“If you’re not a woke communist, you have nothing to fear,” they claimed
Part of me feels bad not to have written for weeks about quantum error-correction or BQP or QMA or even the new Austin-based startup that launched a “quantum computing dating app” (which, before anyone asks, is 100% as gimmicky and pointless as it sounds).
But the truth is that, even if you cared narrowly about quantum computing, there would be no bigger story right now than the fate of American science as a whole, which for the past couple weeks has had a knife to its throat.
Last week, after I blogged about the freeze in all American federal science funding (which has since been lifted by a judge’s order), a Trump-supporting commenter named Kyle had this to say:
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.
Read that one more time: “If you aren’t woke or a communist, you have nothing to fear.”
Can you predict what happened barely a week later? Science magazine now reports that the Trump/Musk/DOGE administration is planning to cut the National Science Foundation’s annual budget from $9 billion to only $3 billion (Biden, by contrast, had proposed an increase to $10 billion). Other brilliant ideas under discussion, according to the article, are to use AI to evaluate the grant proposals (!), and to shift the little NSF funding that remains from universities to private companies.
To be clear: in the United States, NSF is the only government agency whose central mission is curiosity-driven basic research—not that other agencies like DOE or NIH or NOAA, which also fund basic research, are safe from the chopping block either.
Maybe Congress, where support for basic science has long been bipartisan, will at some point grow some balls and push back on this. If not, though: does anyone seriously believe that you can cut the NSF’s budget by two-thirds while targeting only “woke communism”? That this won’t decimate the global preeminence of American universities in math, physics, computer science, astronomy, genetics, neuroscience, and more—preeminence that took a century to build?
Or does anyone think that I, for example, am a “woke communist”? I, the old-fashioned Enlightenment liberal who repeatedly risked his reputation to criticize “woke communism,” who the “woke communists” denounced when they noticed him at all, and who narrowly survived a major woke cancellation attempt a decade ago? Alas, I doubt any of that will save me: I presumably won’t be able to get NSF grants either under this new regime. Nor will my hundreds of brilliant academic colleagues, who’ve done what they can to make sure the center of quantum computing research remains in America rather than China or anywhere else.
I of course have no hope that the “Kyles” of the world will ever apologize to me for their prediction, their promise, being so dramatically wrong. But here’s my plea to Elon Musk, J. D. Vance, Joe Lonsdale, Curtis Yarvin, the DOGE boys, and all the readers of this blog who are connected to their circle: please prove me wrong, and prove Kyle right.
Please preserve and increase the NSF’s budget, after you’ve cleansed it of “woke communism” as you see fit. For all I care, add a line item to the budget for studying how to build rockets that are even bigger, louder, and more phallic.
But if you won’t save the NSF and the other basic research agencies—well hey, you’re the ones who now control the world’s nuclear-armed superpower, not me. But don’t you dare bullshit me about how you did all this so that merit-based science could once again flourish, like in the days of Newton and Gauss, finally free from meddling bureaucrats and woke diversity hires. You’d then just be another in history’s endless litany of conquering bullies, destroying what they can’t understand, no more interesting than all the previous bullies.
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Comment #1 February 8th, 2025 at 2:10 pm
Hi Scott,
Happy to have a dialogue about this issue.
Are you willing to talk to me about it here?
I just worry that you will delete my comments if you disagree with them. If you don’t delete my comments, I’m happy to talk about this issue.
Because you mentioned me by name in this post, I think you owe it to me to “hear me out” in the comments.
Thanks.
Comment #2 February 8th, 2025 at 2:25 pm
Amen. Keep it up Scott.
Comment #3 February 8th, 2025 at 2:28 pm
Kyle #1: Say whatever you have to say in your defense. But I’m not interested in a whole story, just whether or not you support this gutting of the NSF, and whether or not you admit that your assurance to me was wrong.
Comment #4 February 8th, 2025 at 2:33 pm
1. Yes, I admit that my initial assurance may have been wrong (contingent on whether this reporting at Science, a politically biased magazine, is correct, and whether they are actually serious about cutting NSF funding).
2. Yes, reflecting on it, I do support slashing NSF funding.
Can I expand on 2 please?
Thanks
Comment #5 February 8th, 2025 at 2:43 pm
Isn’t this funding determined by Congress and not the executive? Most likely this will be met with another lawsuit and injunction tying it up in the courts until Trump either decides to ignore them or the SC expands its theory of the unitary executive to include congressional power of the purse too.
Comment #6 February 8th, 2025 at 3:02 pm
Have you considered that all this is the actual goal? To make America crumble? At what point will you consider that these people are trolling you and wasting your time?
Comment #7 February 8th, 2025 at 3:04 pm
Look, I’ll admit my initial assessment was wrong—I didn’t expect them to cut NSF.
At the same time, I’m happy—even gleeful—about the cuts.
Let me give you a few points, about my experience in science, to articulate why.
1. I was pursuing a degree in a STEM field (one of math, computer science, physics, microbiology—I’d rather not say exactly what to remain anonymous). I was kicked out of my university in my third year because I refused the experimental COVID jab. My academic career was ruined. These assholes ruined my life because I wouldn’t submit to their experimental modification of my body.
2. Nobody cares that I was unjustly kicked out of university for being unvaccinated, including you. Unlike the alleged “victims” of sexism or racism in academia, the unvaccinated who had their careers ruined have no advocates, no seminars, no support from anyone in the institutions. We are forgotten, and viewed with contempt and ridicule.
3. Most of the professors I knew in my program were pretentious assholes who mocked and belittled unvaccinated people and Trump supporters. Yes, during COVID I had to endure mockery and cruelty for being unvaccinated—I deserve to die of COVID, I’m a piece of shit, people like me deserve to die, we’re “plague rats”—from cable news and reddit and, yes, from students and faculty at my university. And Trump supporters are stupid rubes who eat horse dewormer and we’re all sexist and racist.
4. Most college professors are arrogant condescending assholes who hate half the country.
5. Even before COVID, I knew some professors who were douchebags and condescending. I went to an event once and basically none of them would talk to me. They were seriously unfriendly.
6. The other people in my program were all authoritarian Democrats and woke and nasty to me and they thought everything is racist and sexist. And I hate them.
7. I was so lonely and couldn’t find a girlfriend in college. Meanwhile everyone around me was having sex and partying. The girls were so mean to me. They treated me like shit and wouldn’t even talk to me, while they’d fuck some rapper or some other degenerate. My university was a pit of filth and degeneracy and a miserable lonely place full of unfulfilled lust and brutality. I hated that place. I’d be glad to see if burn. I’d be glad to see every university in America burn. I hate them. Pulling research grants will kill them, which is a good thing.
8. Yes, having read some of your posts about COVID, you supported vaccine mandates, which effectively makes you a woke communist (only an authoritarian government, whose ideology is based on “collective well-being” over individual liberties—i.e., “spiritually communist”—would mandate an experimental vaccine).
Comment #8 February 8th, 2025 at 3:20 pm
I just came here to comment “First they came for the woke communists” but reading #7, I must say that I don’t think that you should allow comments on this blog that can be interpreted as supporting/calling for violence. (I mean the part about wishing universities to burn.)
Comment #9 February 8th, 2025 at 3:24 pm
Kyle, what I’m getting from your comment sounds mostly like “I couldn’t get any dates in college and so I want to see the world burn”.
It’s not a very convincing argument in your favor, and you come across as someone who is willing to blame everyone in the world but themselves.
Comment #10 February 8th, 2025 at 3:29 pm
I’m allowing this one comment from “Kyle” because it’s so self-discrediting. He doesn’t even pretend to have a theory of how any of this will “make America great again.” His entire platform is “make those elitist scientists suffer, make the world suffer, for having refused to embrace my paranoid delusions.” Now that we know that, no more from him.
Comment #11 February 8th, 2025 at 3:45 pm
“Kyle” seems straight up cartoonishly, villainously pathetic, to the point where I’m not sure whether he’s real or a fictional construct invented to confirm all of my least charitable takes.
Comment #12 February 8th, 2025 at 3:48 pm
First They Came For USAID …
Clearly a low‑hanging fruit, like communists and trade‑unionists, but if you’re a pragmatist who pays as much attention to Method and Process as you do the moment’s point of application then you know what’s happening here is they’re just sharpening their wood‑chipper by way of validating the autocratic method against their ultimate target, the very idea of democracy.
By Their Low‑Hanging Fruit Ye Shall Know Them
Comment #13 February 8th, 2025 at 3:55 pm
Is Kyle even real? “I want the universities erased because they kicked me out for being unvaccinated, also I couldn’t get a date”?
Comment #14 February 8th, 2025 at 3:56 pm
It seemed clear early on that Kyle was not writing in good faith and looks like he was trolling. I am not sure that his most recent comment is even genuine. Is it worth engaging in back and forth with such comments?
Comment #15 February 8th, 2025 at 4:20 pm
Not sure if you heard what they did last night to the NIH-but now pretty much every R1 university will have several hundred million less money from overhead. And we are only 20 days into this nightmare.
Comment #16 February 8th, 2025 at 4:44 pm
I would bet real money that Kyle is that Disney troll from a while back. Something about the writing.
Comment #17 February 8th, 2025 at 5:06 pm
I have really no comment other than DJ Trump is doing everything it can to disassemble the one thing that’s almost single-handedly keeping America great, which is its top-notch scientific community.
It’s gonna be hard for Donald to fully accomplish this of course, given that this scientific supremacy appeared as a result of generations of immigration and good policies starting from WWII, and things must really go down the tubes for it to even become second (though I’d bet that once it becomes second, it’s probably gonna go down the ranking really fast).
But I think we have all learned to never underestimate Teflon Don. A lot of us thought he might really end up in prison this time, but lo and behold, he is president!
Well, I guess this was at some point predictable, given the stats on education in America. A little self-reflection would also be needed here; what could have the scientific community done that it didn’t, over the last few generations, that made the status of education in this country this bad …
Comment #18 February 8th, 2025 at 5:24 pm
Excellence in science is America’s money printing machine. But they rather burn it all down than confront their bigotry. Even McCarthy wasn’t that deluded.
Scott, if I were you I’d look for opportunities outside the US. This will get worse before it gets better and I am sure that many top universities around the world would be delighted to have you.
Comment #19 February 8th, 2025 at 5:29 pm
Shakespeare’s Richard 3, the original incel, lays it all out in his opening monologue!
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other:
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew’d up,
About a prophecy, which says that ‘G’
Of Edward’s heirs the murderer shall be.
Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here
Clarence comes.
Comment #20 February 8th, 2025 at 5:36 pm
This effort to diminish or dissolve USAID, NFS, etc etc could be a test for dismantling other agencies in the administration’s crosshairs. I mean, the average American has never heard of either, so cutting something they don’t know about must be good, so we can lower the taxes, can’t we?
If I read correctly most of these things are peanuts in the federal budgets: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/ and all of the “cuttable” programs combined amount to less than 9% of the total budget (a bit more if we count some of the “medical” as “science research in biology”, not clear from the cursory look I gave). So even if they literally cut everything, they would not solve the “problem” with the budget.
So they are either just trolling around to punish their perceived enemies, or they have a really nasty plan: after they have cut literally everything and still not be balanced they can say “see? we cut everything, only Social Security, Medicaid and Interest on debt are left, so we now need to cut them otherwise we bankrupt”. Which of course they can’t do now because there would be a revolution (and not paying interest on the debt would be anticonstitutional, if that means anything but I suspect even the super Trump-friendly SCOTUS would blocked it).
Or they just simply want to break everything to prove they can? It’s really baffling what their goal is, if there is a goal.
Comment #21 February 8th, 2025 at 5:44 pm
I know this is getting stale, but it really feels like
First they came for the Mexicans…
…. and I said nothing because I was not Mexican.
Then they came for the queers…
…. and I said nothing because I was not queer.
Then they came for the communists
…. and I said nothing because I was not communist.
Then they came for the the wokes
…. and I said nothing because I was not woke.
And you know how it ended up. For the records, there is already reports that ICE has arrested people in the country LEGALLY. I am sure they could get out of jail. If they can find a lawyer, and the money to pay representation (and meanwhile lose wages). It’s really appalling and gratuitously cruel. Especially since Elon Musk is an immigrant himself and Donal Trump is the children of an immigrant!
Comment #22 February 8th, 2025 at 6:26 pm
I want to fund the NSF more, not less.
I think we should fund David Reich to write more papers like https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.14.613021v1 – see https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1835340279307469170 for a tweet … trust the science.
If we put out more papers and such talking about male variability, and how ethnic and racial differences in intelligence are at least partly genetic, then people on the right will trust science more, and Elon Musk and Donald Trump will want to fund the universities more.
Comment #23 February 8th, 2025 at 8:00 pm
Wow, Kyle sounds like some 16 yr-old trolling you; and not like someone who ever attended college, but whatever….
Incredible to me how many people still belittle the damage Trump (and the horrid people around him) is doing to yes, science, but the entire country, hell no, the entire world. Heads have to be willfully buried in the sand at this point to preach patience, or give it time, or there’s little we can do until mid-year elections 2 yrs. away. There’s going to be a LOT of dying in those 2 years, and the appeasers, the tolerant, the hopefuls, the excusers, will be just as responsible as Donald himself for it.
Comment #24 February 8th, 2025 at 8:15 pm
Is anyone else getting the sense yet that this whole Musk Coup looks awfully like the prelude to an armed invasion? At least, that’s how it is in all the movies …
Comment #25 February 8th, 2025 at 8:40 pm
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-8-2025
“Yesterday the National Institutes of Health under the Trump administration announced a new policy that will dramatically change the way the United States funds medical research. Now, when a researcher working at a university receives a federal grant for research, that money includes funds to maintain equipment and facilities and to pay support staff that keep labs functioning. That indirect funding is built into university budgets for funding expensive research labs, and last year reached about 26% of the grant money distributed. Going forward, the administration says it will cap the permitted amount of indirect funding at 15%.”
Comment #26 February 8th, 2025 at 8:46 pm
Summary: getting laid prevents funding cuts. Do it for America.
Comment #27 February 8th, 2025 at 8:49 pm
The reasons Musk and friends are going after scientific organizations and STEM universities that fast and aggressively are not purely ideological for punishment or “balancing the budget” (if it was to punish “leftist wokes”, they should have gone after liberal arts, not science). There are also practical reasons. I believe one major reason is to release many technically oriented people into the job market to counteract the wage pressure expected from the immigration crackdown (H1B business and all that). The billionaire class hated that the wages had gone up since COVID and was afraid they would go up even more with the new administration’s immigration policies. The solution: all this craziness.
Comment #28 February 8th, 2025 at 9:55 pm
Earlier today I saw some geezer (i.e., just a few years younger than I) spouting on CNN about “we are sending $4 billion in USAID overseas and it’s borrowed money!” I recall Warren Buffet long ago saying that he paid a lower percentage in taxes than his secretary, and that was many tax cuts ago. $4 billion is literally peanuts to the top !% in this country.
I wish we could have some sort of televised (on all major channels) seminar on the actual economics of the USA to try to eliminate some of the innumeracy. In debate format, but with actual fact-checking. I wish for a lot of things.
As somebody said, it is the stuff we know that just ain’t so which is our biggest problem. (Take Kyle, for example–please!)
Kyle, if you’re still reading, you have a right not to get jabbed with a new vaccine, but a university has a right to have entrance requirements, including things that in their administrative judgement could pose a health risk to other students and faculty. Also you have a right to try to date people, but they have a right to refuse. That’s how a just society works. You may have to make changes in your behavior to adapt. Most of us do.
Comment #29 February 8th, 2025 at 11:19 pm
Besides being concerned about our local CBS station, I was horrified to see HitoMatch has a Foundation promoting science education and their website shows them actually speaking to classrooms presumably in the Austin area.
Comment #30 February 9th, 2025 at 4:00 am
China leading physics research with US a distant rival, so it all fits in.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3297914/china-leads-world-physics-research-us-distant-rival-nature-index-shows
Comment #31 February 9th, 2025 at 4:52 am
German science went down the drain when the Nazis came to power. This attack on science by Trumpenstein & Co may have a similar effect. It will not make America great again. It will diminish America and do irreparable damage.
Comment #32 February 9th, 2025 at 5:24 am
Trump, Musk, and their Republican accomplices are doing everything in their power to weaken our Country and throw it into confusion.
Now why would anyone do that?
Comment #33 February 9th, 2025 at 6:28 am
These actions seem like “shake the tree” approach rather than “fell the tree”. The fact that there have been some quick reversals, as well as someone of the scientific caliber of Elon is in charge(rather than a anti science zealot) , should probably give some comfort ? As far as funding cuts are involved, all should be on the table, NSF/NIH should not be an exception simply because it is a hallowed institution. Then of course there is the protection of the Congressional and Judicial system, those strong error correcting pillars of Democracy needs to be utilized by those who feel outraged by these actions.
Comment #34 February 9th, 2025 at 7:24 am
I’d like to pose this hypothetical question to your readers, Scott, if you’ll allow me.
Imagine for a moment, just for the sake of argument, that everything the anti-vaxxers said about the COVID shots is true. They really do change your DNA, they really do cause cancer, they really do cause permanent changes to your biology, etc. Imagine for a moment that that’s all true.
In this world, do you think Kyle’s feelings are more understandable? Would you get where he’s coming from? Do you think people who enforced vaccine mandates etc. deserve to be punished?
Just trying to get a sense of how much of your revulsion to Kyle’s comments is rooted in a disagreement about vaccines, and how much is due to his attitude.
Comment #35 February 9th, 2025 at 8:25 am
Kyle brings up a rather serious practical problem for American academics: their Universities are among the most partisan institutions in the country, with a huge majority of Democrats among staff, and various Democratic policies and views (affirmative action, DEI, vaccine mandates, etc.) thoroughly embedded in various ways. In these circumstances it’s going to be difficult to find much enthusiasm among Republicans (even those who might strongly favor scientific research) for defending Universities.
One possible response is to continue being smug (e.g. noting that _of course_ Universities are Democrat-dominated, because Democrats are just so much cleverer) and mocking people like Kyle, even as the research funding disappears. Another possible response is to reflect on whether the long march that has thoroughly tied education and research to loyalty to left-wing dogmas was such a good idea as it might have seemed a few months ago.
Comment #36 February 9th, 2025 at 9:39 am
Prasanna #33
Oh please, which should be the scientific caliber of Musk? He seems to be exceptionally good in pushing for and profiting from the development of new technologies, but which are his scientific credits?
On the other hand, he famously declared that higher education is useless
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/10/elon-musk-college-for-fun-not-learning
More in general, Trump, Musk and all their minions are just putting in practice what they announced many months ago. I mean, the writings were on the wall, and in plain sight, what the people voting them (or just not voting for KH) were thinking?
Apologies for bringing in something that so far is still incommensurably more dramatic and evil than the present affairs, but what happened reminds me of the Mein Kampf situation. Much of what was going to happen was written there, and still people decided that probably he didn’t mean it.
It literally blows my mind, why it was that this time? Anger? Misinformation? Blissfull ignorance?
Comment #37 February 9th, 2025 at 10:26 am
asdf #30: Absolutely, anyone who cares about the US ought to worry about it losing its scientific and technological leadership to China, but that Nature report seems clearly not to be measuring the thing people care about in real life. They put, not just Tsinghua and USTC, but a bunch of other Chinese universities that most academics have never heard of ahead of Harvard and Stanford?
Comment #38 February 9th, 2025 at 11:10 am
>Kyle brings up a rather serious practical problem for American academics: their Universities are among the >most partisan institutions in the country, with a huge majority of Democrats among staff, and various >Democratic policies and views (affirmative action, DEI, vaccine mandates, etc.) thoroughly embedded in >various ways.
Nothing much that can be done about the political orientation of faculty (they are, by definition, not characteristic of the overall population in terms of formal education or IQ, and perhaps the strength of the lure of much higher salaries elsewhere (at least for quants) is correlated with personal political ideology).
As for policies – that’s at the performative level (though of course that matters when it comes not to be shafted by the hard right). Private universities are still beholden to legacy admissions, for instance, and of course most places do not admit students in a need-blind way. That will be harder to undo than affirmative action by race. Notice also how welcoming many universities (public ones included) are to fraternities, which are literal old-boy clubs. Will the smarter part of the right take that into account? Who knows. If it doesn’t, then that’s another reason to reform those practices. (The timing would be odd, but Americans are now ruled by the *populist* right, at least nominally.)
Comment #39 February 9th, 2025 at 11:42 am
Jeremy #35: “Defund the universities” is like a right-wing analogue of “defund the police” or “defund the military.” It’s suicidal and stupid for the same reasons.
When you tear down a major societal institution, the usual result is a powerful demonstration of why that institution existed in the first place. Get rid of police in order to punish them for right-wing bias or for Derek Chauvin, get a violent crime wave. Get rid of university scientific research in order to punish us for left-wing bias or for Ibram X. Kendi (!), get China surpassing the US as the world’s technological superpower. Indeed, unlike defunding the police, the latter error would probably be completely unrecoverable even after we realized it.
Defunding just wipes out everybody, innocent and guilty alike. Wouldn’t it be better to empower the people within troubled institutions who actually want to fix them and carry out the original mission?
Comment #40 February 9th, 2025 at 11:50 am
Eric #34:
Imagine for a moment, just for the sake of argument, that everything the anti-vaxxers said about the COVID shots is true. They really do change your DNA, they really do cause cancer, they really do cause permanent changes to your biology, etc. Imagine for a moment that that’s all true.
In this world, do you think Kyle’s feelings are more understandable? Would you get where he’s coming from?
If it turned out, hypothetically, that the Holocaust had never happened, would Holocaust deniers be more understandable? If it turned out that the moon landing was faked, would I owe an apology to moon-landing conspiracy theorists?
Depending on the intent, these can either be good questions for an epistemology seminar or else profoundly idiotic questions, ones that give the lie to there being “no such thing as a stupid question.”
On the one hand, yes, tautologically, if X is true then anyone who said X was right.
On the other hand, in each of these cases, the evidentiary base that the conspiracy theorists were working from was so weak that the conspiracy theorists would, as it were, have been right by accident. They would’ve been right only because the entire world had turned out to be a lie—and not a lie in an interesting new way, but merely in one of the standard, boring ways envisioned by the people prone to paranoid delusions.
Anything else touching on vaccine conspiracy theories, whether or not from yet more “Kyle” sockpuppet accounts, will be ruthlessly left in moderation. I’ve lost interest.
Comment #41 February 9th, 2025 at 11:56 am
“Please preserve and increase the NSF’s budget, after you’ve cleansed it of “woke communism” as you see fit.”
I get it, you’re bitting the bullet to argue that you’re not “woke” and will still suffer the budget cuts. Of course. But it may be time to stop playing the far-right game and start taking things seriously. For the far-right, “woke communism” just means any science. Why should taxpayers fund scientists’ hobbies? If their are truly smart or they research is useful, then they can get jobs in the private sector.
So, maybe it’s time to actually join the “woke communists”. They might be right about a thing or two.
Comment #42 February 9th, 2025 at 12:04 pm
Scott #40,
Does lab leak fit into this scheme?
Comment #43 February 9th, 2025 at 12:12 pm
What do you think of capping overhead, just as they did for NIH?
I have an opinion that isn’t popular in my academic circle: overhead has no trace (no one knows what it funds) and the admin expenses are almost equal to regular research costs. Maybe the latter is necessary but I need to see a good argument for that. Our grant admins are always incredibly overworked but the overall admin-body size has risen significantly in the last few years. I’m assuming their funding comes mostly from overhead.
Just as a calculation, cutting overhead to 15% and NSF budget by ~ 25% will be net zero change on research budget.
PS: I totally agree that a 60% cut would be quite harsh for basic research even if the 20% spent on DEI initiatives (over the last few years) are redirected to basic research. But let’s not take the bait yet and see the actual proposal before doing something as unproductive as Schumer showing up with avocado and Corona (and giving them a perfect ad-clip to run ).
Comment #44 February 9th, 2025 at 12:34 pm
Scott #39
Defund the police,
Defund the military,
Defund the universities.
Defund Homeland Security
Defund the IRS
Defund that medical system
Defund all of the apparatus which make us vulnerable to the sort of totalitarianism we have all been under for a decade!
Disqualify everyone over 30 from receiving federal jobs and from receiving contracts from companies receiving grants or contracts from the federal government.
Is this right or left?
Comment #45 February 9th, 2025 at 12:42 pm
B Sissyphus #43: The overhead system is weird, I would never have designed it that way, and there’s a case for granting agencies to lower the percent of overhead they’re willing to fund. Lowering all the way to 15%, though, is an extinction-level event for research universities the way they’re currently set up. No point in applying for a grant if your university can no longer keep its lights on.
Again and again, I’m not seeing what it would look like if the “DOGE boys” were serious about fixing things and making them work better. It looks a lot more like destruction and revenge.
Comment #46 February 9th, 2025 at 12:46 pm
Since you mentioned Gauss in the context of modern funding difficulties, I’ll share that Gauss to me is a good example of a scholar who could have accomplished more if he had lived in more stable times. I researched this topic because, despite being lauded as one of the very top mathematicians, it always seemed to me that others like Newton and Euler accomplished much more than Gauss did. Gauss was born in 1777, he obtained his PhD in 1799, and published his magnum opus ‘Arithmetical Investigations’ in 1801 (at the age of 24). There’s no doubt that he was one of the greatest child prodigies, and I see the argument that he deserves to be lauded for his early-in-life accomplishments in number theory, one of the most difficult and fundamental areas to contribute to.
But notice the timing of Gauss’s coming of age at the start of the 19th century: he was affected by the Napoleonic wars. He was born in the Duchy of Brunswick, in the Holy Roman Empire, received his PhD from the only state university in Brunswick. The Duke then paid his living for a few years and pledged to set Gauss up as the head of a new observatory. But the Duke was killed in 1806, and the Duchy was abolished a year later, Gauss lost his funding. Gauss took a professorship in Gottingen in 1807, where he soon faced a demand for a war contribution of 2000 francs, which he could not pay – he refused help from Laplace and others, but eventually got it resolved without having to pay. He remained in Gottingen ever after, and by 1816 his situation had stabilized, he headed a newly built observatory. But what could he have accomplished for mathematics if his living had been stable in the 1800 – 1810 decade?
It’s also interesting to note that Gauss occupied a middle period in the development of analysis (i.e. calculus); Euler (1707 – 1783) had scooped up all of the low hanging fruit available with the non-rigorous infinitesimals of those times, and Gauss was nearly 40 years old by the time Cauchy (only 10 years Gauss’s junior) gave a proper definition of a limit in his 1825 French-language textbook on analysis. Gauss is remembered for being as curmudgeonly as any genius ever was; it’s no wonder, he must have felt that the world squandered what he could have offered them, that he missed out on fully exercising his gifts. The Gaussian distribution is named for him, but the central limit theorem belongs more to Laplace (who appreciated its universality before Gauss) and to Lyapunov (who rigorously proved the CLT long after Gauss lived). Gauss is co-credited with developing the non-Euclidean alternatives to the parallel postulate, but Reimann contributed much more to that topic imo.
Concluding, it might seem absurd to some that I question Gauss’s contributions, when he’s been lauded by so many significant mathematicians. But I think his contributions do not really justify his placement at the top, that his placement there is really a charity of history to make amends for his difficult life, during an awkward time in the history of mathematics, that robbed him of what productivity he could have had. Many geniuses of history were like that, failing to reach their potential because of the accidental state of the world in their time; and so it seems it will be for their peers in our times too.
Comment #47 February 9th, 2025 at 12:48 pm
Garald #38: it’s an odd time to claim that there’s “nothing much that can be done about the political orientation of faculty”. It seems likely that the ongoing DEI purge will have some kind of effect.
On a more retrospective note, it also seems likely that (for example) obliging applicants for faculty jobs to swear fealty to DEI has had some effect. For example, here’s a recent(ish) job ad for faculty positions at UT Austin: https://faculty.utexas.edu/career/100690. Applicants are required to submit a CV, cover letter (1 page), research plans (2-4 pages), writing sample, teaching statement (1-2 pages), DEI statement (1-4 pages). Going by the page counts, DEI appears to weigh more heavily in hiring decisions than teaching! Until very recently this was pretty standard for US faculty positions.
Comment #48 February 9th, 2025 at 12:51 pm
Michael Vassar #44: It’s neither right nor left as much as just looney-tunes!
Comment #49 February 9th, 2025 at 1:08 pm
It seems the Confederacy is going to make a comeback after more than 150 years. Remember the times when it was a felony to teach slaves? It seems America is on the road to that. And it could be reached very fast, since it’s always much easier to go down, not up.
Comment #50 February 9th, 2025 at 2:25 pm
Tbh I think Kyle might be a fake, but setting that aside, it seems to me that trump was elected on a campaign promise to cut government spending and bullshit bureaucracy, and that since he also tried to cut science funding in his first term, his voters apparently generally approve of this idea. So, given that the voters have voted to have (at least) science bureaucracy cut, do you have a better way to do it? (I mean this as a genuine question, hear me out…) Because I think the charitable read of this plan is that aggressively cutting science funding will force some hard choices and in an ideal world (so, not ours, but anyways…) that would mean only the best science now gets funding and the junk and excess bureaucracy has to tighten its belt. This is a very blunt tool to try to achieve that goal. But I am not savvy enough to know a better way, and I’m uncomfortable hating trump for doing what he was, after all, elected to do – it’s not like this is a big surprise.
Comment #51 February 9th, 2025 at 3:05 pm
Italian Lurker #36, you are right in pointing out that fascists, like Hitler did in “Mein Kampf”, often quite openly advocate what they plan to do, and yet they still get elected (although in Hitlers case only a relative majority).
To me this is the most discouraging fact about this calamity. The Harris campaign made a big deal about Project 2025, they openly called Trump a fascist. Yet it made not one iota of a difference.
Comment #52 February 9th, 2025 at 3:57 pm
Hi Scott,
I have the following question. Imagine that NSF and other research funding agencies disappeared. How bad this is for mathematics?
Grants are really crucial for experimental sciences with expensive equipment. In Math, many professors write grant applications for the only reason that the Universities require this. They spend huge time for applying for grands with 90 percent chance of failing and loosing this time, and 10 percent chance of getting money for postdoc which they do not really need. Now, imagine NSF or equivalent do not exist. Then no need waste huge time applying for grants. You just teach students and work on your research papers all the time free from teaching. The students pay fees to the University, and the University uses this money to pay your salary. What’s wrong?
Comment #53 February 9th, 2025 at 4:24 pm
Bogdan #52: Even if I don’t need the postdoc, the postdoc needs the postdoc! And what about all the PhD students, who get their stipends either directly through NSF graduate fellowships or via GRAs from NSF grants? Our whole system for training the next generation of mathematicians is premised on the availability of NSF funds. Without that, the existing professors can prove theorems, age, and die, but almost all the young people (except for independently wealthy ones) will be forced to leave. Did you think this over for more than 5 seconds?
Comment #54 February 9th, 2025 at 4:33 pm
Scott,
Rather than letting all these trolls continue to post here pretending to be “reasonable”, please leave them in moderation.
And everyone else, rather than continue to engage with the trolls or commiserating ourselves (like I’ve done myself so far, here and somewhere else), let’s see what we can do. And I mean in the grand scheme of things of society, not just academia. I can only think of the following
* the ostrich: nothing bad is happening, perhaps I will survive this and in a few years we’ll have another administration
* the wren: just fly away to some other country (for those who can and assuming that “some other country” is not just on a delay
* fight: organize in some way and use all the tools at our disposal
Regarding the last point, I can think of the courts, street protests, calling our representatives objecting, what else? Also, would a “counterflood” strategy be best, or should we find some better way? Trying to understand their root motive can help, but it may be a waste of time, efforts and potentially misleading (do they do it for revenge? to flood the job market? to save pennies from the budget? to energize their base? because they can and they want to prove it? does it matter why?)
Comment #55 February 9th, 2025 at 4:39 pm
Karen Morenz Korol #50: I’d guess that the NSF budget was a deciding issue for approximately 0% of voters. Indeed, most voters like science funding if you ask them directly (though they’re unlikely to volunteer if you don’t ask). I daresay that people like Kyle from this comment section, who want the arrogant STEM professors to suffer and be punished for their support of Covid vaccination, are a small minority. 🙂
But more importantly: if those of us who care make enough noise, there’s a nonzero chance we’ll reach the Republicans who like the NSF and get this changed. So why shouldn’t we make noise?
As for hating Trump: I mean, he’s arrogated to himself a power of arbitrarily defunding anything he wants, which the Constitution reserves to Congress. Even many of his voters realize that he wants to be a dictator and sees himself as a dictator. Of course we need to push back as hard as possible if we want the Republic to survive past its 250th birthday.
Comment #56 February 9th, 2025 at 5:09 pm
Scott 55:
Not an anti-vaxxer, but you’re being deliberately obtuse here. Kyle didn’t want to punish the university for “supporting vaccines,” but because 1. He was kicked out for refusing the shot, 2. Faculty or fellow students were mocking unvaccinated people who died.
You can support vaccination without being authoritarian or cruel about it.
Comment #57 February 9th, 2025 at 5:13 pm
Scott #53: For Ph.D. students, where is a working system Teaching Assistantship. A student spend some time to teach problem classes and help with marking, and get a stipend in return.
When the existing professors retire, the Universities would hire new ones for tenured-track positions. Assume that now there are X vacancies for tenured-track positions per year, and Y vacancies for postdocs. Now imagine that postdocs diapppear, and there are only X vacancies for tenured-track positions. Then people who are on the last year of their Ph D will apply for these X vacancles, and X best get jobs and stay in academia. Others would indeed leave. As a result, academia would get exactly X people needed for permanent positions.
“The postdoc needs the postdoc” because currenlty it is difficult to get a tenured-track position right after Ph D, because most of your competitors apply after postdoc positions, and naturally have more experience and publications. Without postdocs positions, best X Ph.D. students will get the tenured-track position DIRECTLY (which is much better for them then get a temporary postdoc position), and then will work without need for applying for grands, which is another advantage.
Comment #58 February 9th, 2025 at 5:24 pm
The speed with which vital scientific information is being rendered unavailable is staggering. An important era in science is certainly drawing to an abrupt close in many senses.
Nature reports CDC datasets and databases are being taken offline. I would not put it past this administration to do the same with similar datasets/databases in other fields.
Some scientists are trying -heroically, I may add- to save and back up these vital scientific resources. Perhaps it’s time for scientists across all fields to do so, with some urgency.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00374-y
Comment #59 February 9th, 2025 at 5:42 pm
Del #54, the Democrats need just two more seats in the House to gain the majority. There are two special election House races coming up in Florida (April 1st). These are long shots but should be the priority. These districts should be flooded on all channels to communicate what is happening in DC and that there needs to be a check on the administration.
Comment #60 February 9th, 2025 at 5:45 pm
Also, you’re wrong about the vaccine thing being a niche issue. Rage about the COVID vaccines is a hugely animating issue for many of the hardcore Trump supporters. If you go to patriots.win, for example (the biggest Trump community online) you can find countless posts raging about COVID vaccines, calling them bioweapons, a genocide aimed at depopulating white people, a pretext for communist control, an attempt to edit our DNA etc. In pro-Trump online spaces, hatred of vaccines is ubiquitous. I think a very large number of Trump supporters are unvaccinated per polling data. A large fraction of Trump supporters believe vaccine conspiracy theories according to polling data.
Being authoritarian about the vaccines, by implementing mandates and restricting discussion on social media, massively backfired and turned many people who were already distrustful of government and institutions into hardened anti-vaxxers. Democrats also turned the vaccine thing into a partisan issue by blaming vaccine hesitancy on “right-wing misinformation.” Many left-wing media outlets did mock unvaccinated people who died, often in the same breath as mocking Trump supporters, which surely didn’t help things. I can imagine some Trump supporters would read that shit and it would only harden their determination to refuse the vaccine.
Democrats were extremely reckless in turning vaccination into another partisan political issue. Adding unvaccinated people to their list of “deplorables” was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It trashed decades of bipartisan trust in vaccines and biomedical science more generally.
**This comment seems to be getting caught in the spam filter, tried submitting a few times, hopefully won’t show up as duplicates.
Comment #61 February 9th, 2025 at 5:49 pm
Bogdan #57: Presumably you know all this, but for the benefit of others here:
All PhD students do multiple teaching assistantships in any case. Without RAships, every student would need to TA every semester. They wouldn’t have time for research, and even if they did, their departments wouldn’t have the money for it.
Oh, and I forgot to mention travel to conferences! Bringing seminar speakers!
Could academic science survive and rebuild after this asteroid collision? Find private funders, on the model of the Simons Foundation or 18th-century aristocrats? Probably. But let no one doubt that this is an asteroid collision.
Comment #62 February 9th, 2025 at 6:03 pm
Grunge aesthetic #56: If anti-vaxxers were the sort of people I could trust to reliably narrate whatever “persecutions” they’d suffered, they wouldn’t be anti-vaxxers in the first place.
To me, vaccine mandates seem like a complete no-brainer: do I want to (a) end a global pandemic, or (b) let the pandemic continue, let thousands die, in order to indulge a minority’s demonstrably false empirical beliefs?
But it was Kyle’s demand for revenge (!) against those supporting mandates that gave the game away, and exposed him as a troll.
Comment #63 February 9th, 2025 at 6:14 pm
Again, I support the COVID vaccines, but Kyle’s story sounds completely plausible to me. I too was at a university during COVID, also in a STEM program, and I heard several of my fellow students saying casually cruel things about unvaccinated people (the ones dying in hospitals were stupid and it’s their fault, hospitals should turn away unvaccinated people because they’re taking away beds from patients “who deserve them,” unvaccinated should be put in quarantine camps or separated from society, etc.) I knew more than one professor who said that stuff too (hospitals should turn away unvaccinated people).
It’s also completely plausible that he was kicked out of school. Many students were. Most universities had a vaccine mandate.
The vaccine mandates had little effect on vaccine uptake and next to no effect on the pandemic’s course, but setting that aside—you are somehow completely missing the nuance of the question. It’s about the balance between individual bodily autonomy and public health. It’s a morally vexed question. It’s not as easy as you make it out to be. Should people lose their jobs because they won’t get a medical procedure they don’t want? Vaccination is an intimate and invasive thing. It’s morally dubious to force people to do something to their body to stay at their university or their job.
Comment #64 February 9th, 2025 at 6:24 pm
Eric #42: No, people should freely debate the origin of Covid, as they would any other open scientific question. I’ve thought that since 2020, and I still think it, even though the Rootclaim debate convinced me that Covid probably originated in the wet market after all.
Comment #65 February 9th, 2025 at 6:43 pm
Hermann Weyl wrote that the German academic position of “Privatdozent” (basically giving the person a license to teach courses at a university without giving them an actual job, so they got paid by privately charging tuition to their students) existed because professors were instead employed by the university and therefore by the State. The government could in turn decline to hire people for political reasons or whatever. The Privatdozent system let the academics appoint instructors using their own criteria keeping the government out of the decisions. Maybe that helped for a while. Of course when things got REALLY bad, everyone was in trouble.
Anyway, here, soon all those decisions will be made by Muskrat AI trying to put the US govt on full self-driving, which worked so well on Tesla cars, lol. https://www.techpolicy.press/anatomy-of-an-ai-coup/
Comment #66 February 9th, 2025 at 7:12 pm
Hesitating .. but while open questions remain on covid origins, the lab leak theory, in most of its forms, involves an engineered virus based on the joint (and rejected) DEFUSE proposal by UNC and WIV. Ultimately, underlying lab leak theories is a conspiracy of cover-up that includes Western scientists/scientific administrators who if not actively involved, are supposed to be looking out for their own professional careers. The rootclaim debate was a terrific event, with even the two judges putting in 100-150 hours each.
Comment #67 February 9th, 2025 at 7:57 pm
M #41:
So, maybe it’s time to actually join the “woke communists”. They might be right about a thing or two.
Oh, the “woke communists” are right about any number of things! And I’ll say when I think they’re right, as I’ve always done, just like I’ll say when I think they’re wrong. And I’ll even ally myself with “woke communists” when we’re on the same side of an issue, as we’ll often be under Trump II. But not only do I not want to join the woke tribe, they wouldn’t want me if I did.
Comment #68 February 9th, 2025 at 9:19 pm
Elizabeth #46
Fascinating. Thank you.
Comment #69 February 9th, 2025 at 9:43 pm
Thank you Scott for the sane leadership. As I watch Trump’s egregious abuse of power, I am extremely happy that I listened to your voting advice.
Comment #70 February 9th, 2025 at 10:10 pm
Scott #64
It is surprising that Rootclaim debate is considered more authentic than the detailed investigations done by two premier agencies in the world FBI and CIA (and DoE). Supporting these kind of unreliable scientific outcomes is what got academia in trouble in the first place. Also the lack of trust in these agencies is bewildering, considering these outcomes were arrived during the previous administration.
Comment #71 February 9th, 2025 at 10:23 pm
re: Kyle #7
I’m not going to go into the gender relations stuff in this post, as this dead horse has already been thoroughly whipped, both on this blog and elsewhere. I mainly want to point out that Kyle has a point, and a significant one at that.
The academic world has a pretty serious problem with regards to professors showing no respect whatsoever to anyone who is not a professor.
Example:
A colleague was at a conference talking to some professor. During the conversation, the professor asked, “so are you an assistant professor?” My colleague replied, “no, I’m a postdoc.” The professor said “oh, ok.” and left.
For me, at a conference during my PhD, me, my PI, and another prof from a different school were at the dinner table together. A few mins into the conversation, it became clear that the other prof was pretty much flat out ignoring everything I said and only responding to my PI.
For my postdoc advisor, in general it was pretty clear that he had a built-in assumption that information flowed in one direction, from him to me. If I had to convince him that something was unnecessary, or should be done in a different way, forget it. Just wasn’t willing or able to go outside his frame even a little bit.
There were a lot of incidents like this, along with all sorts of other types of bad behavior from professors. It would take a very long time to catalog all of them, but I think I made the point. It was ubiquitous and pervasive.
Additionally, there were many times where people talked as if woke leftism was simply true and it was a base assumption that everyone agreed with it. There was also this other cultural thing where they really wanted you to think like them, and assume and care about all of their assumptions and beliefs about academic prestige etc. I really wanted to do be a professor and do research myself, but there was a whole ideological package in there that you kind of had to take on in order to be taken seriously, so my interviews didn’t really work out. It’s one of those subtle things that’s hard to pin down exactly, but it was there.
I do not predict that cutting the NSF funding is going to fix this problem, but there IS a real problem here and it has to be fixed.
Comment #72 February 9th, 2025 at 10:50 pm
Prasanna #70,
Our intelligence agencies have no special access to information that is not available to us. Rootclaim debater Peter Miller summarized their investigation including long ago theories of pangolin chimeras which have by now been scientifically debunked but still persist in their claims. Why not instead go by the best conclusion of our scientific bodies? The FBI/DOE cannot even agree on where it leaked from. The FBI thinks it leaked from the WIV, the DOE thinks it leaked from the Wuhan CDC which wasn’t even operational in Wuhan until December. And the CIA changed its conclusion under professed lab leaker John Ratcliffe on no new evidence with low confidence.
Comment #73 February 9th, 2025 at 11:36 pm
I met a friend who is a renowned university professor today. I asked him about all this.
His response was that there is a lot of waste in universities due to administration costs exploding. While I’d like that fixed, these chaps in Doge don’t know what they’re doing, at least in universities. He said there’s a way to go about it he could think of, and it involved attention to details. This was thoughtless and abrupt.
He added everyone he knew was frustrated and depressed by this and not getting work done at all. He’s worried no progress would be made in research. And he worried things might be irreparably broken in some cases. He said if this president cares about competing with China in innovation, this is not a good idea
Comment #74 February 10th, 2025 at 1:48 am
“Beff Jezos” (who I think is the “Mencius Moldbug” of Trump 2.0, at least its Technocracy wing) has explained in his special style, what’s wrong with academia:
https://x.com/BasedBeffJezos/status/1888684198502044115
“The problem with academia is that the selective pressure is induced peer to peer through an unweighted citation graph.
OTOH, industry is a weighted graph of capital flux according to the utility of a product. It has a much better algorithm for focusing search over design space.”
Comment #75 February 10th, 2025 at 2:40 am
Grunge Aesthetic #63 most universities already had MMR vaccine requirements, at least for living in on-campus housing which is often part of PhD funding, though he did specify experimental
Comment #76 February 10th, 2025 at 3:45 am
Hi Scott,
Looking from the other side of the Atlantic, it seems to me that political polarization in the US has reached an extraordinary level.
I remember reading the Harper’s letter (https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/) a few years ago and these people already suggested that the radicalization of some left-wing (woke?) people was “exploited by right-wing demagogues”.
Now that I think about it, I think too much credit has been given to the whole “Overton window” theory and some people thought they should just be pulling that window all the way left/right at some absurd levels.
Do you think that less radical activism, engaging discussion with those with opposite views, etc. would actually help appease the whole situation or would it only help displace the political spectrum to the right/conservative? What credit should be given to that whole “Overton window” thing?
Comment #77 February 10th, 2025 at 7:47 am
Mitchell Porter #74,
Yes, the industry is very good in optimizing its utility function, which is short-term shareholders return. The problem is that it ignores all other considerations, say public health or long term climate change. It even ignores long-term shareholders value (e.g., GE and Boeing). The point of academia is to have a different utility function considering longer-term benefits. Now, whether this is actually the case is an open question.
Comment #78 February 10th, 2025 at 8:10 am
Rephrasing my #72
The Wuhan CDC was a popular target for media persons like Jim Geraghty because it is located across from the market. But that location was operational only in December 2019. Our best evidence says that the spillover occurred most likely in November. Besides, they don’t do any of the gain of function work that is supposed to have resulted in an engineered dangerous pathogen.
Ratcliffe is playing politics. This was an op-ed he wrote earlier where the goal with Covid origins was to hold China accountable and target it for reparations. https://www.newsweek.com/its-not-too-late-hold-china-accountable-covid-opinion-1919675
Comment #79 February 10th, 2025 at 8:14 am
Mitchell Porter #74: Isn’t the most famous (and empirically successful) “algorithm for focusing search” of all – Google’s PageRank – also based on an unweighted directed graph (of hyperlinks)?
Comment #80 February 10th, 2025 at 9:14 am
> Or does anyone think that I, for example, am a “woke communist”?
I found it troubling that the main problem you have with Kyle’s prediction is that it is untrue. It used to be the American consensus that being a woke communist was an inalienable right that should have no bearing on how the government treats you. That the US government is *only* coming after the first amendment is no consolation. I would think we should find Kyle’s prediction terrifying even if it were true.
Comment #81 February 10th, 2025 at 9:23 am
Gen Fudou #71
In my experience Academia (like all US society) is greatly segregated. What you describe is certainly true in Europe (which I also have first-hand experience), but very different from my experience in the USA. Perhaps you went to a very different place and are making (wrong) assumptions about that being true everywhere.
In the places where I worked, professors were very interested about work of postdocs and their opinions. In some (but not all) of these places, there were plenty of right-wing professors too. Appalling, there was also a white supremacist one who did not shy to respond as follows to a visitor from Europe who asked something like “I see in movies that in USA there are many black people in the US, but I saw nobody at this university”. I would have answered something about the cost of tuition and the black people being traditionally poorer or other general (sad) societal facts. Instead this jerk did not shy to respond “we don’t want them here” (to be clear, that was before DEI, and it was one of the reasons why I then supported DEI, even though it eventually had its own problem as Scott has at length exposed here).
Full disclosure: I’m an old, white, straight male.
Comment #82 February 10th, 2025 at 9:31 am
In the meantime, the actual communists are betting it all on science:
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/images-show-china-building-huge-fusion-research-facility-analysts-say-2025-01-28/
Comment #83 February 10th, 2025 at 9:44 am
Errr… the way you state it, it seems ok with you to target and cut funding to scientists on the grounds of them being perceived as ‘woke’ (whatever that means) or communist (at least that might have a true definition).
Just checking… but isn’t even that kind of, you know, bad ?
Comment #84 February 10th, 2025 at 10:13 am
To be honest I feel that on one hand the situation is ridiculous and the science funding has be be increased by an order of magnitude rather than cut. On the other hand the situation can be put squarely at the academia’s feet.
The majority of the voting public doesn’t know anything (and/or doesn’t care about!) quantum computing. What it does know (and care about) is how expensive college education is, how the professors talk down to them, how students take over universities under weird slogans. And how politically slanted the universities are. The trust in higher education system has been dropping not quite like a stone, but pretty close.
Does it know that Scott and many more people on the inside are opposed to all of that? No it doesn’t. But it also doesn’t know about much good that came out of the academia. Should it? Maybe, but no one is taking care of informing it.
So when people come out and say “burn it all down”, they don’t encounter much opposition.
Comment #85 February 10th, 2025 at 10:19 am
Ron #80 and Nicolas Rougerie #83: Whenever there’s both a sane and an insane reading of something I said, I’ll appreciate you assuming the sane reading unless I explicitly rule it out … thank you! 😊
I will stake everything I have on the First Amendment … including the freedom in America to be a woke communist, or to advocate for a totalitarian regime in which the First Amendment would no longer be operative. I’ll even stake everything on scientists receiving federal funds having the freedom to be woke communists in their spare time.
As for commitment to DEI being a criterion for awarding federal grants … well, my preference is that “outreach to underserved communities” is simply one thing of many that you can choose to talk about, in the Broader Outreach section of your proposal. I don’t want it to be either effectively compelled (the old reality) or effectively banned (the new reality). But I could live with it being banned in grant proposals if that’s all the DOGE boys were doing, rather than gleefully taking an ax to federal science funding itself.
Comment #86 February 10th, 2025 at 10:43 am
Gen Fudou #71 and Mitchell Porter #74: I feel at the core of my being that, if American STEM academia—with all of its world-historic accomplishments, from the Standard Model of particle physics to the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem to the foundations of public-key cryptography and the Internet—is now going to stand trial before the public, then at least it deserves better witnesses for the prosecution than the tweets of “Beff Jezos” (who’s done what exactly, in science or in building useful products?), or someone with an anecdote about how a STEM professor was once a snide asshole to their colleague.
At risk of stating the obvious: sure, there are arrogant jerks in STEM academia, as there are in every human institution. And, as in most institutions, there are wonderful people too—like the professors who encouraged me and volunteered their time with me and advocated for me back when I was an unknown teenager, a priceless gift that I’ve spent the rest of my career trying to pay forward.
A guy in a US Army uniform, sitting next to me on a plane, once icily answered “no comment” when I tried to make friendly small talk with him about his service. Should I conclude, from that one experience, that the entire US Army should be defunded?
Comment #87 February 10th, 2025 at 11:15 am
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.210.4465.33
Comment #88 February 10th, 2025 at 11:43 am
No Name #84
“But it also doesn’t know about much good that came out of the academia. Should it? Maybe, but no one is taking care of informing it.”
What should academics do to inform the public of the good coming out of scientific research? More university press releases hyping up results? More popular science magazine publications like what Nautilus is doing? More blog posts by academics like Scott talking about quantum complexity? More people starting youtube channels commenting on new results like Sabine Hossenfelder? It’s pretty hard reaching the public with this sort of stuff, if Joe six-pack wants to watch the big game instead of any of the stuff above it’s going to be pretty hard to convince him otherwise. If you have any ideas on how to do science communication better, please share.
Comment #89 February 10th, 2025 at 12:23 pm
Jeremy #47: If the “DEI purge” really goes after every liberal and left-leaning person in universities (or most of them), then it will be a catastrophe of Third-Reich proportions. I imagine it will not go that far.
DEI statements are a chore and have a ring of a loyalty oath; I have opposed them. They are also a recent thing that I suspect never had that much of an impact on hiring, outside a couple of places. The selection effect on actual political beliefs must have been slight (academics are good at performance) – if anything, it must have caused a reaction among candidates themselves. At any rate, the political divergence long predates that cohort.
Comment #90 February 10th, 2025 at 12:57 pm
anton #88
Joe Six Pack was quite happy watching US astronauts landing on the moon. And is very happy to watch SpaceX launches. Musk is a showman (among many other things) but one thing he realizes is that you have to make people excited about things. Presumably pro-science (and supported by the scientific establishment) administration has been in power for 4 years. A bit (or a lot!) more showcasing of how the science makes lives better would have gone a long way. An yes, the COVID vaccines would have been a great example if it wasn’t so politically poisoned.
Speaking about popular science magazines, you should definitely not turn them into social justice proponents (e.g. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-term-jedi-is-problematic-for-describing-programs-that-promote-justice-equity-diversity-and-inclusion/ )
Comment #91 February 10th, 2025 at 1:18 pm
anton #88 and No Name #90: It’s a hard problem. The James Webb telescope and LIGO are both spectacular accomplishments, but how many people care? Where’s Carl Sagan when you need him? Meanwhile, Sabine Hossenfelder (who you mention) has become more and more of a “Joe Rogan of science” — it’s gotten harder and harder to name any mainstream research, however successful, that she likes, or any fringe ideas, however loony, that she dislikes. Is that her active ingredient, why she’s amassed such a huge following? In the age of YouTube and social media, is it possible to do anything similar while remaining well-calibrated? Quanta magazine valiantly tries, but in many of their articles, you can almost hear the huffing and puffing as they push the boulder uphill, of trying to get the man on the street excited about the latest progress on Geometric Langlands or whatever.
Comment #92 February 10th, 2025 at 1:35 pm
Fund the NSF #22: I strongly doubt that David Reich’s lab has a single red cent from NSF. Indeed, the preprint you point to has funding listed in the Acknowledgements, and it’s pretty much NIH (a single award) and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI award is a lot of money, compared to a typical NIH grant). This is standard for medical school-based labs — NSF does not fund medical research, including human genetics. Nor should it.
Re Kyle — whether or not that particular entity is a real person is beside the point. There are plenty of people who use ${insult du jour} like “woke communist” or “pedophile” as a stand-in for “someone I don’t like”
Comment #93 February 10th, 2025 at 3:06 pm
Maan America is weird.
I’m an old-school, pure-bred Marxist Communist, and yet even the so-called “woke” crowd in America’s style is against us too. They mock us, calling our views “masculine dinosaur talk,” even when we try to defend them from the far-right fascist government’s oppressive actions here.
According to actual Communist literature, these groups aren’t even close to being Socialist, let alone true Leftists. Many of them don’t even identify as “leftists.”
Meanwhile, the American far right paints everyone even slightly to their left as “Communists.” They uses the word “Communist” as a slur for anyone who doesn’t align with their ideology, even if those people are nothing more than moderate liberals.
I agree with Mr. Aaronson’s statement: “increase the NSF’s budget, after you’ve cleansed it of ‘woke Communists”.
Cheers from a faraway land, where oppression runs even deeper.
Comment #94 February 10th, 2025 at 3:52 pm
I think Elizabeth #46 is overstating a valid case a little (do I detect of whiff of antideutsch?). What is true is that Gauss’s work on number theory came at the very beginning of what, for the standards of his time, was a very long life. Other mathematicians faced greater material difficulties (I mean, some died of TB). Gauss seems to have lived his life in stages – first he was a number theorist, then an astronomer, then he got into geodesy (non-Euclidean geometry was tied up with this, wasn’t it) – then physics (while keeping his work in astronomy)… and then he spent most of his time in his last few decades managing the universities’ pension fund, with such seriousness that he apparently became an actuarial culture hero.
Comment #95 February 10th, 2025 at 4:30 pm
Scott #91 I never said it was easy. My point is that the academia writ large managed to do two things:
Become perceived by all sides as siding with the left (woke, social justice, whatever you call it)
Become perceived by a lot of people as not doing anything valuable
With the change in administration it could survive any one of those but not both. I wish it didn’t work that hard on the first one. But since it did, it should have worked to dispel the second one.
Comment #96 February 10th, 2025 at 5:35 pm
Scott #91 The “Joe Rogan of science” – brilliantly put. I used to greatly admire Sabine, but it’s clear that her most popular videos aren’t those where she explained science (which she excels at) but those where she attacks academia. And the anti-science audience is lapping it up and feels validated in their beliefs. She either willfully ignores this effect or may even lean into it, because the YouTube incentive structure rewards her for these videos.
At any rate, it’s way past time to now educate the US public on the benefits of academic research. The closest analog to what you are facing now (alas less radicalized yet) is Mao’s cultural revolution which also painted the academic intelligentsia as the enemy – it’s rather ironic that the American “conservative” culture warriors are taking a page from Mao’s (little red) book. Then again the more self aware agitators like Bannon were always aware of those similarities as he compared himself to Lenin.
When I first came to the US in the nineties I was puzzled by the ever present anti-intellectualism in American culture. Since then it has only gotten worse. I don’t think there is much of a chance that the American public can be motivated to speak up for academic freedom and funding. As in all other areas they will only start to care once they are hurt by the consequences. But unlike Medicaid or SS cuts these effects will take some time to be felt and by then the American research infrastructure will have been irrevocably harmed.
The only way to avoid this outcome will be another federal institution curtailing the administration’s slash and burn tactic. Realistically, I think the best (small) hope is that the Democrats regain control of the House.
Comment #97 February 10th, 2025 at 9:08 pm
Ty #87
“Greenspan: I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.
And it’s been my experience, having worked both as a regulator for 18 years and similar quantities in the private sector, especially 10 years at a major international bank, that the loan officers of those institutions knew far more about the risks involved in the people to whom they lent money, than I saw even our best regulators at the Fed capable of doing.
So the problem here is something which looked to be a very solid edifice, and, indeed a critical pillar to market competition and free markets, did break down. And I think that, as I said, shocked me. I still do not fully understand why it happened, and, obviously to the extent that I figure out where it happened and why, I will change my views. If the facts change, I will change.”
https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/journals/ea/v10i1/04.html
I know exactly which kind of academic research needs to be defunded. Empirical economics begins with government recordkeeping. Anti-government ideologues in economics departments are the most dangerous anti-science community in a democracy.
immediiate download:
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ows/seminars/tcentury/Historical.pdf
bank failure, income inequality correlation
Comment #98 February 10th, 2025 at 11:26 pm
https://fee.org/articles/why-most-academics-tilt-left/
Comment #99 February 11th, 2025 at 2:57 am
> “Please preserve and increase the NSF’s budget, after you’ve cleansed it of “woke communism” as you see fit”
This is such a weird sentence.
I’m not sure a lot of good has ever come from “cleansing an organization from people with a different point of view”. It leads to fear, keeping your head down, looking the other way, pointing to others, “just do what they want you to do”-attitude.
Plus: how many famous scientists would’ve been expulsed with this attitude? Or left of their own accord? Would Turing stay?
It feels very anti-thetical of a healthy scientific/innovation environment.
Comment #100 February 11th, 2025 at 3:01 am
Harald #94, perhaps I’ve overstated the case, it is just an original opinion, that Gauss was the best example I’ve found of a mathematical genius who was derailed by political instability in his prime (clearly I wanted to distinguish between health and family difficulties, which were common, vs political instability specifically). I see how Gauss could be defended from the Hardy / Fields medal point of view that mathematics is a young-persons game, and that Gauss did well in his youth, but I’ve always found that brand of ageism to be silly in the face of counterexamples. To show that I’m quite pro-German I’ll mention that my favorite mathematical late bloomer is Weierstrass, who was a high school teacher until his early 40s, when he published textbooks that established Real Analysis as we know it today, earning him an honorary doctorate and a professorship that started in his 40s. Weierstrass is one of my favorites because he injected more clarity at once into mathematics than perhaps anyone else besides Cantor. Another notable example of a German late-bloomer was Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason was published in his mid 50s, although he had already been a professor before then, it was only in is 50s that he became established as a great genius of history (sorry for slipping in a philosopher, I know most modern “doctors of philosophy” don’t appreciate them, or mature thought in general…).
Back to Gauss for a bit, I’m more specialized in physics than other subjects, so I looked into his work on magnetism to give him another chance. It seems he made contributions to measuring the magnetic field of the earth, discovered Kirchhoff’s circuit rules but did not publish them in time (a common theme throughout Gauss’s life), and following Faraday’s great discovery of induction, Gauss tried but failed to assemble a general theory of electromagnetism of the sort that Maxwell eventually created (Wikipedia describes his efforts at the general theory as a “tragic failure” – my own assessment is that vector analysis was not yet ripe in Gauss’s time). So I’d assess Gauss’s contribution to E&M to be in the bottom half of the top 10 at best, which is about where the mainstream of history probably sees him in that area. Once again I can sympathize that he got screwed by language and timing issues. Compare this to Euler’s contributions to classical mechanics, where he is in the top 5 with Newton, Lagrange, Hamilton, and Poincare, and really Euler was the one who made Newton intelligible to all who followed so his role was central. Sorry for this long tangent – reviewing the topic affirms my feeling that Gauss is over-rated, and my tying it to his political unstable times is an attempt to reconcile why history over-rates him. But maybe I just don’t appreciate that historic 17-gon construction enough, I’ve only had time for number theory after I retired due to our own politically unstable times. Thanks.
Comment #101 February 11th, 2025 at 5:42 am
Matthijs #99: Does it help that, a decade ago, I had almost exactly the converse plea to those who then held power over my world? Namely: “after you’ve finished clearing out misogyny and racism as you define them and as you see fit, will you then please suffer me and my friends to continue doing science”?
I’m satisfied that, via for example this blog, I’ve been more politically outspoken than 99% of scientists. For me, then, posing the question in this way is not a cowardly act of weakness, but a deliberate choice (see also my Kolmogorov Option essay).
If the answer to my plea is no, then every fair-minded, truth-valuing person on the planet has dramatically witnessed everything they need to know about the new reigning ideology. And if the answer is yes, then at least science gets to keep improving the world until the latest ideological fervor wanes, as they all eventually do.
Comment #102 February 11th, 2025 at 7:10 am
@Ty #98
Are you aware that appeals to authority are rhetorical fallacies?
My mother and her older sister begged for bread in the Great Depression. Meanwhile, Friedrich Hayek grew up with a silver spoon,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek#Early_life
The problem with the kind of appeal Balfour makes in your link is that Hayek cannot defend his own utopian view from his own argument. That, unfortunately, is a common error among people (including myself, at times) who hope to prove some truth where there is no premise taken as a common belief.
The inherent unscientific aspect of Austrian economics is that one cannot meaningfully acquire data on the economic motivations and choices of every individual. It is the same problem which confronts modern physics. One can make “in principle” reductive arguments because mechanical philosophy assumes such reductionism is correct. But, as the number of “particles” increases, the wave equation intended to predict the physics becomes intractible to actual calculation. One cannot exclude all forms of emergence.
Austrian economists simply cannot provide empirical data for their own claims. Like the many theorists in foundational physics being criticised for adjusting parameters for theories with no predictive capacity, Austrian economists and their promoters can always use empirical data obtained from empirical economics to adjust their rhetoric.
There is a reason that people who work in the hard sciences raise an eyebrow toward knowledge claims which are based solely on deduction. Although this is not always justified (Neptune had been substantiated, whereas Vulcan had not), it is a good rule of thumb for actual science.
Until Austrian economists produce actual scientific evidence consistent with their methodological basis, I will retain my opinion that anti-government ideologues in economics departments are a primary threat to democratic principles.
Comment #103 February 11th, 2025 at 7:14 am
This is completely off-topic, but if you want to be frustrated by something else just for a change, I found a thesis from a couple of decades ago (from a well-known North American institution of some repute, supervised by someone in quantum foundations that is no slouch) with this pearl of wisdom in the first page introduction:
“…give even the tiniest quantum computer, the qubit, an infinite advantage over any classical machine”
I don’t believe you can easily find this thesis online, and even then the ocr’ed scan is so bad it’s not really scrapeable, so no one bother looking. This is certainly a new one for me: a qubit is a quantum computer, and could, in principle, not just exhibit quantum supremacy, but apparently be *infinitely* better than *any* classical machine.
I have no idea how this got through the proof-reading stage…
To quote Mr Bennett, “Are you not diverted?” 🙂
Comment #104 February 11th, 2025 at 7:43 am
@scott:
I think it’s a false equivalence?
I hope we can all agree that we hate misogyny and racism. Both concepts are rotten from the core, based on hate and fear.
Communism and ‘woke-ness’ (whatever that is) are at their core (naively) hopeful concepts. “Yay, everyone is the same”. Concepts so universal that they align with ancient teachings of Buddha and Jesus and Kondo: get rid of your stuff and treat everyone the same, and boom: you’re happy.
Note that I’m not saying that they are _good_ ideas, btw. We can point at a million different problems that arose when communist/woke gets forcefully implemented.
I too trust in capitalism and meritocracy.
What I am saying:
It’s possible to work with a moderate communist or woke-person. The hippies who walk around in socks made from goat-wool. The type that wants to do better, hold themselves accountable, and spread the word. Yeah, you don’t want the systemic prescription/religion type, but isn’t that a minority?
But working with a ‘moderate’ racist or misogynist: I’d leave.
Besides, a little bit of woke stuff is good. Just not in excess (that’s the real problem: America never knows how to do anything in moderation). We know scientists are normal people who have biases (confirmation bias, publication bias, sampling bias, availability bias, etc), and there are mechanisms to prevent those biases. It’s not that weird to suggest there may be social biases as well, and that overall it’s good to prevent those.
Comment #105 February 11th, 2025 at 8:13 am
Matthijs #104: On the left, you have a spectrum from “be nice to others” and “share with the less fortunate” and “be aware of your biases,” all the way to the Stalinist and Maoist ideologies that murdered 100 million people trying to remake human nature in pursuit of those visions. And some far-leftists who really do want the latter will strategically retreat to the former when challenged, and many rightists will use the specter of the latter to condemn even the former.
Meanwhile on the right, you have a spectrum from “reward hard work and gumption” and “treat people as individuals rather than members of identity groups” and “say what you mean rather than constantly walking on eggshells,” all the way to “the superior races must cleanse the earth of the inferior ones, while forcing women to breed superior babies.” And some far-rightists who really do want the latter will strategically retreat to the former when challenged, and many leftists will use the specter of the latter to condemn even the former.
This is the symmetry.
Would you like me to concede that it takes a little more intellectual effort to see the horror of the far-left vision, without (say) the experience of the twentieth century—and that therefore, the far-left vision is in more danger of seducing otherwise smart, thoughtful, idealistic people who for whatever reasons failed to update on that experience?
Comment #106 February 11th, 2025 at 8:48 am
@Scott:
That’s exactly right and very nicely worded. But nobody is A or B.
We’re all a jumbled mess of both. And sometimes one side gets the better of us.
Sometimes to the extreme: people “on the right” who value hard-work and initiative, but choose to give their lazy son a high-paid position in the company. People “on the left” who want to be so nice and peaceful, that they would literally kill to achieve it.
We need the forces to be in balance.
And sadly, it feels like the current fashion is to try and push people apart and force them in their respective corners 🙁
(plus: it’s not just people. There’s also other forces at play, such as luck and systemic bias. These should not be underestimated. Even the hardest working person cannot beat being at the right time and place – or the wrong time and place)
I feel we can get to a reasonable list of “don’t be an idiotic asshole” pretty easily by contrasting the views. And get to something we can all teach our children:
Reward hard work and initiative – but be aware you might’ve had an unfair starting point. Strive create a level playing field
Give to others freely and share – but don’t reward lazy freeloaders
Say what you mean – but be polite and with respect, and try to understand others: they might be right
Trust others are doing their bit, allow experimentation – and make it clear there are consequences for malice
Respect individual people and their freedom – as long as it doesn’t negatively impact someone else
Help people who are in need – but within your limits, make sure you are okay first
Give others space to talk and listen, don’t punish them for thinking different, challenge yourself – but stand strong by your own convictions and follow your own path
etc.
Comment #107 February 11th, 2025 at 9:10 am
Does the dating app promise exponentially growing matches and does it crash if you peek at the screen at the wrong time?
Comment #108 February 11th, 2025 at 10:28 am
I just saw this by Dr. Peter Woit on his blog and think it sums up the situation well:
” The US is now under the control of oligarchs and those who believe the way forward is to just start smashing anything with an aspect that fits in their long list of resentments. I don’t see how this ends well, hope that I’m wrong.”
Comment #109 February 11th, 2025 at 11:17 am
Elizabeth #100: by “anti-Deutsch” I meant a specifically German brand of contrariness that loves to go against German pieties, not some sort of prejudiced ‘anti-Germanness’. But never mind.
I got the same impression about Gauss’s work in electromagnetism – Gauss and Weber’s attempt was brave but flawed. (OTOH they managed to put together the first telegraph, though not a very practical one yet.) Gauss’s contributions to number theory weren’t just the work of a prodigy, though – what would be a fair comparison, perhaps the first half of Mozart’s creative output? And of course he did contribute very substantially to geometry (intrinsic curvature). It may be true that popular accounts simply don’t give enough credit to those who preceded him (Fermat, Euler, Legendre, Lagrange) and those who followed him – Dirichlet, Riemann, Dedekind (though obviously Gauss had a hand at making Göttingen into a major center).
I honestly don’t know how major was the actual effect political instability had on Gauss’s output. Maybe he’s just the kind person who masters a field and then loses interest and moves to the next one.
Comment #110 February 11th, 2025 at 11:43 am
Scott:
Well, one difference is that “hard work and gumption” are not uniquely or even disproportionately right-wing *values*, even if their _invocation_ tends to be a mainstay of a certain kind of right wing rhetoric (in our days, not when the Right was monarchist and aristocratic, obviously).
I also would have to say that it’s much easier to get along and work with a non-fanatical communist than with a non-fanatical fascist or racist (as the quip went: “someone who does not hate Jews more than necessary”).
I suppose one difference is that, while no side has a monopoly on violence, or on unreason (even if traditionally the left has had a clear filiation to the Enlightenment), some kinds of positions leave people who hold them out of self-interest open to charges of hypocrisy. The greedy Maoist and the Christian conservative who pressures his mistress to abort, can all fairly be called hypocrites. I suppose people who announce their belief in enriching themselves as much as they can need not worry about that charge, unless (as they often do) they derive their wealth from state concessions, say; ditto for woke careerists who believe rules should be bent in their own favor. I’m not sure that’s a good reason to find the latter kind of position attractive, however.
Comment #111 February 11th, 2025 at 12:15 pm
Scott #101 Matthuis #99
““Please preserve and increase the NSF’s budget, after you’ve cleansed it of “woke communism” as you see fit”
This is such a weird sentence.
I’m not sure a lot of good has ever come from “cleansing an organization from people with a different point of view”.”
” I had almost exactly the converse plea to those who then held power over my world? Namely: “after you’ve finished clearing out misogyny and racism as you define them and as you see fit, will you then please suffer me and my friends to continue doing science”?”
1) Since when is “woke and communist” equivalent to “misogyny and racism”?!
Haven’t we learned anything from the communist-purging McCarthy era?! Especially when it comes to Jewish scientists in the US (e.g. watch “Oppenheimer” again).
Wokism, as a term, was originally about Black people being aware of the reality of their situation.
2) I guess maybe it doesn’t matter as long as it doesn’t affect what he believes in… i.e. if it was about purging “zionism and evolutionism”, it’d be another story. 😀
Comment #112 February 11th, 2025 at 12:23 pm
Garald #110:
I also would have to say that it’s much easier to get along and work with a non-fanatical communist than with a non-fanatical fascist or racist (as the quip went: “someone who does not hate Jews more than necessary”).
“Moderate racist” certainly sounds like an oxymoron. But the central problem with your statement is the massive recent expansion in the definitions of “fascist” and “racist”—even while there continue to be all too many people who satisfy the old definitions. In the Robin DiAngelo / Ibram Kendi moral universe, for example, a “racist” could be anyone who supports any institution or evaluation measure with any statistical racial disparity in outcomes—or even anyone who gets defensive when accused of being a racist. Of course, this definitional expansion came at the same time as the salience of racism, and the consequences of racism accusations, were being raised toward infinity.
By now it seems fair to say that this strategy has spectacularly backfired—just like many of us warned at the time, all it did was cheapen the concept of racism to the point where people no longer care about actual racism. But, failure though it was, redefining classical liberals as “moderate racists” absolutely was the strategy—I was there! 🙂
Comment #113 February 11th, 2025 at 12:37 pm
Scott #111:
Right, there’s that. I meant racists, not ‘racists’. I think you and I can tell the difference!
Comment #114 February 11th, 2025 at 1:37 pm
Garald #110,
Okay, but then, “be nice to others” and “share with the less fortunate” are not uniquely or even disproportionately left wing *values*, even if their _invocation_ tends to be a mainstay of a certain kind of left wing rhetoric. What’s good for the goose…
Comment #115 February 11th, 2025 at 2:10 pm
In your top post, you write “””Or does anyone think that I, for example, am a “woke communist”? I, the old-fashioned Enlightenment liberal who repeatedly risked his reputation to criticize “woke communism,” who the “woke communists” denounced when they noticed him at all, and who narrowly survived a major woke cancellation attempt a decade ago?”””
I think that there are people who think you are woke. I can think of a couple ways of explaining this by means of analogy:
First is the “what water?” sense. (This is a reference to the joke about fish, made popular by DFW among others.) You’re a professor in mainstream academia, and there are a lot of things that strike people outside academia as “woke” that you wouldn’t notice. Perhaps this is helped a lot by the unclear referent “woke”.
The second analogy is about how many closely-related people actually hate each other and think they’re very different, but outsiders can’t tell. For example, people might call a Ukrainian “Russian” without thinking much of it, but the person in question might think it’s a terrible insult. Or person P can’t tell Shia and Sunni Muslims apart — it might be a defining characteristic of person Q that they’re Shiite but somehow to P “you are just a Muslim to me”. I think this pattern is very common across the world. And so the version here is that you think you’re very opposed to wokeness, but from across the pond you might look the same.
Comment #116 February 11th, 2025 at 2:23 pm
Scott 112.
Trying to understand where the “racism” line is. Certainly many wokes would think I’m racist, but I know I’m not.
Racism means treating people differently because of the color of their skin, or espousing beliefs that people should be treated worse because of their skin color (for example, blacks shouldn’t be allowed to go to the same schools as white people, etc.)
Now I’m white/European, and I do have “white pride.” I don’t think that makes me racist. I’m proud of my ancestors, I’m not ashamed of my heritage or of being European, and I’m proud and appreciative of the huge contributions white/Europeans have made to world history. I don’t think “whiteness” is something to be ashamed of, and in fact, I think Europeans have made the world a much better place. Europeans originated the capitalist and industrial revolutions that transformed the world.
I don’t hate other people at all. I don’t treat people differently because they’re not European. But I do have a “European identity”—I’m proud of what Europeans have accomplished and how we’ve transformed the world, and I refuse to be ashamed of it.
I know you are, if not proud to be Jewish, identify strongly with your Jewish identity. I don’t think pride in European ancestry is intellectually disqualifying or racist. “Europeans” might not be as tight-knit or coherent an identity as Jewish people, but I think you can’t understand world history without appreciating that these strange light-skinned peoples at the edge of Eurasia, speaking Romance and Germanic languages and practicing Christianity, for thousands of years a backwater, in a matter of a couple hundred years totally rebuilt the world as we know it. It’s an amazing story and it’s hard not to feel pride for my ancestors, to be part of this story.
Am I a racist in your view, Scott? What do you think?
Comment #117 February 11th, 2025 at 2:52 pm
Adam Treat #110,
“Be nice to others” certainly isn’t uniquely or even particularly left-wing, especially not if “nice” means “polite”.
I’d say that the idea that sharing with others is not strictly supererogatory, or a way to show noblesse obligue, but part of a duty to work towards a fairer world, is inherently left-wing, though in a very broad, ethical sense that includes, say, the current Pope.
Comment #118 February 11th, 2025 at 3:17 pm
freakyeraser #116: The one thing that’s weird to me is, why “European” pride? Why not Swedish or Latvian or Italian or whichever other kind(s) of European you are? Normally, people who just want to explore and take pride in their ancestry, without it being a cover for anything else, would get more specific than a whole continent as wildly diverse as Europe.
Comment #119 February 11th, 2025 at 3:42 pm
I mean, why not go down further? Why not Milan pride or Manchester pride or Philly pride (go Eagles!) Human social structures, cultures, and ethnicities are fractal. When you study world history—and I’ve been fascinated with world history since I was a little kid—you have to suppress some degrees of freedom, so to speak; that is, you have to study things at some level of granularity. Douglas Hofstadter in “Godel, Escher, Bach” calls this “chunking.”
I submit that as a student of global history, it’s a surprising, important, and useful fact that “Europeans”—these strange peoples at the edge of Eurasia, speaking Romance and Germanic languages and practicing western Christianity, who for a very long time were a backwater of civilization—remade the world in two hundred years. They originated the scientific and industrial and capitalist revolutions that transformed the world. They started the agricultural revolution that feeds the world today (the “Haber process” and pesticides and herbicides). They also enslaved millions of people and depopulated the Americas and conquered much of the world. As a student of history, it’s enormously important to understand the influence of Europeans on the rest of the world. We might call it “the West.” It’s illuminating in this context to think of “the West” as a singular thing, a superethnic group or a geographically and culturally pseudo-cohesive group of peoples or whatever.
Unfortunately, it’s become orthodox in many parts of academia in the US and Europe to understand Europeans and their interactions with the rest of the world as entirely negative. European societies (some of them) did conquer and enslave and kill. But if you imagine a balancing scale, with all the atrocities inflicted by Western societies on one side and all the contributions on the other, it’s not even close. It’s off by orders of magnitude. Europeans killed millions but saved billions.
If you imagine a hypothetical world in which Europeans were all killed, say, by the Black death, today would look very grim indeed. The industrial revolution never happened. The population of Earth is a few billions short of what it is in our reality. Most people are desperately poor peasants. There’s no modern technology, no communication.
The interaction of Europeans with the rest of the world dramatically changed the world, and for the better.
But who are Europeans? That’s a tricky question. Europeans are a pan-ethnic group, or a pan-socioethnic group. They’re Indo-European / Indo-Iranic, whose language and perhaps a big part of their genome descends from nomadic herders and warriors in the steppes thousands of years ago. They’re the fusion of Roman and Germanic cultures. They lived in feudal societies and practiced Western Christianity. They’re the product of thousands of years of migration on the European subcontinent. You could probably identify some constellation of y-DNA and mitochondrial DNA haplogroups that reasonably identifies European (according to all these definitions Ashkenazi Jews are European, minus the Western Christianity part of course).
I would submit that, historically speaking, pride in a European nation is far more dangerous than pride in “pan-European identity.” German and French and British and Russian nationalism produced the first world war, that horrific slaughterhouse that stole millions of lives. Hitler rose to power on German nationalism, not Himmler’s kooky Aryan race theories. He loved Germans, not Italians. He hated the French because of the Franco-Prussian war and the first world war (Mein Kampf). He hated Slavs. Obviouslt he hated Ashkenazi Jews, who have been living in Europe for thousands of years.The vast majority of the Nazis’ victims were themselves white Europeans—Ashkenazis and Slavs. Why isn’t German pride taken to be a cover for Nazism?
What has European pride given us? The European Union! Is the European Union an inherently racist project? Is it a cover for something else? Why should the EU even exist if there’s no coherent pan-European cultural identity?
In Academia, in many universities, Europeans, the West, “whiteness” are hated. We’re the cause of all the world’s problems. Defend yourself by pointing out all the contributions that these societies have made to the world, however, and suddenly POOF! white people don’t exist. It’s a blatant double standard. If somebody wants to spout about how white europeans are evil colonizers, it’s perfectly valid to point out all the contributions they’ve made to the world.
Comment #120 February 11th, 2025 at 3:56 pm
I fear I may have misspoken about the Nazis, and I’m sure you know much more about them than me. Of course they had their Nordic race theory, the Nuremberg laws etc. What I say is threefold
1. Germans voted for the Nazis primarily because of German nationalism, not because of the Nordic race theory
2. The German concept of the Nordic race really can’t be identified with white Europeans in any coherent sense. Italians were “less Nordic.” Slavs weren’t Nordic at all (although I suppose in at least one of my schemes they don’t speak Romance or Germanic languages).
3. The Nazis imperial ambitions were directed east, towards Russia. They didn’t really have any interest in colonization of Africa or Asia or subjugating Asians or Africans.
Also a lot of their issues focused specifically on German nationalism, like punishing the French for WW1 and the franco-prussian war
Comment #121 February 11th, 2025 at 4:17 pm
freakyeraser #119, #120: That’s great, you do you. I find that I don’t even care enough to search what you’ve written for signs of possible racism. As such, and given possible troll tendencies, anything further on this will be left in moderation.
Comment #122 February 11th, 2025 at 6:49 pm
I think reducing $9 billion to $3billion to pulverize lower ranked universities. Universities ranked below 50 would resort to getting more undergraduates and reduce graduate education.
An example: It happened during great recession where higher ranked UCs were prioritized over lower ranked UCs in the UC system.
Comment #123 February 11th, 2025 at 10:45 pm
Interesting that Kyle complained that most of his professors hated half the country. But to a viewer from Mars, sorry, Europe, it often seems that *all* Americans hate half the country! The other half.
Comment #124 February 12th, 2025 at 1:33 am
> “Moderate racist” certainly sounds like an oxymoron.
> all it did was cheapen the concept of racism to the point where people no longer care about actual racism
Completely agree with this.
But…
There are problems that exist that don’t fall into classical racism. Problems that are difficult to talk about without a word for it (like systemic effects. Branding those racism kind-of helps getting attention to these problems, but doesn’t help fixing them, because it gets people into aggression/defense.
I think it’s possible for people to be non-racist, work with the best of intentions, but still have their actions contribute to (down the line, unintended) negative effects.
We can see a similar thing happening with anti-semitism, where a critique of an action of the state of Israel gets branded anti-Jewish. But the person isn’t an anti-Semite, his words aren’t, but maybe voicing his opinion does bolster others to further_their_ antisemitism.
Comment #125 February 12th, 2025 at 2:07 am
Elizabeth#46 … I truly believe that you do not fully grasp Gauss’s contribution to mathematics (even considering the few things he published during his lifetime). While the quantity may be small compared to Euler, the quality is incomparable—from the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, which established a rigorous foundation for modular arithmetic and calculations in algebraic fields, to his rigorous and astonishingly creative proofs of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra and the Law of Quadratic Reciprocity.
Comment #126 February 12th, 2025 at 7:16 am
Elizabeth #100: “Gauss tried but failed to assemble a general theory of electromagnetism of the sort that Maxwell eventually created (Wikipedia describes his efforts at the general theory as a “tragic failure” – my own assessment is that vector analysis was not yet ripe in Gauss’s time)”
Vector analysis was not yet ripe in Maxwell’s time either. The vector calculus we know today was developed by Gibbs and Heaviside long after Maxwell had already formulated his theory and didn’t mature until around 1900.
Comment #127 February 12th, 2025 at 8:23 am
Matthijs #124: Of course it’s possible to make life worse for a racial group even without any racist animus, and of course we need to be able to discuss such matters! But experience has confirmed that it’s impossible to use the word “racism”—even with modifiers like “structural,” “systemic,” etc—without making people extremely defensive. This is all the more so when the people who say the important racism is “structural” or “systemic,” then contradict themselves by eagerly joining mobs to cancel individuals (as in the “ne-geh” incident).
While antisemitism raises different issues, there too I avoid deploying the word even against the most fanatical antizionists, always trying to offer them an out (“so then … after Israel is eradicated, surely you have a plan for where half the world’s Jews go next … don’t you?”), until the antizionist has really, truly eliminated all explanations for their stance other than that one.
Comment #128 February 12th, 2025 at 1:19 pm
Interesting discussion, but nobody tries thinking from the opposite side.
What would you do, if you believe that higher education has been so badly politically captured by a deranged politics that reforms might be impossible; you got a few years of limited democratic power; you want to try to fix the problem? This was debated in the past months. Can you suggest something better than what is being done now?
Comment #129 February 12th, 2025 at 6:48 pm
@Scott, I am an international student pursuing a masters in cs in the US. I am aiming for a phd position working at the intersection of deep learning interpretability and theoretical computer science. I am deeply saddened by the current situation in the country, but as a nerd wanting to pursue a career in research, am particularly devastated about this move.
I have 2 groups of questions –
1) In the timeline of the next 6 months to 2-3 years, will this affect a student’s ability to be enrolled as a phd position in cs? How much can it reduce recruitment?
2) What can students do to push for keeping the NSF budget? Is there any plan to fight back against this in a concrete way? Can organising help in this case? (I’m not sure what I can do as an international student)
Comment #130 February 12th, 2025 at 7:34 pm
Abhishu Oza #129: Thanks for the excellent questions.
Unfortunately, we don’t know yet what it means. It could be bad, but it’s also possible that Congress will step in and restore the funding—it’s happened before with threatened cuts to science funding.
As for you, I’d advise you to just do great science, apply for PhD programs when it’s time (in the US and elsewhere), and then take everything including the funding situation into account when you make your decision. Even if NSF funding has collapsed by then, for AI interpretability in particular there’s a lot of private philanthropic funding in the US.
You can post on social media etc if you feel strongly, but for the most part, leave the advocacy to the middle-aged guys like me whose ability to do science is on the wane.
Comment #131 February 12th, 2025 at 11:34 pm
Scott #85, on what admittedly is a somewhat of a side topic here:
> As for commitment to DEI being a criterion for awarding federal grants … well, my preference is that “outreach to underserved communities” is simply one thing of many that you can choose to talk about, in the Broader Outreach section of your proposal.
I believe you meant “Broader Impacts,” which can include outreach, but that is just “one thing of many.” I would go further. I feel NSF should make “Broader Impacts” a *programmatic* requirement, not a requirement for each and every proposal/grant. The current approach has multiple shortcomings; just a few here. The requirement encourages mediocrity in broader impacts, because most researchers don’t have the expertise to do it very well, and proposers and NSF each lack the resources needed to include talented BI experts in every project. In practice (as I’ve seen both as a review panel member, and in reviews of my own grants), thanks to the BI requirement’s vague criteria, it gets used to criticize a proposal enough to kill it, without having to offer substantive scientific (“Intellectual merit”) criticism, when a reviewer just doesn’t like a topic without being able to articulate an objective scientific criticism—just give it positive but not enthusiastic IM grades, but criticize BI (a fundable proposal needs both to be positive). If BI were a programmatic goal, actual BI experts could lead proposals (some or many perhaps linked to a research-focused proposal), with a few of those selected by each program, each cycle, making much stronger broader impacts than diffusing the BI effort across every single proposal. Although I’m a researcher (astrophysics & statistics), I could easily see myself as an enthusiastic team member for such a BI proposal on occasion, though my heart is really in research.
My impression is that the BI requirement is related to your #86 observation — “sure, there are arrogant jerks in STEM academia…,” i.e., don’t judge the whole field by its worst members. From my discussions with admins, the BI requirement appears to have been added as an overreaction to rare cases of frivolous (or at least apparently frivolous) research. The “solution” was to require that every funded research project *somehow* “contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes” (inclusion being among the list, along with STEM workforce growth, national security, etc.). I’ve never seen a good argument for linking that requirement to the funding decision for every possible research project. Surely good, impactful scientific research can be done by a team without it devoting specific effort to the laundry list of BI topics.
Comment #132 February 13th, 2025 at 6:24 am
Tom Loredo #31: Ah yes, Broader Impacts. Years ago, my patience for tedium and executive function deteriorated to the point where I can only be on a grant application if someone else (e.g., a co-PI) is managing the details.
I actually have zero problem with scientists applying for grants being asked to speculate briefly about why the person on the street (or at least in the next department over) might care about their efforts. But yes, “Intellectual Merit” should be at least like 80% of it.
Comment #133 February 13th, 2025 at 8:47 am
Not to keep beating the dead horse, but Lee Jussim, who can only be considered to be a right-winger in the context of the academia, has written a much better historical review of the situation than I ever cool https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/we-tried-to-warn-you
Comment #134 February 13th, 2025 at 9:44 am
@Scott #130, Aye aye, captain 🫡
Comment #135 February 13th, 2025 at 7:17 pm
Garald #110, 117: “I also would have to say that it’s much easier to get along and work with a non-fanatical communist than with a non-fanatical fascist …”
“I’d say that the idea that sharing with others is not strictly supererogatory, or a way to show noblesse obligue, but part of a duty to work towards a fairer world, is inherently left-wing, though in a very broad, ethical sense that includes, say, the current Pope.”
The current Pope apparently exemplifying a “non-fanatical communist” reminded me of Paul Erdős allegedly referring to the Almighty as the “Supreme Fascist”.
Comment #136 February 13th, 2025 at 9:40 pm
PS. János Kádár is apt to be classified by many as a “non-fanatical communist” (aka ‘goulash communist’), while Viktor Orbán might well find himself being allocated to a neighborhood of the “non-fanatical fascist” category. It is not altogether clear to me personally whether the former would necessarily be preferable to the latter by the majority of the Hungarians who experienced both. The choice between, say, Brezhnev and Putin strikes me as being no less bereft of an unambiguously clear resolution in favor of the “non-fanatical communist” (and that “non-fanatical fascist” appellation — “conceived in a very broad, ethical sense” — is indeed applicable to Putin I personally find difficult to dispute).
Comment #137 February 14th, 2025 at 12:21 pm
f3et #125: thank you for the pointers, I love counterpoints (so the I can learn more), and I also especially love works of incomparable quality, so thanks for defending Gauss that way. I hope to appreciate those works more soon and I’ll hold my judgement of Gauss for now. It makes sense what you say given Gauss’s historical ranking, I just haven’t seen it compared to what others have done in the areas of math I know. I’ve studied math for +20 years but mostly analysis since I am a quantum physicist. It’s only about 6 months ago that I learned the law of quadratic reciprocity while trying out some work on prime numbers (I wondered whether the Hilbert-Polya approach to the RH could be accessible through a growing family of finite dimensional matrices, and learned enough to appreciate the answer is very likely to be “no”). Cheers.
Comment #138 February 16th, 2025 at 8:03 am
Is it “vox populi, vox dei” now? A reasonable, decent, constructive, mature person would almost certainly prefer to work with a non-fanatical communist (note: I’d put the Pope in the former, not the latter category) than with a non-fanatical fascist. Many people would make the opposite choice.
Brezhnev was grossly corrupt. Perhaps I should have added “non-fanatical *sincere* communist” or “I don’t mean a non-fanatical person who works with way up the system in a self-declared communist regime” (even though it might be very much possible to reach detente with such a person on an international level).
Comment #139 February 16th, 2025 at 1:28 pm
Scott, this is a revolution. Of course, there will be collateral damage.
The funds are frozen due to DEI elements in broader impacts and stuff like that. You and I both know that most, if not all, scientists pay lip service to DEI ideology to improve their chances of securing NSF funding—including myself, which I am not proud of. While I sympathize with those affected by the policy change, eliminating the DEI nonsense is exactly what we need to remain competitive against China. Of course, right-wingers have their own ideological blind spots, such as American exceptionalism. However, the fact that you frame this policy change as something that weakens America against China suggests a TDS-driven bias.
It’s also interesting that, after criticizing wokism for so long, you now struggle to accept the tide turning against it. I admire you for speaking out against wokism, but it’s clear that academia cannot reform itself. After all, if it weren’t so full of conformists, DEI statements and cancel culture wouldn’t have taken over so easily. Any meaningful change must come from outside academia. Since Democrats refuse to act, I applaud Republicans for pushing back, even though I fully recognize their own agendas.
Comment #140 February 17th, 2025 at 9:00 am
Saying what the federal administration is doing is revitalizing government agencies and anything bad that happens is just minor collateral damage, is like doing a home remodeling project by driving a cyber truck through the living room. Sure, maybe you need to update the house, but driving a truck through it isn’t how any sane person goes about doing that.
Last week, the administration fired hundreds of employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency in charge of managing the country’s nuclear weapons. Now the government is complaining that a lot of these people are actually needed back at work, but they have no way to contact them because their access to their work emails was revoked as part of the firing process. All this at a time when the agency and the GAO have recently expressed that the NNSA is in danger of being understaffed. This is not evidence of an administration that knows what they’re doing.
Comment #141 February 17th, 2025 at 1:38 pm
Peter Jordanson #139:
Nice parody,
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/why-i-am-dr.-peter-b.-jordanson-now
if only we could now go back being serious and behaving like adults…
Comment #142 February 18th, 2025 at 3:35 pm
I have no idea how science is funded in China, but they manage to do it inspite of being a communist corrupt dictatorship… so there’s hope!
Comment #143 February 21st, 2025 at 12:58 pm
Funding for my career has always depended on government grants, contracts and coop agmts. I’m also old enough to remember both the good and the bad in research administration, like the guy from university who negotiated rate agreements going straight to the federal side to sell the idea that universities were double-dipping on facilities and administrative costs (e.g., pencils, secretaries, etc.) by buying them as direct costs – anyway it was a lot of effort and I don’t know that it helped much more than his career. Then there was the efficient idea to drop budget detail at the NIH and move to modular $25k components for the most common projects. I know that a, perhaps minority, of us have vocally complained about bloated administrations while faculty salaries and tenure languish.
In any case, it reminds me of what our software engineer (one of those bright people you listen to when he bursts-out, “No, no, no, you’re wrong, and here’s why”) said during a usual complaining session about peer-review. He thought you could probably do about as well by making an initial sweep to clear out the obvious lunatics, and then randomly award the rest on the idea that all the effort to distinguish between a project with a score of 9 compared to one with 11 really was wasted effort with the distinctions falling more toward random preference than useful rating. Maybe start a thread on peer review here?
Comment #144 February 21st, 2025 at 10:03 pm
Introducing pseudo-randomness into the very fabric of a representative liberal democracy might well strike one as a borderline splendid idea; with the stated proviso of “an initial sweep to clear out the obvious lunatics” it is potentially applicable beyond the evidence-based peer-review.
PS. Is there indeed a need for the thereby all-important “initial sweep”? At least on this particular issue the views of JD Vance+ and their European/German interlocutors are apt to differ.
Comment #145 February 22nd, 2025 at 1:17 am
Garald #138: That the Pope is “a reasonable, decent, constructive, mature person” no sane person would dispute. Whether the Pope would in fact prefer Kádár/Brezhnev to Orbán/Putin is far less clearly settled methinks.
Comment #146 February 25th, 2025 at 6:18 pm
Scott #91
I just saw a bit of wonderful expository science in a youtube channel by the name of 3Blue1Brown, called “The distance ladder”. At the end of it he even mentions how LIGO experiments tie into calibrating the distance to distant galaxies, so I couldn’t help but thinking about your comment. I’m posting this comment here in case anyone else enjoys watching that sort of thing.