard. We can only try to rush in be back, leaving our luggage behind, hoping that only the first few cars will have serious injuries, and that we can make it relatively unscathed, if losing some of our precious things we had in those luggage. If we even survive, that is.
Now, I have an (even sadder) comment. If the numbers here https://www.houstonchronicle.com/projects/2024/texas-registered-voters-trends/ are to be believed, Texas has 18M of voters, but shy of 12M casted ballots according to https://apnews.com/projects/election-results-2024/texas/?r=0 — if the about 6M who did not vote have about a even more favorable to Trump 65-35% split, those democrats who did not cast their vote could have *really* changed the course of history.
Look, I understand them, because I myself did not vote for Harris (I went for a third party), because I wanted to protest the many things that I believe she (and Biden) did wrong. But I did so only when I saw the polls in my state were strongly in her favor and that she would have carried my state hands down (which she did). If there were the slightest chance of her losing the state, I would have definitely voted for her as the least evil, despite the disagreements.
Hopefully this comes with a wake up bell for the next time, that is, assuming that our nation survives till then and that the train wreck is not so destructive as it certainly appears to be at the moment.
Comment #15 January 31st, 2025 at 9:27 am
Hi, Scott. I am a graduate student in Italy studying quantum engineering. The situation worldwide is similar and quite disappointing. Here, they have cut €173 million from education and increased the funding for politicians.
My hope is that in the future, because of this ‘strange’ trend, they will understand the importance of universities and research and they should not cut money to the us.
(I mean Italian has a strong relation with America and i think that every time something happen in america happen also in italy after 5 month).
Comment #16 January 31st, 2025 at 10:47 am
Ben Hoffman #13,
“Zhang’s twin primes breakthrough came while he was working at Subway.”
This seems mistaken. By the Quanta profile, he started working as a lecturer in 1999, long before he started thinking about twin primes (his paper is in from the early 2010s).
“Do you really think someone can’t explore the world, make formal inferences about it, do experiments to falsify their hypotheses, and publish their findings without a government grant?”
There’s a strong version and a weak version of this claim.
The weak, literal version, on an individual level, is basically correct.
The strong version says that, as a consequence of the weak version, research can survive on hobbyists. This one is very wrong for one important reason (among others): we know a lot of stuff, and the majority of which is so advanced it is hardly ever lectured about. You have to look for it by yourself. Getting to any place resembling the forefront of knowledge is a highly nontrivial task which demands a lot of quality time.
If you have an undergraduate degree, congratulations! Poincaré or Hilbert (even earlier for certain parts of mathematics, maybe a bit later for biology) could do anything you can do, and they could do it better and faster than you even if they were intoxicated. The 20th century is a long time of quickly-increasing sophistication and there is a lot to learn from resources that will, most of time, not be in your local library and cost hardly ever less than $100 (assuming they’re still in print).
And there’s the even bigger transition from the small-scale exam or textbook questions (even olympiad questions) to open research problems, which are very different from each other.
These barriers are *tremendous*, and weed out all but the brightest *and* most pig-headed of hobbyists (which is why you only find a few worldwide per generation)… and there is simply not enough of them to preserve the knowledge that we have.
Please have a look at the reference list of Zhang’s paper and those that he uses. Now go look at these references, what they start from, and what they do. There is a lot of background!
That’s for pure mathematics – for everything else, you need a well-supplied lab and a lot of specialized experimentalists, and this is usually both expensive and difficult to find.
I don’t know enough about the Polymath project to make a good comment, but I also suspect that the story is not as straightforward as you make it seem.
Comment #17 January 31st, 2025 at 11:35 am
When money is being handed out, people will line up to take it, and will even arrange their whole lives to be part of the handout. We run massive deficits, and yet no one is willing to face the reality that things that cannot go on forever must stop. As @Ben Hoffman says, there is likely a great deal of malicious compliance going on in places that are being told to stop spending, so that they will be seen as essential. Part of having “ignorant baboons” running things is that they are more resistant to those tricks that the “wise apes” fall for.
Comment #18 January 31st, 2025 at 11:35 am
Ben Hoffman #13: I can discourse for hours, on the slightest provocation, about everything that’s broken and wrong in our sclerotic, blankfaced, bureaucratic system, that needs to be fixed or improved or replaced. But consciousness of history makes me acutely aware of just how much worse things could be than they are—and also, of the fact that most revolutions have been catastrophic failures from the standpoint of human flourishing, burning everything down to satisfy nothing higher than the revolutionaries’ own vengeance, sadism, and greed. And the more complex and interconnected our civilization becomes, the greatest the danger of burning everything down, and the longer it will take to rebuild.
So I’m going to come right out and say it: I want our system to be fixed via reforms debated in Congress and implemented by smart, nerdy, conscientious experts. I don’t want a “revolution” of Executive Orders to mass-fire the people with decades of experience running the Pentagon and FBI and nuclear weapons labs and NSF and health agencies and on and on, and to replace them by partisan hacks who don’t even understand what they’re replacing.
Sure, the revolutionaries will occasionally do things I agree with—like reining in the excesses of DEI, or forcing universities to protect Jewish students from antisemitism the same way other minorities are protected (ironically, using the “woke” Title VI). When they do, I’ll be intellectually honest enough to say so.
But even well-meaning revolutionaries can cause catastrophe by swinging their axes at just a few key pillars. And far from giving any reassurance that they understand that danger or care, the current revolutionaries have spent the past two weeks simply handing out axes to the baboons.
We can go through your examples. Yes, the billions wasted on the amyloid hypothesis will go down in history as one of the worst bets in the history of medical research. Then again, libertarian mavericks haven’t cured Alzheimer’s either. No one has figured that out yet. Meanwhile, mainstream medicine actually has found much better treatments for cancer and heart arrythmia over the past few decades—should I share the stories of my older relatives whose lives were recently saved by such treatments?—not to mention the twin revolutions of GLP-1 drugs and mRNA vaccines.
Yitang Zhang’s story is an inspiration to me. Yes, he worked at Subway when he first arrived from China, and (for complicated reasons, including his failure to publish papers and his falling-out with his adviser in China) hadn’t yet made his amazing abilities legible to the American math community. But then he did get a professorship at the University of New Hampshire, where he’d been for 15 years when he proved bounded gaps in primes. He’s now a distinguished professor at UCSB. Should we ask him today whether he supports taking an axe to the academic system that he’s now part of?
Here in the US, our system actually does a pretty good job at identifying and nurturing mathematical talent, at least from age 18 onwards (K-12 education is another story entirely). If you like, we’ve rescued hundreds of Yitang Zhangs from ever having to work at Subway. That success is precisely what’s now in danger.
Anyway, I don’t remember any of this coming up during the election! And I’d settle for the American people being asked, directly, whether they want the federal government to continue investing in medical research and fundamental science—whether taking an axe to the agencies responsible for that is actually what they intended to vote for.
Thus, any further comments debating whether publicly-funded science ought to exist, whether our institutions ought to be burned down, etc. etc., are at severe risk of being left in moderation. Debating the wild-eyed revolutionaries simply isn’t my main interest in this post. My main interests, like I said, are
(1) to make the public aware of what’s actually happening and
(2) to gather more information about what’s happening.
Comment #19 January 31st, 2025 at 12:27 pm
And, unsurprisingly, the only exception to foreign aid freeze is for Israel.
Maybe the NSF should relocate there…
Comment #20 January 31st, 2025 at 12:38 pm
We are not the “wild eyed revolutionaries.” The “wild eyed revolutionaries” are the woke communists who have subverted every institution, academic, public and private. The president is doing his best to rid these institutions of anti-American communist revolutionaries.
No, these funding cuts are not permanent. He is only cutting funds until his staff can identify which money is going to the communists and the wokes. If you aren’t a woke or a communist, you have nothing to fear.
Comment #21 January 31st, 2025 at 12:46 pm
Scott #7: “The National Science Foundation is part of the Death Star?”
“OPEN FIRE!”
::8 months later::
“Your request to open fire has been rated ‘Fair’ by the panel and thus the primary laser was not fired. Please find attached 8 pages of notes by people who skimmed your proposal to open fire and wildly misinterpreted key parts of it. Also, reviewer 2 notes that your recent citation for inadequately cleaning up shed hair from a recent Wookie intrusion is a violation of current funding guidelines.”
Comment #22 January 31st, 2025 at 12:51 pm
Kyle #20:
He is only cutting funds until his staff can identify which money is going to the communists and the wokes. If you aren’t a woke or a communist, you have nothing to fear.
I’m so relieved to hear that! So, I take it you speak for the administration? And I can take my complaints to you, if this promise turns out later not to be fulfilled?
Comment #23 January 31st, 2025 at 1:00 pm
Scott:
Did you read the text of the OMB memo?
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25506186/m-25-13-temporary-pause-to-review-agency-grant-loan-and-other-financial-assistance-programs.pdf
It specifically says funding is stopped to Marxist social equity, trangenderism, climate change shit, DEI and wokeness. If you aren’t doing anything woke or communist, you literally have nothing to fear.
This is a temporary (as stated in the memo) order to root out communist, anti-American and extremist ideological subversion within our government and academic institutions. Really the only reason you could oppose this is if you have sympathies for the communists who are within our institutions.
If you are not a communist, you have nothing to fear. So don’t worry. It will be much more pleasant to work at the UT Austin without wokeness and DEI.
Comment #24 January 31st, 2025 at 1:32 pm
Kyle #23: Did you read my post? Here in the actual reality where you and I live, all federal science funding has been indefinitely paused, not just “Marxist social equity and transgenderism.” And crucially, there’s been no public communication about when the funding might resume. In such an environment, scientists can’t make any long-term plans—for example, about making offers to prospective PhD students or postdocs. There’s also been an indefinite freeze on hiring at the NSF and other agencies.
The longer this goes on, the more young scientists with options will be tempted to accept offers in other countries, or leave academic science altogether. Every day does more damage.
Does this sound to you like a surgical strike against “wokeism,” carefully minimizing any collateral damage to apolitical hard sciences, or does it sound like unleashed baboons with axes?
Comment #25 January 31st, 2025 at 1:36 pm
Kyle #23: Putting aside your modern day McCarthyism, and granting that the freeze will be temporary, the idea that a new administration can pause disbursement of *already-approved* funding based on their no-nothing ideological whims leads to changes in the way we do science in this country that are not so easily walked back. People whose experiments depend on NSF funds need certainty that, once awarded, those funds are guaranteed. Trump has shaken that belief for the first time in…the history of the NSF? It’s completely reasonable to think that this will have a terrible effect on science, lasting far longer than the freeze itself does.
Comment #26 January 31st, 2025 at 1:44 pm
The problem is that it’s virtually impossible to do a “surgical strike” against wokeism because wokeism—like Hamas—is embedded everywhere. Shoot randomly at a university and there’s a decent chance you’ll hit a woke communist. Identifying and expelling all the communists from society will not be easy. It will be very hard, and will necessitate some difficult choices in the short term. The administration’s move, while difficult for researchers, students and postdocs, among countless others who depend on government grants, is worth it in the long run, and the right thing to do. Think about President Trump’s position right now! Yes, he’s the chief executive of the federal government, but the agencies are crawling with traitors and anti-american communists who are subverting him. He needs to make some tough calls to expel these traitors and communists, to root them out. If you suffer from some of his decisions in the short term, please know that it’s for the greater good of America, to once and for all root out and destroy the communist menace.
Comment #27 January 31st, 2025 at 2:19 pm
Kyle #26, I’ve railed against wokeness for going on ten years now. I’m no fan. But I don’t think I’ve ever met a communist in all my time in academia. There are some bad actors, but the vast majority of people are perfectly reasonable, even if I don’t agree with them on some issues. So either you’re using that term to mean something else or you have an utterly warped view of reality. The internet can do that to you. Incidentally, I’m reading “Lenin’s Tomb”, about the last days of the Soviet Union. Reminds me a lot more of what we’ve been seeing with Trump than anything from previous recent administrations.
Comment #28 January 31st, 2025 at 2:24 pm
Oh, and forget about “surgical strike”. It would have been a lot more reasonable just to instruct agencies to adopt different review criteria with respect to DEI for *future* proposals. They didn’t do that. Why? Because they’re morons.
Comment #29 January 31st, 2025 at 6:10 pm
I can’t fathom how anyone could possibly be surprised that Trump is causing a mess…
Comment #30 January 31st, 2025 at 7:33 pm
The resistance has largely folded this time. Even the ‘deep state’ Orcs, who discovered WMD in Iraq, have kissed the ring and endorsed the lab leak.
Comment #31 January 31st, 2025 at 8:56 pm
There are some legitimate concerns that research production has increased a lot without a similar increase in useful results, and reasonable people can agree or disagree with that. If that was their concern I would have recommended the UK model of slowly strangling the NSF out of funds, a la NHS. It would have given the postdocs more time to switch to universities abroad or to leave academia. This is the sort of chaos one can expect out of Trump I guess.
Comment #32 January 31st, 2025 at 9:08 pm
Thanks for this timely post, Scott. Indeed, what an unprecedented shake-up to the world of STEM research!
As ever, Terry Tao’s description of matters is excellent. I hope people unfamiliar with how basic research work will take a look at his mean-field-game analogy of the current situation.
In terms of information: at least anecdotally, some upcoming conferences and workshops are seeing considerable disruption.
And to Kyle #26: your stance seems predicated on two assumptions.
Assumption 1: That there’s a coherant plan for sifting through thousands? hundreds of thousands? of already-funded science grant proposals, and determining which ones are ‘woke’ or not.
Assumption 2: That *you* will be a net beneficiary of this revolution.
Assumption 1 is not justified, simply because no such plan has been articulated. Who is going to do this sifting? Will someone be sitting there with Ctrl-F, looking through the abstracts for their favorite keywords? What keywords? And how does this map to the specialized vocabulary of disciplines?
I am old enough to remember fervent pro-life politicians in the US railing against the teaching and study of ‘evolution’; some of these good people found entire areas of mathematics which were ‘bad’. Well, no kidding – all work on dynamical systems and time-dependent PDE was about ‘evolution’ of something.
I have zero expectation the Inquisition is going to look any less silly this time around.
Assumption 2 could be more justified, perhaps you’re on the ‘in’ track. But historically, revolutions are like that very hungry caterpillar of a favorite childhood book… they’re hungry, and everyone eventually looks like dinner. In the meanwhile, what’s going on looks very, very much like intentional sabotage of your country’s scientific research enterprise.
Comment #33 January 31st, 2025 at 11:39 pm
Kyle #20: “If you aren’t a woke or a communist, you have nothing to fear.”
ANTIFA-types like to say “If you aren’t a fascist, you have nothing to fear”. But somehow nobody finds that very reassuring.
Comment #34 February 1st, 2025 at 1:05 am
Kyle #26:
> The problem is that it’s virtually impossible to do a “surgical strike” against wokeism because wokeism—like Hamas—is embedded everywhere.
I find it pretty distasteful (to say the least) to compare “wokeism” with Hamas. Are you comparing people who have points of view you disagree with with armed terrorists who rape, kill and kidnap people from their homes? It”s also a stupid analogy – “A bunch of people disagree with my view on things” is not the same as an armed group embedding itself among civilians in order to disguise themselves from enemy forces. Quite the opposite – people who support those views usually publicly *advocate* for those views, which is why you have a problem with them!
> Yes, he’s the chief executive of the federal government, but the agencies are crawling with traitors and anti-american communists who are subverting him.
Agencies are *crawling* with anti-american communists? What possible reason do you have to think this? It seems completely disconnected from reality, unless you define anti-american and communist as “anyone who disagrees with Trump one something”.
Comment #35 February 1st, 2025 at 2:35 am
President Trump invites the authors of the 2021 Report of the U.S. Community Study on the Future of Particle Physics (https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.06581):
«My brilliant uncle was a physicist. Back then, the U.S. was leading—by a lot. We had the biggest discoveries, nobody even came close. But now? We’re falling behind. We can’t let that happen! With more funding, more innovation, we can be the absolute best again. Now, you wrote the Snowmass report, right? So tell me—what’s the plan? What are the BIG, BOLD ideas to win?»
«Sir, at page 22 we plan robust strategic planning of workplace norms to address the needs of marginalised physicists subject to microaggressions: physicists communities must engage in critical race theory and social science to implement new modes of community organization.
We need more funds to maintain the highest standards of mental health for staff, and career path opportunities to everyone».
You see the problem? They politicised science and lost elections. And they are not idiots, some are good physicists. And physics is a real science, unlike some “studies”.
The messy external cure is needed because nearly nobody internally acted to avoid the politicisation of academia. Many grants have been awarded to scientists who accepted political discriminations (such as DEI statements), sexist discriminations, and racist discriminations. Others who refused to apply are working without grants. The fraction of public funds for science that is misused to fund the anti-scientific political ideology seems so big that a temporary freeze is justified. I am sorry for the troubles it causes to some innocent people, but it’s needed.
Comment #36 February 1st, 2025 at 6:34 am
Dear Scott,
Regarding our previous discussion about adding or deleting sharing buttons on WordPress, there’s a place for doing that under Tools | Marketing | Sharing Buttons. The link below may take you to the neighborhood for that and ask you to choose your site. May depend on your WP setup.
• https://wordpress.com/marketing/sharing-buttons
Aside from all the usual chatter, BlueSky does have many good pointers to information about the newly unelected shadow government known as Muskocracy in the U.S.
Comment #37 February 1st, 2025 at 8:00 am
Let me play devil’s advocate here, for entertainment value.
It’s ironic to see worries about “postdoc stipends” when the reality of Academia in America is that millions of young people are literally thrown every year into long term crippling debt in order to feed a gigantic Ponzi scheme con.
The institutions are now literal greedy hedge funds, transforming student debt into big tech and military complex speculative investments.
And then you have the tenured fat cats justifying it all with pre-industrialization and pre-computerization era ideals, doing their endless paper pushing circle jerks, with 99.99% of those papers full of mistakes or totally impractical and detached form reality… but we’re told that even if 0.001% ends up useful, it’s still all worth it!
Of course once the same tenured fat cats see some golden opportunity in the private sector, they immediately jump ship, leaving al their ideals behind…
So there’s definitely a valid point to cut the crap and leave the middle man behind, and have the private sector directly organize the training of young bright minds with stuff that actually matters, which is already the case in many sectors, but at the moment they just have to unlearn a lot of crap first and toil to pay back their long term student debt…
And, anyway, it won’t be long before AI fundamentally changes how young mind learn things.
Comment #38 February 1st, 2025 at 8:29 am
Fred #19, I think that’s what the usual antisemitic, pro-Palestinian crowed is saying. I don’t think it is correct though. The US doesn’t give any “aid” to Israel (except arm sales contracts), and I don’t think that aid for Egypt, Saudi Arabia etc. is stalled.
Comment #39 February 1st, 2025 at 8:58 am
Alessandro Strumia #35: so, blatantly breaking the law (e.g. the executive halting disbursement of payments approved by Congress) is needed because academia became too woke? Trump releasing water in California as a political stunt (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/us/trump-water-california-central-valley.html) is needed because academia became too woke? Musk–does he have an official government position anyway?–gaining access to the Treasury’s payment system, locking civil servants out, and having recent high school graduates send emails to government employees lying about buyouts is needed because academia became too woke? How about imprisoning people who voted Democrat while we’re at it. Is that also needed because academia became too woke? Do you actually think Trump has any principled commitment to free speech? He doesn’t, and neither does Musk, who artificially promotes the visibility of his own tweets and those of the people he likes. Trump, with the power of the presidency behind him, is suing news organizations for coverage he didn’t like. By the way, the wokeness epidemic had peaked and was on its way down, because, contra the nonsense that right-wing media promote, most people in academia think it had gone way too far.
Comment #40 February 1st, 2025 at 9:12 am
Fred #37: I’m not sure the stuff that “really matters” is making more AI bots and assistants whose main effects are to 1) strip of us qualities and practices that promote human flourishing, and 2) make the investors of these companies rich. Once AI leads to major breakthroughs which clearly improve human life (like cures of diseases) I’ll change my tune, but there is very little evidence that it will do this. In the meantime, I’m not so sure we should leave the training of young minds to entities whose primary missions are to make lots of money for a small number of people. I grant that there are problems in academia, including along some of the lines you mention, but the vision you paint in your devil’s advocacy is not an convincing alternative.
Comment #41 February 1st, 2025 at 10:34 am
Kyle #23: “If you aren’t a woke or a communist, you have nothing to fear.”
Scariest thing I’ve ever read on this blog.
Trump is but a symptom these people who blindly follow him are the real threat.
Comment #42 February 1st, 2025 at 11:59 am
Scott:
Why haven’t you posted about this:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/additional-measures-to-combat-anti-semitism/
You’ve made so many posts about the situation of Zionists on college campuses. If you’re fair you’ll give Trump credit for this. You post about every “bad thing” you think Trump’s done, so why don’t you post when he’s done something so big and so powerful that you strongly agree with? Come on.
Comment #43 February 1st, 2025 at 12:56 pm
John #39, the woke are part of a very serious problem. Please read the book «America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything» by C. Rufo, if you want to understand what people around Trump think and why they use the word “Marxist”. In one line, they try undoing the political takeover of academia, media, state, corporations.
Comment #44 February 1st, 2025 at 1:29 pm
Kyle #42: From this very comment section…
Sure, the revolutionaries will occasionally do things I agree with—like reining in the excesses of DEI, or forcing universities to protect Jewish students from antisemitism the same way other minorities are protected (ironically, using the “woke” Title VI). When they do, I’ll be intellectually honest enough to say so.
Normally, the purpose of political posts is to alert my readers to something I find catastrophically wrong. But, fine, I reiterate my cautious optimism that making American elite universities once again safe and welcoming for Israelis and pro-Zionist Jews, will be a tiny sliver of light amid this thunderstorm. And I’ll continue to call each issue like I see it.
Comment #45 February 1st, 2025 at 1:41 pm
Hi Scott,
The issue of “anti-semitism on college campuses” (which is genuinely a hugely important issue) was important enough to you to warrant multiple posts on your blog. You didn’t really answer my question, which is why Trump’s latest executive order, which is a huge installment in this saga, didn’t also earn a post on your blog? I can’t help but wonder whether, if Harris was president and she did something similar, you WOULD have posted about it on your blog—but in Trump’s case, your TDS is clouding your judgement and you just can’t admit that he did a good thing.
Ditto about Trump shutting down woke DEI, another dangerous communist thing you’ve talked about on your blog.
Comment #46 February 1st, 2025 at 1:57 pm
Alessandro Strumia #43: Like I’ve said here before, I’ve been railing against various aspects of “wokeism” for a decade. It’s a problem (though, as I’ve also said, it was waning on its own). I just don’t think the solution is to break fundamental structural features of our government that have kept our democracy stable over the last 250 years (with some exceptions like the Civil War)–for example, the fact that it’s the Legislative rather than the Executive branch that has power of the purse. That’s even WORSE than wokeness. For one thing, while Trumpists are riding high at the moment, you should accept that the pendulum is going to swing in the other direction at some point, unless you’re cheering the beginning of some sort of dictatorship-adjacent situation, and presumably you don’t want a future woke president halting all federal grants because they weren’t woke enough. The ends don’t justify the means. Governments who’ve thought thought otherwise have not ended up in good places, historically. We need to think in a principled way about the kind of government we want here, no matter which party happens to be in charge at any given moment.
Finally, if your goal really is to root out DEI stuff, the way Trump is going about it is almost certainly not optimal. Issuing EOs that blatantly violate laws passed by Congress and the Constitution is unnecessary and will mobilize your opposition for the long haul. As I mentioned earlier, an EO mandating an end to DEI stuff in *future* proposals would’ve met with resistance, but nothing close to the sustained animus that will result from Trump’s actions over the past several days. The fact is that Trump isn’t actually serious about almost anything. Or, to the extent that he is, he’s still more concerned with trolling and settling personal grievances. It’s dangerous to hope upon some kind of morally and intellectually-deficient star like him that it’ll lead somewhere good in the end, even if you believe your immediate interests are aligned.
Comment #47 February 1st, 2025 at 3:18 pm
Scott, have you considered that for quite a number of people the US scientific edifice (academia) is not worth saving? Not because science is bad, not because there should not _be_ an academic structure, but because the exiting edifice is rotten to the core?
I think there’s a lot of good still in the academia. But people looking from the outside in can be forgiven for thinking that the system that has easily succumbed to the worst excesses of wokism with zero visible pushback from inside does not deserve to be trusted. Or saved.
If only academia has spent 10% of the effort it spent on publicly promoting _insert a leftwing thing du jour here_ to promote what it does for society, the result would have been much different
Comment #48 February 1st, 2025 at 3:19 pm
Kyle #45: a while ago I had an issue with my hot water and boy was it a pain. If someone had come and instantly fixed it I would have been highly grateful and praised them. If someone had come and fixed it – while also ripping holes in my roof and smashing all the windows, I would…probably forget about the hot water problem pretty fast and call the police.
I’m not American, I don’t know if Trump is fixing or breaking things. I don’t much care. But your criticism seems unreasonable.
Comment #49 February 1st, 2025 at 3:39 pm
No Name #47: If I go to a hospital for cancer treatment, and the doctor says “have you considered that we could stop the cancer from spreading by putting a bullet through your skull?”—well, the issue is probably not that I haven’t considered that, per se. The issue is that I’d like to remain alive. So, if you have nothing to offer except killing me, then you and I have nothing further to say to each other, and I’ll continue looking for someone who can stop the cancer while preserving what I value in the world.
Comment #50 February 1st, 2025 at 3:47 pm
Scott:
THIS IS NOT THE END OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA.
Please, calm down with your hysteria, which does not help the situation.
Trump is very pro-science and scientist.
The thing is, Trump’s working class voters don’t want their tax dollars going to asshole ivory tower academics who call them racist and sexist. Very reasonable.
Why don’t you blame the asshole academics who call everyone sexist and racist for causing this situation in the first place?
Comment #51 February 1st, 2025 at 4:04 pm
Kyle #50: I risked my entire future pushing back against academic wokeism, a decade ago on this blog. I’ve done my part and have nothing to apologize for on that score.
As for the rest, who should I believe: you, confidently assuring me “THIS IS NOT THE END OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA”? Or commenters like No Name #47, who defend what’s happening by faux-innocently asking me, “have you considered that for quite a number of people the US scientific edifice (academia) is not worth saving?”
Comment #52 February 1st, 2025 at 4:05 pm
No Name #47 “Scott, have you considered that for quite a number of people the US scientific edifice (academia) is not worth saving?”
I’m not him, but I’m aware of that, specially among Trump supporters where there’s an anti-intellectual streak. The only thing I can say is that contrary to what seems to be common belief among them, DEI is a pretty small and relatively insignificant part of scientific research, and the benefits of the enterprise include some bread and butter stuff that is hard to miss like military and medical technologies, and I don’t think this policy was the result of a sober analysis of the costs, to put it mildly. I don’t think the intention was to punish academics, but whatever the intention, some damage has already been done, and even if things change tomorrow, as Tao commented with the mean fields thing, this will leave long lasting effects. Some marginal academics will either leave the US for other parts of the world like Europe, and more recently China, or leave academia entirely, these are for the most part pretty capable people, so most of them will eventually be ok.
Comment #53 February 1st, 2025 at 4:07 pm
Kyle #50, genuine question: do you know any of these anti-American, communist, asshole academics personally, or are you just repeating what you see on Twitter? Step 0: have a clear-eyed view of reality. You don’t.
Comment #54 February 1st, 2025 at 4:11 pm
Kyle #20: “If you aren’t a woke or a communist, you have nothing to fear.”
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Woke
And I did not speak out
Because I was not Woke
…
I am always surprised by the anger and the lack of empathy shown by some commenters. Both scary and sad.
Comment #55 February 1st, 2025 at 4:30 pm
I’m sorry, but I don’t even know what you’re referring to when you say you’ve fought woke academia ten years ago. What was this?
Comment #56 February 1st, 2025 at 4:31 pm
Scott #49 You mistake me. I am not saying go kill yourself. I am saying think about the future. This will pass one way or the other. But unless the academia changes, it might not survive the second time.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone on the street to whom you come asking for his tax money. What has he heard about academia in the last 4 years? I would argue much more negative than positive. Republicans have successfully painted universities as out-of-touch anti-american institutions. And to be fair, they didn’t really need to work that much on it. Not because this is true. But because most of the stuff that came out of the universities _and was legible to an average american_ supported this view.
My point is that if the academia-as-it-is-right-now wants to survive for long, it needs to change how the public perceives it. Otherwise if this republican administration doesn’t kill it, the next one will. Because not only universities are opposed to republicans (and are making it very clear), giving them a reason, they won’t face much blowback from the public when acting against universities, which removes the restraint
Comment #57 February 1st, 2025 at 6:40 pm
Kyle #50: “The thing is, Trump’s working class voters don’t want their tax dollars going to asshole ivory tower academics who call them racist and sexist. Very reasonable.”
Trump’s working class voters are perfectly happy for him to give tax breaks to billionaires. That tells you all you need to know about the intellectual faculties of those voters. They also call everyone to the left of Genghis Khan a woke communist, and they are all climate change deniers. Turkeys voting for Xmas are geniuses compared to your typical working class Trump voter.
Comment #58 February 1st, 2025 at 9:03 pm
Kyle,
I am obviously in favor of fighting antisemitism. But reading Trump executive order on the subject, I don’t see how much it helps, beyond adding more bureaucracy, requiring agencies to produce reports on how antisemitic activities can and should be prosecuted.
The problem with the executive order is that it seems to imply that antisemitism started on October 7th, 2023. It also implies to antisemitism is limited to Arabs attaching Jews.
This is a 1984 style attempt to redefine the word antisemitism. Antisemitism originate in European/Christian cultures. Today in the US, I am much more worried about antisemitism of white supremacist groups. The shooting at a Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 was the results of white supremacist views.
If Trump really cared about fighting antisemitism he would condemn the Charlottesville rally in 2017 instead of saying that there are “very fine people on both sides”.
If Trump really cared about fighting antisemitism he would condemn Elon Musk for his Nazi salute.
Comment #59 February 2nd, 2025 at 12:13 am
Scott, NoName is right: here is a 2024 pool finding that people who don’t vote for the left developed an unprecedented NEGATIVE opinion of higher education:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/646880/confidence-higher-education-closely-divided.aspx
I agree it’s like curing a cancer, and that most of the body currently is sane (I know that many physicists keep doing good work and silently disagree with the politicisation). But various institutions have been captured from the top at institutional level by a politics that views science as a form of power. Institutions that were built to help science, now censor and embarrass science.
I think that so far Trump tried acting surgically. Good people inside know where the cancer is and could fight to remove it. If these institutions cannot be recovered, then one should expect that the next action will be the easy one: unrecoverable institutions depend on public subsidies. Let a few big names go.
Comment #60 February 2nd, 2025 at 6:11 am
Kyle #55:
I’m sorry, but I don’t even know what you’re referring to when you say you’ve fought woke academia ten years ago. What was this?
If you really don’t know, you could start with Conor Friedersdorf’s Atlantic article The Blog Comment that Achieved an Internet Miracle. Or Scott Alexander’s Untitled—possibly the most famous article he wrote, before he deservedly became much more famous than I am for all sorts of things.
You’ll see that in my life, I’ve stood up to left-wing bullies, who said (in effect) “bow to our narrative or you’ll never do science again.”
Today, if necessary, I’ll stand up to right-wing bullies who say “bow to our narrative or you’ll never do science again.”
I want great science to be done, by people who feel free to disagree with each other politically. And I’m never more certain I’m in the right than when I’m standing up to obvious bullies.
Comment #61 February 2nd, 2025 at 7:53 am
I don’t agree that this was a surgical attempt by the administration. It seems more like the usual one-chaos is good and the collateral damage is useful. If it were a “surgical” attempt, the agencies would be told to halt all DEI aspects in all grants going forward. This would basically accomplish the same thing and money differential is almost nothing.
Another aspect here that has gone undiscussed is that it isn’t just DEI-presumably it is also things related to climate. Say what you want about DEI-but the idea that someone’s outreach teaching about the physics of solar cells once a year to a local school could put them in the crosshairs of this memo’s scope seems quite alarming.
Comment #62 February 2nd, 2025 at 8:26 am
I just read “Untitled.” Wow. People were truly horrible to you. I’m sorry you had to go through that.
Reading that has made me even more confused that you continue to stand up for these woke and leftist people.
Is there, or was there, no part of you that wanted to “burn it all down” just to spite them? Is there no part of you that is excited and gleeful about Trump “sticking it to the libs?” I feel like either of those reactions would be healthier than becoming apologetic and spineless about it, which it appears to me is what you’ve done.
Comment #63 February 2nd, 2025 at 8:49 am
Kyle #62:
Is there, or was there, no part of you that wanted to “burn it all down” just to spite them?
Of course there’s a part of me that wants that. There’s also a part of most heterosexual men that wants to throw down and conquer and impregnate every pretty young girl who walks past. There’s a part of most people that wants to stab everyone who’s ever wronged them (even just cut them off in traffic), till they’re all lying in a huge pool of blood.
Being a decent person is all about controlling the various parts of yourself, forcing them through a gauntlet of reason and empathy before they’re able to affect the outside world. This isn’t liberal or conservative—or at least it’s not supposed to be. It’s what various religious and philosophical traditions have taught for millennia.
I’m hardly perfect, but at least I understand this much. And because I do, I recoil from those on the far left or the far right who believe they’ve discovered some ideology that lets them indulge their basest impulses with a clean conscience.
Comment #64 February 2nd, 2025 at 9:17 am
Sorry, but I wouldn’t say becoming a decent person is **all about** suppressing and controlling parts of yourself and your feelings. That’s part of it. But your perspective—being decent is all about repression—sounds like a recipe for becoming repressed and frustrated (and letting people walk all over you). There’s nothing wrong with wanting to fuck pretty young girls, for example.
Obviously you should check your feelings at their most extreme. I think we fundamentally differ, though, onwhat the spectrum of indulging violent or hateful feelings looks like. On one side of this spectrum (hatred of leftists) is doing nothing. On the other side is something like identifying and rounding up all the leftists and putting them in prison camps, or shooting them, or disappearing them into secret torture prisons. There’s a **part** of me that would be thrilled by that, because I hate leftism so much, and I think that’s true of most Trump supporters. But we haven’t and will never do anything remotely even approaching that, because we are restrained and we realize how horrible and what an infringement on our principles that would represent. The fact that nothing of the sort is happening is testament to the restraint of the Trump movement. What HAS happened is far, far closer to the first side of the spectrum than the second. People getting fired, grants getting held up, banning pronouns from being used in government? That’s nothing approaching what would happen if rightists unleashed their violent urges or indulged their darker fantasies. We used the democratic process, our president is obeying court orders, etc. If Trumpers indulged their darkest feelings, things would be very different.
Comment #65 February 2nd, 2025 at 10:03 am
My point is that if the academia-as-it-is-right-now wants to survive for long, it needs to change how the public perceives it.
This reads a lot to me like “if the kulaks-as-they-are-right-now want to survive for long, they need to change how the public perceives them.”
Comment #66 February 2nd, 2025 at 10:28 am
Kyle #64: holding up grants and banning pronouns is not the only thing that’s happening. That was three days ago man, catch up! At this point, I’m more worried about a constitutional crisis in which the Supreme Court rules that the Trump administration has violated the law, and Trump’s response is “nah.” Also, moving past some of our darker adolescent fantasies and other anti-social behaviors doesn’t have to be repression. That’s not remotely how it feels to me, at least, I can’t speak for you. It’s largely just growing up. Some people never do. And those people are overrepresented in Trump supporters.
Comment #67 February 2nd, 2025 at 10:54 am
Reflecting on it, yeah, Scott, I think you’re basically right. I love that Trump’s an asshole, and that he gives me the moral license to be an asshole too, to say and do what I want even if it offends somebody else. America was founded by assholes. Assholeness is an intrinsic part of what it means to be American. Not letting anybody tell you what to do. Telling other people to fuck off. I’m naturally very distrustful of other people already. I find most other people annoying and stupid, and I don’t care all that much about other people. I can’t fucking stand it when other people tell me what to do and condescend to me. “Put on a mask, use the recycling, don’t drive an SUV, get vaccinated, don’t make offensive jokes, don’t talk to girls, don’t waste food, donate to charity, feel bad about being white and male, PAY THESE STUPID TAXES every year so we can give your hard-earned money to some fuckers you don’t even know and don’t care about” and so on and so on. I already barely tolerate other people, and I can’t stand them telling me what to do and what to say. I’m glad Trump gives me permission to be an asshole and not to feel bad about being selfish, uncaring, stubborn, saying what’s on my mind. Now I can say and do whatever I want and not feel bad about it. That’s the American way. I’m done with liberals and communists telling me what to do and how to behave.
Comment #68 February 2nd, 2025 at 11:09 am
With the federal freeze stayed by the courts, why is NSF leadership still freezing funds? Is their strategy to create as much pain as possible and blame it on the stayed orders, to build stronger and more vocal support?
If so, that strategy is causing as much harm in service to itself as the original executive order would be causing.
If someone is pointing a flame thrower at your lawn, and the police and fire department show up to stop them, it feels irresponsible to then bring out your own flame thrower and point it at your lawn because the other person is planning on doing that later anyway if nobody stops them.
Comment #69 February 2nd, 2025 at 11:30 am
Kyle wrote:
“What HAS happened is far, far closer to the first side of the spectrum than the second. People getting fired, grants getting held up, banning pronouns from being used in government?”
Are you really saying that it is OK to fire someone for being a leftist or woke? What about the first amendment? Don’t people have the rights to have their own political opinions?
I consider myself a leftist and a woke. I’m not in academy, but I do have a job. Would it be OK to fire me for my political opinions?
Personally, as a woke person, I believe that people are entitled to their own opinion and should not be fired for being a liberal or a conservative.
But if, because of your political views you think that transgenders are bad and you start bullying transgender people at your work place, than yes, I think that could be a reason to fire you.
Comment #70 February 2nd, 2025 at 11:57 am
Kyle #50 “On the other side is something like identifying and rounding up all the leftists and putting them in prison camps, or shooting them, or disappearing them into secret torture prisons.(…) we haven’t and will never do (…). If Trumpers indulged their darkest feelings, things would be very different.”.
“I refused to achieve an overwhelming victory, and I could have done so. I imposed limits on myself. I told myself that the greatest wisdom is the one that does not abandon us after victory.
With 300,000 young men fully armed, determined to do anything, and almost mystically ready to follow my command, I could have punished all those who defamed and attempted to tarnish Fascism. I could have turned this deaf and gray Chamber into a bivouac for my squads; I could have shut down Parliament and formed a government composed exclusively of fascists.
I could have: but, at least for now, I have not wanted to.”
Benito Mussolini’s speech to the Italian Parliament on January 3, 1925.
We all know how it played out, don’t we?
Comment #71 February 2nd, 2025 at 12:01 pm
Kyle #67: I appreciate the honesty (“please speak directly into the microphone”), but I take issue with one thing you said:
America was founded by assholes.
Jefferson possibly, but Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Franklin, etc were all huge on duty and restraint and the common good. Don’t kid yourself that any of them were assholes the way you’re an asshole.
Comment #72 February 2nd, 2025 at 12:01 pm
@Scott P #65 I was making a descriptive and not a normative observation.
Consider this. The academia is apparently very dependent on the government support. In exchange it promises to do basic research that would not otherwise be done by private corporations. I completely agree with this and think that it is worth it. But then I have been on the inside and understand how the system works.
But also consider someone who is not plugged into the system and knows about it from the news alone. So what were the top news about academia in the last couple years?
I would claim that those are:
Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard lawsuit (neither discovery nor decision have reflected well on the academia’s approach to “equality”).
The student protests after October 7th (which were _not_ limited to protesting Israel, involved quite a bit of property damage and saw protestors protected by the faculty).
And the student loan forgiveness saga (aka colleges charge so much that people can’t pay off their debts… and so everybody has to pitch in)
I can’t think of any positive news of a similar magnitude that came out recently
Add to this “there are 26 genders and you have to declare your pronouns” and the rhetoric similar to JanSteen #57.
I think that a lot of people could be forgiven for deciding that the current bargain with the academia has to be revisited. Note that I do not support Trump’s blunt methods and think he overreached here and in other places. I am trying to explain why you need to find a way to explain to the voters why academia must be saved other than by telling them that they are all idiots.
Comment #73 February 2nd, 2025 at 12:06 pm
Circle the wagons and fire #68: While (as I said) it’s hard to get reliable information, my impression is that people at the grant agencies want assurance that if they continue doing their jobs, they won’t get fired because some currently-funded math or physics proposal from back when they all contained pro forma DEI language, did indeed (shocker!) contain that pro forma language.
Comment #74 February 2nd, 2025 at 12:07 pm
I too thank Kyle #67 for his honesty, as I now feel liberated to ignore everything he writes from this point on. Scott #70: awesome response.
Comment #75 February 2nd, 2025 at 12:15 pm
Scott #73: that’s my understanding as well. It’s tough because people need to stand up in order to stop what’s going on. On the other hand, if they do they can just be replaced by people more willing to go along with Trump. It a conundrum. What I’d like to see is more non-cooperation on the part of, e.g., US Marshalls, where, when Musk orders them to remove USAID staff preventing their access to classified info (note that none of Musk’s people have clearances), they refuse to comply until the legality of Musk’s/Trump’s demands has been clarified.
Comment #76 February 2nd, 2025 at 12:21 pm
Circle the wagons #68: please check the NSF website, they’ve announced the payments are not frozen any more (as of 12 pm in the right time zone).
These payment systems or their tech stack are certainly built shoddily (because good contractors are expensive, and no one likes wasting taxpayer money on something so trivial, if my foreign experience is any guide) and not designed to withstand brutal deviations from the normal. Checking that the system was ready for deployment again was likely to require work from someone who’d rather enjoy their week-end.
Comment #77 February 2nd, 2025 at 12:35 pm
Kyle #67, here are two profiles.
Profile #1: An extremely talented computer scientist who hosts a blog, and for years engages both honestly and earnestly with intellectual arguments from across the spectrum under his own name. He is the target of extreme vitriol – repeatedly – from both crazy people on the left and on the right. For years. And yet he continues to stand up for Enlightenment values, open science and honest inquiry, letting neither vile commentary nor creative death threats stop him.
Profile #2: An anonymous commentator, likely young, male and underemployed, who needed Trump to grant him moral licence to be an asshole.
Profile #1 is a profile in courage.
Profile #2 is, well, a sorry cliche or stereotype. It’s almost like you were dreamt up as an outsize bogeyman by the very ‘wokeists’ you deride. Your need for the much-caricatured ‘leftists and wokeists’ as a target for your energy is rivalled only by their need for you.
May I recommend, instead, a couple of excellent diversions? They may provide a more productive outlet for your energies.
A fun course on structural dynamics and acoustics:
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/2-067-advanced-structural-dynamics-and-acoustics-13-811-spring-2004/
and of course
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mas-865j-quantum-information-science-spring-2006/
Comment #78 February 2nd, 2025 at 2:33 pm
Scott,
Don’t kid yourself that you’re not like me. I read your “museums and blankfaces” series. You, too, view many of your fellow humans as annoying, nasty, horrible, stupid. Low-level employees you have to interact with are “blankfaces,” condescending annoying power-tripping rules-enforcing scolds. You see the “blankfaces” everywhere. You hate them. And you’re right! They are everywhere, and they are horrible. I hate them and I loathe them and I revel in breaking their rules and making them upset. I’m sure you do too! The thing is, I’m honest enough to admit it. I’m honest enough to admit that I’m a jaded asshole who hates his fellow man.
Comment #79 February 2nd, 2025 at 3:46 pm
“I hate them and I loathe them and I revel in breaking their rules and making them upset. I’m sure you do too! The thing is, I’m honest enough to admit it. I’m honest enough to admit that I’m a jaded asshole who hates his fellow man.”
The problem here is that you don’t realize the slippery slope. I think Scott has admitted that, yes, at times he is filled with anger. But this is just human. The Woke also hate you. Societal decay occurs where there are 2 sides that continue to make each other more angry and more extreme. This isn’t a new thing-it has occurred over and over again in history. In Germany before 1933 the center was hollowed out and the remaining battle was between the Communists and the Nazis. Before that the Mensheviks were pushed aside, and the battle was between the more extreme Reds and Whites, etc. That is what is happening here. To be a rationalist you need to identify what is right and wrong rationally, not by your anger. There is a difference.
Comment #80 February 2nd, 2025 at 3:49 pm
Random mathematician #76, sorry but the OMD freeze was stayed before it was set to take effect on Tuesday. Not only did NSF freeze existing funds anyway, but they appear to have also cancelled any Tuesday transactions that had been submitted before they froze things. Your seemingly fantasized excuses for the delay in restoring payments, without even telling researchers that the restoring of payment was in progress, seems like just you making justifications for other people out of the blue. Circle the Wagons seems like they might be on to a reason why NSF behaved as they did.
Comment #81 February 2nd, 2025 at 4:07 pm
Kyle #78: The difference is that I never, ever let go of the primacy of the individual. Every single person working at a museum has an opportunity to be a non-blankface, just like every single person living under a murderous dictatorship has an opportunity to refuse to support it. As long as the individual is your North Star, you’ll never find yourself herding a whole trainload of people into a gas chamber, or marching them into a forest to be shot. You’re safe from the worst atrocities of which humans are capable.
Comment #82 February 2nd, 2025 at 4:16 pm
Seems to be some confusion about what the NSF is doing as of now. I am still sort of confused. For anyone interested-here is what was sent out to grantees as of an hour or so ago:
MESSAGE to the NSF PI Community,
On Friday, January 31, 2025, a Federal Court issued a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) directing Federal grant-making agencies, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), to “…not pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate… awards and obligations to provide federal financial assistance to the States, and… not impede the States’ access to such awards and obligations, except on the basis of the applicable authorizing statutes, regulations, and terms.” Although the language of the TRO is directed at State institutions, the Department of Justice has determined that it applies to all NSF award recipients. You can review the TRO here.
In order to comply with the TRO, the NSF Award Cash Management Service (ACM$) system is available for awardees to request payments as of 12:00pm EST, February 2, 2025.
This message is also available on the Executive Order Implementation webpage. Please check back regularly as we add frequently asked questions (FAQs) based on community feedback.
Sethuraman Panchanathan
Director
Comment #83 February 2nd, 2025 at 4:36 pm
Fred #80:
I’ll admit that I’m about 6000 km from where all this drama is happening, and that I do not have any inside information nor a direct stake (except insofar as the US seems like one of the best places to take a tenure-track or tenured faculty position).
However, as Terence Tao points out in the thread linked by our host, the administration’s messaging was confusing (the executive order was stayed, then someone else claimed it was not). As per the NSF website, the court order’s demand for them to unfreeze payments is dated Friday.
I’m also not making justifications, simply suggesting a chain of events that I deem more plausible than Circling the Wagons’ explanation.
I think that a combination of
1) “so is that order stayed or not?” (see the Terence Tao thread),
2) “oh crap are we going to get all hauled in front of Reed O’Connor because all grant proposals of the past 5 years for which we go in paying money have a DEI paragraph?”, (and the induced frantic panic while the lawyers try to assess their exposure and could suggest to comply with the orders in order to show good faith, just in case) – which our host has alluded to,
3) the payments system being bad and only designed for an ordinary course of operations,
is sufficient to explain the NSF’s behavior without positing a political game.
Comment #84 February 2nd, 2025 at 10:56 pm
Very helpful timeline of the Musk Coup from Mercedes Schneider —
https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2025/02/02/unelected-billionaire-elon-musk-now-has-unprecedented-access-to-federal-data-systems/
Comment #85 February 3rd, 2025 at 5:26 pm
Update on the Musk Coup from Mercedes Schneider
• https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2025/02/03/wired-the-young-inexperienced-engineers-aiding-elon-musks-government-takeover/
Comment #86 February 3rd, 2025 at 10:28 pm
Here is a good piece about DOGE (Dangerous Oligarchs Grab Everything) getting control of the US treasury payments system.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02/tankus-kelton-on-musks-doge-seizing-the-treasurys-payments-chokepoint-where-are-the-lawyers.html
Comment #87 February 4th, 2025 at 7:48 am
Helpful Overview and Analysis from Heather Cox Richardson
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-3-2025
Comment #88 February 4th, 2025 at 11:41 am
Mr. Aaronson, I’m more interested in your writing style. Do you have a blog post on how you became such a lucid writer?
Comment #89 February 4th, 2025 at 5:26 pm
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/what-s-happening-inside-nih
What’s happening inside the NIH and NSF. “This is a long post, and it just keeps getting longer although I keep removing curse words. If you only have time for some of it, see Part Two and Part Six.”
Comment #90 February 4th, 2025 at 9:26 pm
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/04/science-funding-agency-layoffs-threat-00202426
This might be hearsay, but the fear of drastic impact is getting very real.
Comment #91 February 5th, 2025 at 6:00 am
Updates on the Musk Coup from Heather Cox Richardson
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-4-2025
What we have here is a massive data breach and criminal sabotage at the highest levels of government, 1000 times more serious than the Watergate Break‑In and that Guy Who Kept Boxes and Boxes of Top Secret Classified Documents in His Bathroom combined. There needs to be a Congressional Investigation commensurate with the depth and scope of the threat to public safety and national security.
Comment #92 February 5th, 2025 at 8:05 am
Nothing surprising, really, given that Musk doesn’t believe much in the value of a college education.
“Elon Musk Thinks ‘College Is Basically For Fun And To Prove That You Can Do Your Chores’ — Says Degree Requirements Are ‘Absurd'”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-thinks-college-basically-182424787.html
At least Trump created the Trump University :_D
Comment #93 February 6th, 2025 at 5:48 am
Update and Background on the Musk/Trump Coup from Heather Cox Richardson
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-5-2025
❝Today journalist Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich noted that a thinker popular with the technological elite in 2022 laid out a plan to gut the U.S. government and replace it with a dictatorship. This would be a “reboot” of the country, Curtis Yarvin wrote, and it would require a “full power start,” a reference to restarting a stalled starship by jumping to full power, which risks destroying the ship.❞
Comment #94 February 7th, 2025 at 6:56 am
Continuing Updates on Disinformation Nation from Heather Cox Richardson
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-6-2025
❝Yesterday, a White House order signed by Trump required the Central Intelligence Agency to send over an unclassified email listing all the employees hired in the past two years. David Sanger and Julian Barnes of the New York Times reported that the list included the first names and first initial of the last name of those hires, including “a large crop of young analysts and operatives who were hired specifically to focus on China, and whose identities are usually closely guarded because Chinese hackers are constantly seeking to identify them.”
❝The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, called the sharing of the information over unsecured channels “a disastrous national security development,” adding: “Exposing the identities of officials who do extremely sensitive work would put a direct target on their backs for China.”❞
Who would’ve guessed the guy who kept boxes and boxes of top secret classified documents in his bathroom would open a hacker’s firesale in the nation’s most sensitive data archives?
And so it goes …
Comment #95 February 21st, 2025 at 10:48 am
Scott Aaronson #13:
There’s no credible evidence that reform without revolution is even possible. “Reforms debated in Congress and implemented by smart, nerdy, conscientious experts” sounds great – but where’s the plan to make this happen?
The current system doesn’t just fund some approaches over others – it defines what counts as “science” in ways that actively suppress alternatives. Peter Higgs himself said he wouldn’t be hireable in today’s academic environment because he wouldn’t be “productive enough.” Sabine Hossenfelder found herself pushed out for maintaining her integrity. And we never hear from the talented people who look at academic incentives and choose other paths entirely.
When you say “libertarian mavericks haven’t cured Alzheimer’s either,” you’re ignoring how the system systematically excludes and suppresses alternatives. It doesn’t just fail to fund different approaches – it taxes everyone to fund institutional research, uses state control of education as a recruitment funnel, and subjects captured talent to incentives demonstrably opposed to truth-seeking (as shown by the replication crisis and Alzheimer’s fraud). Then it uses its capture of the “science” brand to dismiss alternatives.
I’m not arguing these specific changes are good. I didn’t vote for Trump and I’m worried about the erosion of what’s left of state capacity. But it’s bizarre to conflate NSF funding with science itself – a conflation that seems better suited to propping up institutional entitlement than to figuring out how to advance human knowledge. And likewise silly to treat criticism of that distorted story as support for Trump. If you want to argue against these changes, and you can’t refute these serious problems, suggest better ways to do it that are actually feasible – no fairy tales about a functional Congress unless you have a way to make that happen. “If you’re against us, you’re not with us” denies the basic premise of science and rational discourse.
Comment #96 February 24th, 2025 at 11:26 am
Kyle:
Communist ideology is a spent force. Even China is organized along capitalist oligarchic lines. Woke has over-reached even on its home turf. To target woke communism is to pick a weak opponent and thus announce one’s own weakness.
I submit that MAGA Trumpism is many times more dangerous to liberty, security, and prosperity than Communism is now, or woke will ever be.
Comment #97 February 26th, 2025 at 1:16 am
The US science funding catastrophe is chaos at the National Science Foundation. Frozen funds paralyze research, threatening thousands of grad students and postdocs who may abandon careers. American science could stall, giving China an edge. The author angrily depicts “drunken baboons” at the helm, urging info and loyalty to science. A temporary shock or lasting crisis? I hope for a swift resolution—science doesn’t deserve this.
Comment #98 March 5th, 2025 at 11:04 am
(Sorry, the video is in french)
a debate on French radio about the cancellation of science in the US… even there scientists (all in disbelief) are raising the alarm.. US scientists are being bullied, forced to not communicate with foreign colleagues, fired… in what is called an Orwellian nightmare… and in the meantime Vance gives Europe lessons on free speech and values.
Comment #99 March 14th, 2025 at 9:12 pm
I particularly liked this by Kyle:
> Trump is very pro-science and scientist.
Comrade Stalin was the greatest scientist ever, according to the contemporary Soviet press, and as he declared himself to be a scientist. Needless to say, repressions against not Marxist enough, or not loyal enough (often merely by having a suspicious ethnicity), Soviet academics increased many-fold at that period in USSR.
Well, I can’t rule out Kyle using manuals supplied by Putin’s FSB in his trolling here. Note that Putin lately claimed to be a scientist too, a historian, trying to prove, e.g., that Ukraine does not exist, and never existed as a nation…