I speak at Harvard as it faces its biggest crisis since 1636
Every week, I tell myself I won’t do yet another post about the asteroid striking American academia, and then every week events force my hand otherwise.
No one on earth—certainly no one who reads this blog—could call me blasé about the issue of antisemitism at US universities. I’ve blasted the takeover of entire departments and unrelated student clubs and campus common areas by the dogmatic belief that the State of Israel (and only Israel, among all nations on earth) should be eradicated, by the use of that belief as a litmus test for entry. Since October 7, I’ve dealt with comments and emails pretty much every day calling me a genocidal Judeofascist Zionist.
So I hope it means something when I say: today I salute Harvard for standing up to the Trump administration. And I’ll say so in person, when I visit Harvard’s math department later this week to give the Fifth Annual Yip Lecture, on “How Much Math Is Knowable?” The more depressing the news, I find, the more my thoughts turn to the same questions that bothered Euclid and Archimedes and Leibniz and Russell and Turing. Actually, what the hell, why don’t I share the abstract for this talk?
Theoretical computer science has over the years sought more and more refined answers to the question of which mathematical truths are knowable by finite beings like ourselves, bounded in time and space and subject to physical laws. I’ll tell a story that starts with Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Turing’s discovery of uncomputability. I’ll then introduce the spectacular Busy Beaver function, which grows faster than any computable function. Work by me and Yedidia, along with recent improvements by O’Rear and Riebel, has shown that the value of BB(745) is independent of the axioms of set theory; on the other end, an international collaboration proved last year that BB(5) = 47,176,870. I’ll speculate on whether BB(6) will ever be known, by us or our AI successors. I’ll next discuss the P≠NP conjecture and what it does and doesn’t mean for the limits of machine intelligence. As my own specialty is quantum computing, I’ll summarize what we know about how scalable quantum computers, assuming we get them, will expand the boundary of what’s mathematically knowable. I’ll end by talking about hypothetical models even beyond quantum computers, which might expand the boundary of knowability still further, if one is able (for example) to jump into a black hole, create a closed timelike curve, or project oneself onto the holographic boundary of the universe.
Now back to the depressing news. What makes me take Harvard’s side is the experience of Columbia. Columbia had already been moving in the right direction on fighting antisemitism, and on enforcing its rules against disruption, before the government even got involved. Then, once the government did take away funding and present its ultimatum—completely outside the process specified in Title VI law—Columbia’s administration quickly agreed to everything asked, to howls of outrage from the left-leaning faculty. Yet despite its total capitulation, the government has continued to hold Columbia’s medical research and other science funding hostage, while inventing a never-ending list of additional demands, whose apparent endpoint is that Columbia submit to state ideological control like a university in Russia or Iran.
By taking this scorched-earth route, the government has effectively telegraphed to all the other universities, as clearly as possible: “actually, we don’t care what you do or don’t do on antisemitism. We just want to destroy you, and antisemitism was our best available pretext, the place where you’d most obviously fallen short of your ideals. But we’re not really trying to cure a sick patient, or force the patient to adopt better health habits: we’re trying to shoot, disembowel, and dismember the patient. That being the case, you might as well fight us and go down with dignity!”
No wonder that my distinguished Harvard friends (and past Shtetl-Optimized guest bloggers) Steven Pinker and Boaz Barak—not exactly known as anti-Zionist woke radicals—have come out in favor of Harvard fighting this in court. So has Harvard’s past president Larry Summers, who’s welcome to guest-blog here as well. They all understand that events have given us no choice but to fight Trump as if there were no antisemitism, even while we continue to fight antisemitism as if there were no Trump.
Update (April 16): Commenter Greg argues that, in the title of this post, I probably ought to revise “Harvard’s biggest crisis since 1636” to “its biggest crisis since 1640.” Why 1640? Because that’s when the new college was shut down, over allegations that its head teacher was beating the students and that the head teacher’s wife (who was also the cook) was serving the students food adulterated with dung. By 1642, Harvard was back on track and had graduated its first class.
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Comment #1 April 15th, 2025 at 12:53 pm
Thank you for sharing information about the academic situation! As part of a graduate student council at OSU, it has been tough for everyone to learn how to navigate these turbulent waters.
Comment #2 April 15th, 2025 at 1:02 pm
I find it hard to reconcile the fact that you, yourself, were weaponizing the notion of “antisemitism” against universities and students, while also being upset by Trump’s doing the same. Let me make it quite clear: Palestinians are Semites too. One can support the right of Palestine to coexist with Israel, while Israel is performing genocide in Gaza, without being antisemitic. Furthermore, one can simultaneously abhor the actions of Israel and Hamas; both appear from the outside to be governed by terrorists.
Comment #3 April 15th, 2025 at 1:03 pm
Trump uses antisemitism as a pretext to attack freedom of speech in America. Criticism of Israel, particularly in its over reaction to October 7th is not antisemitism. And Jew do themselves (I’m one) a disservice in supporting.
Comment #4 April 15th, 2025 at 1:08 pm
Reality check on the larger picture:
Once Trump will have stashed away tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, he will no longer be tied to voters, wealthy donors, powerful lobbies, US CEOs, judges, or pretty much anything.
Do you think that Putin (the actual richest man in the world) still cares about his voter base, the laws, or external pressure? He only has to make sure that the military is loyal.
The Trump regime sending innocent immigrants to foreign jails, outside of US jurisdiction, and repeating more and more that this will be extended to US citizens, is not an effect of incompetence or plain evil, it’s all on purpose: to create fear. The supposed crackdown on universities is the same: shutting down the intellectual elite.
Do you think that Putin had to send 50% of the Russian population to gulags to shut down the opposition permanently? Jailing of a few key political figures and a few of his own oligarchs was enough.
Finally, Musk/DOGE is now getting control of the electronic voting system. The very thing that Musk claimed again and again was rigged going into the 2024 election… do you see where this is going?
Comment #5 April 15th, 2025 at 2:02 pm
AF #2:
I find it hard to reconcile the fact that you, yourself, were weaponizing the notion of “antisemitism” against universities and students, while also being upset by Trump’s doing the same. Let me make it quite clear: Palestinians are Semites too. One can support the right of Palestine to coexist with Israel…
Did you read my words, or did you just try to extract a general vibe from them?
I’ve always supported the right of Palestine to coexist with Israel. If you also support Israel and Palestine existing next to each other, then that makes you a Zionist like me, specifically a liberal Zionist. A “Zionist,” today, just means anyone who wants Israel to continue existing.
My criticisms, by contrast, were always specifically aimed at anti-Zionists: that is, people who want to end Israel’s existence. Such people played a dominant role in the tentifada protests that followed October 7. My criticisms were not aimed at anyone who criticizes the current Israeli government—an act that I often partake in myself.
Incidentally, “antisemitism”—a term coined by the German antisemite Wilhelm Marr—was never a very good term, but in its actual usage (as opposed to its etymology) it’s always specifically meant Jew-hatred. Every form of hatred is bad, but Jew-hatred is distinctive because of its role as the central conspiracy theory of Western civilization for 2000 years. Playing semantic games with “semite” is not a good way to understand what’s going on here.
Comment #6 April 15th, 2025 at 2:24 pm
While I’m only half Jewish (and not practicing), my father raised me to look for and expect both anti-Jewish hatred and a recurrence of fascism within my lifetime. Needless to say, this was not all a good time. When I was very young he took me to visit the camps and showed me the special star they had for kids like me. This left me with very strong convictions about the idea that we, as a society, should fight anti-semitism — REAL anti-semitism.
My father was (is) also an academic and an ethicist. He believed that democracy and education were the best defense we had against those horrors coming back again. He felt that when fascism came back, it would be people like us who saw the danger and acted first. It would be intelligent, educated people who saw what was coming, and the first target of the regime would be the University system and its faculty.
So none of this is particularly surprising to me.
What is surprising is what has happened this past year. I’ve been forced to watch the most dishonest group of politicians on the planet erect a facade of caring about “anti-semitism”, while redefining the term to mean something entirely different than what I’ve understood it to mean. Those same people then captured the minds of multiple smart people I respect, and essentially tricked them into clapping while they prepared their plans to steamroll higher education, crush the legal profession, render the courts toothless, and then set up a deportation regime that involves literal camps.
So yes, I’m glad that Harvard is standing firm. That’s great news. And I think in the end, America will win. Because the people who are doing this to us are weak, lazy, bad and incompetent.
But it’s not going to make me feel any better. To see someone as intelligent as Scott conditioning his support for academic freedom, essentially feeling the need to write a paragraph that says “Yes but” before he’s willing to express the very obvious view that we, as moral beings, must fight this? Maybe our parents and grandparents overestimated us.
Comment #7 April 15th, 2025 at 2:26 pm
I do have to point out, is it actually its largest crisis since 1636, or are there larger ones inbetween that you just didn’t think of? 😛 Not very relevant to the actual point, since it’s a big deal either way, but…
Comment #8 April 15th, 2025 at 2:28 pm
Any chance of a video of the lecture, Scott? or of a related lecture? Sounds great.
Comment #9 April 15th, 2025 at 2:32 pm
Cycledoc #3:
Trump uses antisemitism as a pretext to attack freedom of speech in America.
Yes, if there was any doubt about that a couple weeks ago, there can no longer be any doubt today.
Criticism of Israel … is not antisemitism.
In the 20-year history of this blog, you’ll never find me making such an equation even once. (You will find plenty of my own criticism of right-wing Israeli policies.)
As I explained in #5, my beef is specifically with the anti-Zionists who drove the post-10/7 protest movement—the ones who loudly say, along with Hamas, that they won’t be satisfied by anything short of Israel’s dissolution (whether or not that includes the mass murder of Israel’s inhabitants that was previewed on 10/7).
Comment #10 April 15th, 2025 at 4:50 pm
Of the Trump admin’s demands, some make me uncomfortable: viewpoint-diversity audits, government/leadership restructuring that favors alignment with the Trump admin, and screening of international students based on political views. These can be abused by whoever is in power. But I also realize that this abuse is already happening, just from the opposite side.
– The diversity that’s audited belongs to DEI: I’m forced to write BPC plans for funding, told to attend BPC conferences, receive DEI training, and bite my tongue when computer science is painted as a racist/sexist discipline.
– The sociology, history, psychology, education, etc. departments are aligned with the political left, and they control who gets hired, gets tenure, gets their annual raise, gets to speak on campus, etc.
– And while we haven’t been actively screening international (or any) students for their political views, we have certainly been indoctrinating them with mandated DEI seminars and certifications, in addition to the political bias present in the above departments.
But surely there are better ways to address these problems, right? One thing that Harvard is certainly guilty of is racial discrimination in its admissions process. Yet, it took YEARS before the issue got pushed to SCOTUS, with Harvard obscuring their racist/illegal policies the whole time and never admitting wrongdoing.
So, while theoretically there might be better ways, I think “no”, in reality there isn’t. Harvard had many chances to course correct and it chose not to.
After years of getting their way, the DEI bullies are getting some small amount of comeuppance. But dismissing the Trump admin’s requests because there’s a component of retaliation is just one more way of trying to avoid a much needed course correction, and Harvard gets no sympathy from me.
Comment #11 April 15th, 2025 at 4:56 pm
Your statement “Columbia’s administration quickly agreed to everything asked” and “despite its total capitulation” is categorically false.
See, e.g., this thread: https://x.com/CUJewsIsraelis/status/1903513712041816280
Second, Columbia’s president literally just resigned because, among other things, she was caught saying to the faculty that they are not even going to enforce what they told the federal government they will.
https://www.thefp.com/p/columbia-president-says-one-thing
Third, the issues at Columbia continue and have not been resolved.
e.g. https://x.com/CUJewsIsraelis/status/1905340309422125362
https://freebeacon.com/campus/masked-protesters-rally-against-columbias-new-mask-policy-testing-schools-resolve-to-deliver-trump-imposed-reforms/
https://x.com/gil_zussman/status/1909048224515567949
Comment #12 April 15th, 2025 at 5:03 pm
Ron #11: Very well—the amount that Columbia agreed to was wildly unprecedented. I wish the administration had taken the win and then built on it, pressing the administration to live up to its commitments rather than quietly reneging on them. They could’ve restored the funding while dangling the threat of cutting it again—believe me, the message was received! 🙂
The scorched-earth strategy that the government is pursuing now goes wildly beyond what’s helpful even for the goal of combating antisemitism. Now the message being received by all of American academia is: “we will destroy you no matter what you do. There’s no point in even trying to cooperate with us. You might as well band together and fight us as best you can.”
Comment #13 April 15th, 2025 at 5:09 pm
Matthew Green #6: I actually agree with most of what you write, but I resent your implication that I’ve “conditioned my support for academic freedom.” From my perspective, I’ve done my best to balance the large, obvious external threat to academic freedom from the Trump goons, with the internal threat to academic freedom from those seeking to turn universities into Zionism-free zones (meaning: “OK, we’ll let you participate in academia as a Jew … if you’ll agree that half the world’s other Jews must be left defenseless against those trying to exterminate them”). Maybe someone else could do a better job of balancing these threats than I have. But I’m skeptical that they’ll succeed, if they start by not even acknowledging the reality of one of the two.
Comment #14 April 15th, 2025 at 5:20 pm
Respectfully, the facts about Columbia tell a different story. To the US Administration, Columbia claimed they are “fully cooperating”. But to the faculty they denied it. Even denied mask bans. This becomes clear when reading the transcript of former President Armstrong’s deposition with the administration. It reveals a complete lack of engagement with requests to address antisemitism and the support of terrorism at Columbia. Trump’s demands may be tough at times, but they are not unreasonable—and with some genuine goodwill, a much better outcome would likely be possible.
Here is the transcript. I promise you’ll be amazed when reading it.
https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Dr.-Katrina-Armstrong-040125-Full-Size.pdf
As for Harvard, Trump’s demands are not only about antisemitism, but about DEI and affirmative action as a whole.
Comment #15 April 15th, 2025 at 7:26 pm
The T-Rex is running around freely tearing humans to bits, and the ones still alive are holding a meeting 50 feet away from the bloody buffet, not realizing they’re next but instead nitpicking that the ones who got eaten first should have stood still instead of run away, or they didn’t run away fast enough, or they should not have tried to distract the monster by waving a light… anything except trying to come up with ways to actually take down the beast while they still have a tiny window of opportunity before their number is too small.
Comment #16 April 15th, 2025 at 7:36 pm
Some interesting counterpoints by Shabbos Kestenbaum:
“Turned on my phone after 3 days of Passover to learn the Trump administrations is cutting $2.2 billion in federal grants to Harvard.
Eight quick and easy points:
1. This entire showdown boils down to Harvard insisting on violating civil rights law and the Trump administration refusing to allow Americans to fund said violations of civil rights law anymore.
2. The federal government withheld funds to racist schools that refused to integrate. The federal government withheld funds to sexist schools that refused to combat sexual assault. Stop pretending this is somehow an unprecedented threat on higher education and instead recognize these campuses have egregiously violated the rights of Jewish American students.
3. Harvard has no rights under the constitution to federal funds. Harvard students have a right under the constitution not to be discriminated against. Harvard is insisting on the first point but not the second.
4. If Harvard doesn’t want the federal government to have a say in their education, then they can choose at literally any point in time to stop taking 9 billion dollars in American taxpayer money.
5. Harvard is neither brave nor principled for refusing to comply, they’re elites who’ve been paying less in taxes for decades than school teachers and firemen. They expect you to keep subsidizing their classes, classes that have consistently been proven to teach kids to hate America and discriminate against Jews, Asians, and Whites.
6. Harvard wrote the federal government can’t tell them who to “admit and hire.” They literally can. It’s called the Civil Rights Act. It’s truly remarkable to see that even after a year and a half, Harvard is still run by some of the lowest IQ lawyers at WilmerHale who don’t even bother to read their statements aloud anymore.
7. Jewish American students should not be facing discrimination in class. Due to their university refusing to fix that problem, there is no other solution than for the federal government to intervene.
8. The federal government forcing Harvard to comply with the constitution or lose funding is a damning indictment on how unaccountable and reckless American colleges have become, all the while amassing billions in tax breaks.”
Source: https://x.com/ShabbosK/status/1911960897892778093
Comment #17 April 15th, 2025 at 8:09 pm
fred #15: So what would you suggest that we do then, beyond what Harvard is doing already (fighting this in court)?
Comment #18 April 15th, 2025 at 8:35 pm
Theorist Israel #14:
> As for Harvard, Trump’s demands are not only about antisemitism, but about DEI and affirmative action as a whole.
Specifically, the “Merit-Based Admissions Reform” is one Harvard would never agree to without a fight. Full demands here, in case anyone missed them:
https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2025/04/Letter-Sent-to-Harvard-2025-04-11.pdf
Comment #19 April 15th, 2025 at 9:10 pm
@Scott
> If you also support Israel and Palestine existing next to each other, then that makes you a Zionist like me, specifically a liberal Zionist. A “Zionist,” today, just means anyone who wants Israel to continue existing.
My feeling on this is that, while “Should Israel exist?” was a meaningful and important question in, say, 1945, it’s not one now. The fact is, Israel does exist, it’s not going anywhere any time soon, and any advocacy for Palestine worth taking seriously needs to respect that reality and work within it. (A corollary to this: a call to keep fighting until Israel is destroyed is, in effect, a call for the bloodshed to continue forever, and should be rejected as such.) If that makes me a Zionist, I’ll accept the label on that basis…
…but, I would insist, there’s a reason other than stubbornness that people who sincerely believe Israel is guilty of crimes against humanity tend to resist being called Zionists, or identify themselves as anti-Zionists. “Zionism” is associated with, even if it doesn’t logically imply, being okay with bombing the shit out of an entire population, causing many times the civilian death toll of October 7 or any other Hamas action, in a way that’s really damn hard to believe is part of a targeted and proportionate self-defense strategy.
I can’t help suspecting something of a theory-of-mind problem about this – I recommend not panic-reading more screeds about Judeofascism, but just making an effort to imagine how the post-October 7 military campaign looks to someone who isn’t already firmly convinced of the rectitude of Israel’s cause.
You’re absolutely right, of course, about the events at Harvard. I particularly like the simultaneous demands to end all diversity programs and implement affirmative action for “viewpoint diversity”! Also the combination of merit-based admissions without regard to national origin and strict ideological scrutiny for international students. This set of demands was issued in bad faith and has no coherent principles behind it, and Harvard would ultimately be unlikely to gain anything by even trying to comply.
Comment #20 April 15th, 2025 at 9:12 pm
Scott: we disagree on some things, but I applaud this post. Btw, I wonder if one of the main sticking points in your threads about Israel-Palestine, and their comments sections, has to do with the different ways in which people deploy the word “Zionism.” For example, none of my leftist friends, many of them Jewish, who describe themselves as “anti-Zionists” think that Israel should stop existing now that it exists. A lot of them believe that aspects of its founding were unjust, or even that its founding was a mistake, have trouble with the idea of a supposed democracy which insists on certain demographic quotas, and don’t like the way in which aspects of Zionist ideology animate some of the bad things Israel does or supports, tacitly or explicitly (like West Bank settler violence). I mean, see the following from the Wikipedia article on “Zionism.” It’s not hard to understand why people might object to some of these ideas:
“The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the notion that Jews had a historical right to the land that outweighed the rights of the Arabs. The establishment of a Jewish demographic majority was an essential aspect of Zionism. Israeli historian Yosef Gorny argues that this demographic change required annulling the majority status of the Arabs. Gorny argues that the Zionist movement regarded Arab motives in Palestine as lacking both moral and historical significance. According to Israeli historian Simha Flapan, the view expressed by the proclamation “there was no such thing as Palestinians” is a cornerstone of Zionist policy. This perspective was also shared by those on the far-left of the Zionist movement, including Martin Buber and other members of Brit Shalom. British officials supporting the Zionist effort also held similar beliefs.”
Comment #21 April 15th, 2025 at 9:25 pm
Kestenbaum is a fool. So much of what he says is moronic. Let’s take this one “Harvard wrote the federal government can’t tell them who to “admit and hire.” They literally can. It’s called the Civil Rights Act. It’s truly remarkable to see that even after a year and a half, Harvard is still run by some of the lowest IQ lawyers at WilmerHale who don’t even bother to read their statements aloud anymore.”
Err, did he read the administrations demands? They want Harvard to invoke quotas for conservatives in all programs and departments with a reporting system to prove they have balanced “viewpoint diversity.” Otherwise known as right wing DEI. Find that one in the Civil Rights Act. Talk about low IQ.
Comment #22 April 15th, 2025 at 9:38 pm
Misomythus #19: eerily similar posts!
Comment #23 April 15th, 2025 at 9:46 pm
More from Wikipedia, which does not make “Zionism” sounds so awesome. So yeah, I’d say that it’s this branch of the of ideology and some of the more insidious consequences of it that the vast majority of the American left who call themselves “anti-Zionists” are against.
“In pursuing a Jewish demographic majority, the Zionist movement encountered the demographic problem posed by the presence of the local Arab population, which was predominantly non-Jewish. The practical issue of establishing a Jewish state in a majority non-Jewish region was an issue of fundamental importance for the Zionist movement. Zionists used the term “transfer” as a euphemism for the removal, or what would now be called ethnic cleansing, of the Palestinian population. According to Morris, the idea of transfer was to play a large role in Zionist ideology from the inception of the movement and was seen as the main method of maintaining the “Jewishness” of the Zionist’s state. He explains that “transfer” was “inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism” and that a land that was primarily Arab could not be transformed into a Jewish state without displacing the Arab population. Further, the stability of the Jewish state could not be ensured given the Arab population’s fear of displacement. He explains that this would be the primary source of conflict between the Zionist movement and the Arab population.
The concept of “transfer” had a long pedigree in Zionist thought, with moral considerations rarely entering into the discussions of what was viewed as a logical solution—opposition to transferring the Arab population outside Palestine was typically expressed on practical, rather than moral grounds. The concept of removing the non-Jewish population from Palestine was a notion that garnered support across the entire spectrum of Zionist groups, including its farthest left factions, from early in the movement’s development. “Transfer” was not only seen as desirable but also as an ideal solution by the Zionist leadership.”
Comment #24 April 15th, 2025 at 10:03 pm
Scott #17
I’m actually talking in a wider context, like the law firms and news media caving in, the silence and inaction of the dems, etc.
I see what Harvard is doing as the right thing to do! And your support is very encouraging.
Comment #25 April 15th, 2025 at 10:33 pm
Btw, how to fight back?
with the very same tactic the regime has been using for 3 months – relentlessly pummel from all sides… responding to executive orders by flooding them with outrage, protests, law suits, and various acts of public (but legal) defiance, such as this
https://i.imgur.com/5CLV8Y5.jpeg
Comment #26 April 15th, 2025 at 11:44 pm
Dave #21:
Kesetnbaum is not a fool, and it’s largely due to his efforts that the issue of antisemitism and civil rights violations at elite universities has been in the news. You may disagree with some of his points, but that doesn’t make him a fool.
You write:”Err, did he read the administrations demands? They want Harvard to invoke quotas for conservatives in all programs and departments with a reporting system to prove they have balanced “viewpoint diversity.” Otherwise known as right wing DEI. Find that one in the Civil Rights Act. Talk about low IQ.”
I don’t want to speak for Kestenbaum, but my guess is that he, as a typical liberal democrat (except on this one issue of antisemitism), does not agree with the viewpoint diversity demand, as well as several other demands by the Trump admin, but he does support taking a heavy-handed approach with Harvard, which, according to him, has not rid itself of the problems leading to this.
Comment #27 April 16th, 2025 at 1:16 am
John #20:
> A lot of [people who describe themselves as anti-Zionist] believe that aspects of its founding were unjust, or even that its founding was a mistake,
Lots of people consider aspects of many states’ founding to be unjust. E.g. the United States. I think if you call yourself anti-American, you’re implying something far stronger than disapproval of its founding. If you call yourself anti-Pakistani you’re not just saying “I don’t like the way Pakistan was founded”. etc.
> [those people] have trouble with the idea of a supposed democracy which insists on certain demographic quotas,
Israel does not insist on demographic quotas, or at least I’m not sure what you mean here?
> and don’t like the way in which aspects of Zionist ideology animate some of the bad things Israel does or supports, tacitly or explicitly (like West Bank settler violence).
I’m Israeli, and I don’t like a lot of the actions that Israel takes or supports, to put it mildly.
I don’t agree with saying that it comes from aspects of Zionist ideology though. I think *I* and other Zionists get to define what Zionism is, not outsiders who choose to apply the label Zionist to whatever action they dislike.
> I mean, see the following from the Wikipedia article on “Zionism.” It’s not hard to understand why people might object to some of these ideas:
Wikipedia has had a cabal of editors making a concerted effort to make Zionism and Israel look worse, since the Gaza war started. I wouldn’t trust its articles blindly on anything to do with Israel anymore (unfortunately).
The sentence “The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the notion that Jews had a historical right to the land that outweighed the rights of the Arabs.”, for example, has only been in that article for half a year or so. And sentences like “Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.” are new as well.
It’s possible all these changes have made this article more correct, of course, but I think it’s worth asking if major changes to a not-obscure article that’s been around for twenty years, which all go in the direction of making Zionism seem worse, all happening in the shadow of a way – if those changes are actually correct or not. There is also documented evidence of this cabal making these changes purposefully to introduce an anti-Israel bias to Wikipedia.
Comment #28 April 16th, 2025 at 1:23 am
As an Italian (where the fascism-nazism craziness started), I’m quite worried. The capitulation of the universities to the government was one of the defining events of fascism: at some point those that refused to explicitly swear allegiance to the fascist party were dismissed, as well as all Jewish professors. But that was years after a gradual encroachment of the government into all education institutions.
Comment #29 April 16th, 2025 at 2:15 am
Sniffnoy #7: If you want to be pedantic about it (and it sure does make a refreshing diversion from the daily news), I’d say “biggest crisis since 1650” is on very solid ground. Or since 1642, for that matter.
But Harvard’s biggest crisis ever, as far as Harvard itself was concerned, is probably still the one that peaked in 1639–1640 — the nascent college was actually closed. Why closed? Because the head teacher Nathaniel Eaton was run out of town. On what grounds? In a series of hearings, the colony’s authorities concluded that he savagely beat the students and staff, and that his wife (the school’s cook) fed them a diet adulterated with barnyard dung. Really. (*)
A classic book on Harvard’s early history tells the story in detail; excerpts here:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Founding_of_Harvard_College/PQMdzhnfaSwC?gbpv=1&pg=PA234
And Wikipedia has a summary:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Eaton#Harvard_College
In 1640 the colony appointed a new president for the college, though — Henry Dunster — and he got things going again. In 1642, they graduated their first class; in 1650, Dunster obtained the formal charter, under the authority of the colony’s governor, that has governed Harvard ever since. And I don’t think any crisis since that one has existentially threatened Harvard like the present crisis does.
On the other hand, Harvard itself is a heck of a lot bigger in 2025 than it was in 1639. So *in absolute terms*, the present crisis — even purely as it relates to Harvard, leaving aside the rest of the world — is far bigger than any event in the Harvard of 1639 could have been, and is Harvard’s biggest crisis since 1636 after all.
(*) That really was their conclusion, anyway. Now, should one *believe* a lurid story from the findings of a court proceeding in 17th-century Puritan Massachusetts? … That might be a different matter.
Comment #30 April 16th, 2025 at 2:28 am
On the main topic, and briefly because I don’t have much new to say: Like Scott and many others, I’m very happy to see Harvard stand up like it now has.
I think part of why this feels so good to see is that this is just about the first example we’ve had, in these long last few months, of a big, powerful institution in this country unequivocally saying no to this administration’s outrageous, lawless claims of autocratic power. (Other contenders: the state of Maine; some individual federal judges, but with at best half-hearted backup from the Supreme Court; the AP, but so far at relatively low stakes.) I hope many others follow.
Comment #31 April 16th, 2025 at 4:58 am
John#20
“For example, none of my leftist friends, many of them Jewish, who describe themselves as “anti-Zionists” think that Israel should stop existing now that it exists.”
Yes, just like Putin who is not against Ukraine and don’t want to conquere it. He is very good guy, who only “believe that aspects of its founding were unjust, or even that its founding was a mistake, have trouble with the idea of a supposed democracy which insists on certain demographic quotas, and don’t like the way in which aspects of Ukrainian ideology animate some of the bad things Ukraine does or supports, tacitly or explicitly (like Donbass violence).” ( sarcasm )
Jews have right for self-determination which is one of major fundamental international rights. And also was big leftist point of early 20s century. Strange that your “leftist friends” now forgot this fundamental bolshevik principle.
Jews have right for own country the same way as evey other nation. And arabs have already 22 countries. They even could have 23 if palestinians realy wanted it
Comment #32 April 16th, 2025 at 5:43 am
Sych
“Jews have right for own country the same way as evey other nation. And arabs have already 22 countries. They even could have 23 if palestinians realy wanted it”
It’s indeed hard not to agree with that point.
Comment #33 April 16th, 2025 at 6:49 am
Steve E#26,
I read Kestenbaum’s tweets often. Harvard didn’t need Kestenbaum to shed light on its problems (they are not hidden), and much of what he says regarding Harvard is wrong. He has helped create a situation where it is easier for the administration he supports to go full Orban on universities and to attempt to destroy science in this country-something that is far worse than some cosplay revolutionaries marching around the quad.
Comment #34 April 16th, 2025 at 7:09 am
John #20 and #23: Edan Maor #27 beat me to the punch. I was going to ask: when you quoted the Wikipedia article on Zionism, were you aware that that specific article was recently completely rewritten and then locked down by a group of anti-Israel radicals, who (we now know) organized to infiltrate Wikipedia for the specific purpose of rewriting Zionism-related articles from their previously neutral tone into agitprop? Were you aware that this is now a major controversy, which in many people’s minds has called into question the entire founding premise of Wikipedia itself?
Again, “Zionist” has always simply meant anyone who supports the establishment and then continued existence of a Jewish national home in Israel. There exist (alas) fanatically anti-Arab far-right Zionists, today just like a century ago. But Albert Einstein, a lifelong supporter of Jewish/Arab coexistence, proudly considered himself a Zionist, as did Martin Luther King Jr, as has every American president since Truman.
Comment #35 April 16th, 2025 at 7:33 am
I feel for Scott. Although he exaggerates too often with the “victim” card (just my opinion), many “very righteous” people compel him to speak out against Israel on the occasion or to disregard what he sees as antisemitism, two core beliefs of him. And then there are some pressures or “friendly” fire from a few probably right-wing active zionists on his blog.
Scott, as much as you want to please everybody (and preach to everybody), you should not feel bad if not everyone agrees with you. Besides, most people write to express their disagreement; those who calmy agree are quieter.
Well I am not Jewish, but I consider myself a zionist by Scott’s definition (who isn’t?). After more than 75 years of existence, the most surprising thing about the state of Israel is not its shaky origins (how many countries were born after WWII, how many people were displaced?), but the millions of people (the few alive today of those originally displaced, their children and grandchildren) that the UN or others consider refugees. Three generations granted no rights from where they live just to put pressure on Israel. Imagine the successors of the roughly 12 million displaced Indians (Pakistanis or Hindus) after the India-Pakistan split asking to return to their homes… and try to sort out the mess. The UK and the US have not even solved the problem of the few hundred Chagossians they displaced from Diego Garcia after the british loaned the naval base to their American friends.
Full disclosure: I have been to Israel several times and lived there for almost a year during my PhD, more than twenty years ago. I consider my mentors not only great scientists, but also great human beings. A couple of times I witnessed what (without knowing the details) I perceived as unjustified agressions from Israeli military to Palestinian civilians, but I always thought that Palestians feared more the oppression from fellow Palestinians. I never heard a single racist comment from any Israeli I talked to. The only disgraceful comment I heard (“you should put them on planes at throw them into the sea like the Argentinians did”), was from a visiting religious American Jew, much to the dismay of the young israelis I was dining with, at the time many in the military, who were not happy, to put it mildly, when they heard the sweaty guy who had not fought a single war tell them what to do. In my experience most Israelis can be tough, but not unfair.
Comment #36 April 16th, 2025 at 7:47 am
Greg #29: ROFL I truly stand corrected, and have added a note to the post itself. Thank you.
Comment #37 April 16th, 2025 at 8:46 am
This comment that I saw at “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” gave me a chill:
“If you ever wondered what you would do in Germany in February of 1933, you’re doing it now.”
(Dr. Scott is doing well by this standard. I can’t say the same.) (The “Hands Off” rallies are the best responses from people like me which I can think of so far.)
Comment #38 April 16th, 2025 at 8:52 am
In 1640, eating some fresh dung was the best way to build up one’s immune system against the bubonic plague.
Comment #39 April 16th, 2025 at 9:11 am
Unfortunately, this will be the easiest time for people to summon the courage to find their voice. It will only get harder as more corners of opposition are snuffed out, cleaned out, or suppressed. I still have faith that the large majority of people still want to be living in a country they can remotely recognize four years from now. The elements of the government behaving this way only have finite resources. If a sufficient number of institutions, individuals, companies,etc begin to push back in a meaningful way I don’t see how they can possibly make progress along all fronts at the same time. I think at this point appeals to morality, precedent, or highlighting how self sabotaging some of these actions are is fruitless. Only the volume of dissent, not the quality, can change things (I hope)
Comment #40 April 16th, 2025 at 9:46 am
The talk sounds cool! I will “attend” if possible.
Were you planning on discussing Beeping Busy Beaver? I recently found a 3-state 3-color program that shows BBB(3, 3) > 10 ↑↑ 6. Details here:
https://nickdrozd.github.io/2025/03/24/bbb-3-3.html
That post also contains a table of the latest proven / best known values for BB / BBB. So far the general picture appears to be that BBB reaches milestones earlier than BB — millions, exponential, tetrational. We might expect that pattern to continue. Except there is no pattern, because BBB grows super-uncomputably fast. It’s even more unknowable than BB.
Comment #41 April 16th, 2025 at 10:20 am
Nick Drozd #40: Sorry, no plans to discuss BBB in this talk! I do have a different talk where I touched on it.
Comment #42 April 16th, 2025 at 10:31 am
JimV #37:
“If you ever wondered what you would do in Germany in February of 1933, you’re doing it now.”
Of course that thought has never been far from my mind in these dark times for the US and the world.
I was just thinking about it this morning: when I get criticized from my left, what I resent the most is the constant implication that, because I’m willing to say when I think the Trumpists are actually correct about something—for example, in supporting Israel, or opposing various forms of woke grandstanding—that means I’m at best a weak ally against Trump, my many denunciations of Trump’s gangsterism ring hollow, and I’m probably the sort of person who would grumble about Hitler in 1933 but ultimately go along with him, or who hasn’t even given that question too much thought (!).
To me, that’s like saying that, because Winston Churchill held many right-wing views, because he even agreed with Hitler in (e.g.) fiercely opposing Bolshevism, therefore Churchill would not be a reliable ally in fighting Hitler.
Sometimes, the people you want on your side in a righteous war against X are simply the people who have really well-tuned sensors for stupidity and evil, so much so that they even notice the stupidity and evil within the anti-X coalition. 🙂
Comment #43 April 16th, 2025 at 10:47 am
Max Madera #35:
Scott, as much as you want to please everybody (and preach to everybody), you should not feel bad if not everyone agrees with you. Besides, most people write to express their disagreement; those who calmy agree are quieter.
Thanks so much Max!
I was thinking about this a couple weeks ago when I visited U. Wisconsin in Madison: every time I give a talk at another university, I get student after student after student coming up to me to say “Thank you so much for writing Shtetl-Optimized! I’m a huge fan! I agree with almost everything you say!”
My answer to those students is always the same: “Thank you, but how come I never see you in my comment section?” 😀
Comment #44 April 16th, 2025 at 12:54 pm
Scott, Sych, Edan Maor: I’m not sure what to say about the Wikipedia cabal other than that I’ll be sad if I can’t rely on it as a neutral arbiter. In any case, I don’t think my point hangs on these quotations, which Edan acknowledged may even been adding accuracy to the record. There are plenty of disturbing things in the Wikipedia entries about, e.g. the Balfour Declaration that were there years before the October 7 conflict. Maybe those were placed there by Wiki radicals too, I dunno.
Edan, I agree that you and other Zionists get to play a large part (though not the whole part–that’s just not how any identity functions) in deciding what Zionism means, but the point is that Zionism, like any political or religious ideology, means different things to different people who operate under its mantle. To some, it justifies annexing all of Gaza for Israel. To others, West Bank settler violence. I don’t think that’s up for debate, right? I agree and everyone I know agrees that people have general rights to self-determination. But that general right doesn’t mean that *any* action taken towards self-determination is moral or just. That’s the whole point of the disagreement in some sense.
Edan, by demographic quotas, I meant maintaining a majority-Jewish population.
Mostly, I just wanted to say to Scott that he is missing something when he equates “anti-Zionism” with “being happy to see that all Jews are murdered.” That’s not what practically any self-described anti-Zionist (of which I am not one, ftr) wants. I don’t think continuing to believe in that falsehood is doing him any service.
Comment #45 April 16th, 2025 at 1:14 pm
John #44:
I just wanted to say to Scott that he is missing something when he equates “anti-Zionism” with “being happy to see that all Jews are murdered.” That’s not what practically any self-described anti-Zionist (of which I am not one, ftr) wants. I don’t think continuing to believe in that falsehood is doing him any service.
I’ve never said that anti-Zionism means that and I don’t believe that it does.
On the other hand, anti-Zionism does mean removing the only shield that currently protects 7 million Jews from being murdered. I imagine that, if the worst were to happen, many anti-Zionists would be genuinely sad, but would ruefully add that it wasn’t their fault and that the Jews, alas, had “brought their own destruction on themselves” through their settler-colonial ideology (Heidegger and other European intellectuals said almost exactly the same thing after the Holocaust).
Comment #46 April 16th, 2025 at 1:20 pm
Looking far ahead. Let’s say in two years time or in four years time GOP (especially the MAGA faction) loses power (hypothetical I know – but let’s say so for now). Will the woke policies that the administration is claiming as the reason to freeze aid return with even more force?
Concretely, what do you think the chances are of having the worst of both worlds: for the next four years we’ll have this administration going after academia for many things, and after that we’ll have the many problematic policies (especially those that we’ve seen in abundance since 2021, and rampantly in the open since Oct 2023) come back in even greater force. Or do you think if GOP loses, then academia will do the corrections needed?
[Of course, the above scenario is perhaps not the absolute worst of all worlds as one could have eight years of MAGA going after academia.]
Comment #47 April 16th, 2025 at 1:36 pm
Henry #46:
Let’s say in two years time or in four years time GOP (especially the MAGA faction) loses power (hypothetical I know – but let’s say so for now). Will the woke policies that the administration is claiming as the reason to freeze aid return with even more force?
Alas, I think there’s an extremely high probability of precisely that scenario. And that, in turn, might cause Trump-like fascism to return even worse than this time (!), and so forth until our liberal-democratic order is as dead as the Weimar Republic.
We’re now, tragically, in an era of extremely high-amplitude oscillations into both left-wing craziness and right-wing craziness, with the right-wing kind triumphant at the moment. The left-wing oscillations did some damage on their own, but they did more damage by setting the stage for the right-wing oscillations. And many of us foresaw this dynamic more than a decade ago, even if we didn’t know exactly what shape it would take.
If you’d like to decrease the magnitude of the oscillations, come join me in the Coalition of the Reasonable and Sane!
Comment #48 April 16th, 2025 at 1:37 pm
Let’s forget about antisemitism, and think about the future of the US.
Should professors who call for the ethnic cleansing of Jews keep educating US leaders of next generations? How many flaws does a scholar have for chanting “global intifada” and “from the river to the sea”? Also, when does this becomes a national security issue, considering foreign powers like Qatar are actively taking part in this?
Comment #49 April 16th, 2025 at 2:28 pm
The minority that was actually affected by university policies were Asians (with their unfair quotas or higher admission standards, before it all got scaled back by the courts), but I guess noone really gave a shit because Asians got blamed for covid, to the point where chinese-american grandmas were being punched on the streets, so we had the somewhat lookwarm “anti-asian” debate, now replaced with antisemitism talking points, which are clearly more potent.
Comment #50 April 16th, 2025 at 2:57 pm
The woke takeover of many universities makes a political intervention justified, as no internal reforms are possible. The Trump attempt at saving US universities can be successful if moderates inside universities manage to reduce the current left-wing politicisation while limiting the risk of a right-wing politicisation. The best would be firing woke activists without hiring MAGA activists. The worst would arise if visceral anti-Trump instincts win: the current problems remain, public funds are gone.
Comment #51 April 16th, 2025 at 3:33 pm
Suppose that MAGA loses the 2026 and 2028 elections. Do you see any way for academia (and the US as a whole) to recover?
Also, any way to distinguish me from AF #2? We are not the same commenter.
Comment #52 April 16th, 2025 at 4:17 pm
What is the BB() of ZF without choice? What would a higher or lower BB() imply as compared to ZFC’s BB() number?
Comment #53 April 16th, 2025 at 4:31 pm
Alessandro Strumia #50: Alas, what’s happening is already way past the stage where the “moderates inside universities,” like me, could work to reduce left-wing politicization. We’re now at the stage where even the moderates at universities (e.g., Larry Summers and Steven Pinker) see their institutions as being at war against the government for their survival and independence, and where they’ll ally with left-wingers in that war much as Churchill and Roosevelt allied with Stalin against Hitler.
If the MAGA bosses didn’t want that outcome, then they should’ve restored Columbia’s funding after Columbia capitulated to their demands.
Comment #54 April 16th, 2025 at 4:36 pm
AC #52: I don’t know what you mean by “the BB() of ZF.” The BB function has a fixed definition independent of your axiomatic theory.
Separately, it’s also true that any arithmetical statement provable in ZFC is provable in ZF alone (Shoenfield absoluteness theorem).
Comment #55 April 16th, 2025 at 5:09 pm
Are you all good with the fact that last fall Harvard introduced a remedial math course last fall — https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/9/3/new-math-intro-course/
It’s DEI gone mad. While Harvard knows the skin color of who they admit, lacking SATs and other testing, they have no idea of how smart they are.
Harvard has done a fine job of wrecking itself from the inside, long before Trump. Vide Claudine Gay, etc. etc.
Comment #56 April 16th, 2025 at 5:46 pm
Luysii #55: what is the DEI component you see in Harvard’s new formulation of remedial math offerings? It appears that they’re seeing that substantial numbers of incoming students are less well-prepared than previous cohorts, and so rather than reducing expectations by simplifying existing courses, they are adding remedial hours addressed at those who need them, to let them catch up. They’re also simultaneously enrolled in the regular math classes, they do the same problem sets, etc. What is wrong with that?!
Comment #57 April 16th, 2025 at 8:03 pm
Y #48:
Should professors who call for the ethnic cleansing of Jews keep educating US leaders of next generations? How many flaws does a scholar have for chanting “global intifada” and “from the river to the sea”? Also, when does this becomes a national security issue, considering foreign powers like Qatar are actively taking part in this?
Those are important questions! Indeed, they’re exactly the reason why I didn’t initially dismiss the Title VI actions against Columbia, and why I wanted Columbia to negotiate (as it did)—even as this stance caused Peter Woit and many others to denounce me as a fascist stooge.
Alas, we’ve now learned that there really is nothing Columbia and other US universities can do to appease the fascists, short of relinquishing their intellectual independence completely. And for all their faults, universities have been a beloved home for me, as they have for hundreds of my Jewish and non-Jewish friends and colleagues.
So, just like you first need to save the earth from an alien invasion, then save your country from hostile neighbors, and only then defeat the opposing political party inside your country … so too, if we value US universities at all, we first need to fight for their continued existence, then work on fixing the many serious problems they have.
Comment #58 April 16th, 2025 at 8:13 pm
Luysii #55: The timing of your story doesn’t seem to work out, as Harvard was just recently forced to get rid of explicit consideration of race in admissions! Harvard says the remedial class is because of COVID (so presumably temporary).
I agree that with a 3% acceptance rate, it would seem easy for Harvard to fill its entering class with students who don’t need remedial math, but I don’t see what this has to do with DEI.
Note that Harvard, like the other Ivies, arguably only ever did undergraduate admissions in truly “merit-based” way for a brief period in the 1910s and 1920s, after the SAT was introduced and before they replaced it with a “holistic” process to keep down the number of Jews. So, “holistic” admissions long predate DEI.
Comment #59 April 16th, 2025 at 10:19 pm
Scott #47
What do you think is the primary cause(s) of this amplitude getting so high in recent past, compared to the center right/left nature of the past. I can list a few
1. Human nature: While this sounds like a catch all cause, the track records of past, from Roman system all the way up to communism, probably means human societies cannot organize in a certain way for a very long time. May be Liberal democracy has run its course and something new is in the making ?
2. Social media: While this has certainly amplified the amplitudes , it may have just provided a platform to accelerate what was already cooking. Case in point – see how this blog has evolved over a decade.
3. Instigation by autocratic powers: How much of the. autocratic powers utilized 1 and 2, to destabilize the liberal democratic order ? They certainly have a vested interest..
4. Inequality created by unbridled capitalism: Compared to Europe, the polarization is high in US (as of now). They seem to be less affected by 1-3 above, and the way working class is treated in Germany and other industry heavy countries is missing in US. Remember the swing state sweep materialized with support of this demographic.
5. Structure of democracy: And finally the way democracy itself is organized. US has too much concentration of power in elected representatives. Not seen other democracies where even judiciary gets represented as part of the political party , reducing its independence and effectiveness that was intended in first place.
I’m sure its a combination of the above , but for coalition of the reasonable to have a chance, need to know the top contributors and try to address them
Comment #60 April 16th, 2025 at 10:32 pm
Prasanna #59: I don’t know. I expect that historians will be debating this for as long as civilization exists. The Internet and social media seem like clearly a part of it, just like radio was part of the rise of Hitler. Basically, the Internet actually delivered on its utopian promise from the 1990s: to give everybody a voice, not just a few powerful people with megaphones. The trouble was that what millions of people wanted to use their voices to say was that vaccines have secret autism-causing microchips, Hillary Clinton should be locked up for sex trafficking, and the Jews want to harvest your organs. And we still haven’t developed societal immunity to this stuff. I hope someday we will.
Comment #61 April 16th, 2025 at 11:36 pm
Scott, would you be willing to share your talk here on your blog after you’ve given it? The short excerpt you posted above is very intriguing. I’d love to read the whole thing, and I suspect many others would too.
I’m just an infrequent reader of your blog, by the way, but often enough when I do come here I find myself spending hours browsing through your posts, reading comments, following up references and the like. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with the world. They are some of the better products of the internet.
Comment #62 April 17th, 2025 at 12:08 am
Alexander #61: Of course! I’ll post the slides, and the video if there is one. And thank you.
Comment #63 April 17th, 2025 at 12:54 am
Alessandro Strumia #50: Harvard currently has an endowment of $53 billion. In addition to all the issues of plagiarism and fabricated research, left-wing politics terrorizing people both on and off campus, university presidents maintaining neutrality in front of Congress on whether there should be a second Holocaust, etc. that have been discussed at length, should Harvard continue to get tax-exempt status and government funding so it can continue to entrench the elite status of a relatively small number of alumni and faculty? I think a lot of Americans are looking around at the state of our country and feel that a relatively small number of people have enriched themselves without providing commensurate value to the people around them, and are thinking, “if these clowns are going to keep acting like this, I at the very least don’t want to be paying for it.” If you’re going to say that we need universities because of the great research they produce, you’d better have some answers when people want to know why a president of Harvard resigned over plagiarism and a president of Stanford resigned over fabricated research.
Comment #64 April 17th, 2025 at 2:01 am
As a lifelong admirer of yours and opponent of attempts to restrict intellectual freedom, but who also has neither financial resources nor meaningful connections to the powerful within academia or outside of it, let me ask as the simple son from the Four Questions might:
What can I do to help?
Comment #65 April 17th, 2025 at 3:50 am
Ryan Landay #63
I am sure that whenever one is worried about
“a relatively small number of people have enriched themselves without providing commensurate value to the people around them”
the best strategy is to put in charge a bunch of multi-billionaires with autocratic and illiberal tendencies. Jackpot!
Comment #66 April 17th, 2025 at 6:00 am
@Ryan Landay #63
In the 1970’s, the common answer to discontents in the Unites States was: “Love it or leave it”
Money given over to taxation is like money given to a homeless man on the street. Once it leaves your possession it is no longer yours to control. It is simply no longrr your at all.
I have been listening to nonsense like,
“… I at the very least don’t want to be paying for it.”
my entire life. This is nonsense pushed by the public relations of the anti-tax segment of our country’s political elite. And, when the government fails to work for a stated objective of “domestic tranquility,” those people simply go elsewhere with their money. Middle and low income earners are the ones stuck with riots like those of 1967 and Black Lives Matter. Transforming into the country with the largest percentage of its population incarcerated in prisons after 1980 (thank you President Reagan) did nothing.
So, these whiners ought to just move out of the United States.
For what this is worth, I am not an atheist. Were I crowned “King of the World” tomorrow, the very first thing I would do is to delist religious organizations from IRS exemptions under 501(c)(3) of the code. Why should the American government subsidize the hateful rhetoric taught in so many of these institutions? This argument works both ways. And, the tax code is independent of the First Amendment protections.
What is the new State Department policy? If you hear remarks critical of Christian values report it.
The enemy within is not Harvard University. Their administration respects the rule of law as contained in the Constitution.
Comment #67 April 17th, 2025 at 7:23 am
Thank you so much for speaking up about these topics. It’s really brave to do so at this point. I usually follow for the QC content, but lately this has been the highlight, it’s great to see people with a platform speaking up and it makes me slightly more hopeful.
Comment #68 April 17th, 2025 at 8:58 am
Scott #58 — I find it incredible that Harvard could not find applicants not needing remedial mathematics (or remedial anything) in the 97% of applicants they rejected. I doubt that they actually complied with the results of the suit about using race. I think the fingerprints of DEI are all over this.
That being said, Trump is going too far (see the WSJ lead editorial from 16 April). Hopefully this is one of his typical bargaining tactics.
You might be interested in the reply I received from a friend to whom I sent the Crimson article about remedial math. He is an MIT grad and the father of a Berkeley math PhD. These thoughts are his, and I think worth consideration. I’m keeping him anonymous for obvious reasons.
“Its definitely not Covid, although Covid significantly harmed (perhaps permanently) the education of millions. This is being used as a convenient excuse. Harvard and perhaps less than 20 other big name colleges all used to compete for about 17,000 of the very top high school students in the country. These were the kids who got above 1400 on combined SAT scores and above 33 on ACT. Such kids did not and still do not need remedial high school math instruction in colleges. However, the kids who were admitted to these colleges on the basis of affirmative action preferences certainly do need this. It was true then and still true now. There is some data out there which shows the extent to which standards have been relaxed. Some years ago I saw a report of average SAT scores for students admitted to Duke. Asians topped the list, the scores of white admittees were more than 100 points lower and blacks were more than 400 lower. Combined SAT scores reflect both math and English.
It has been widespread that many state universities provide remedial high school courses in math, English and other subjects. Many of these schools are mandated to accept all high school grads, so these courses are needed by lots of kids regardless of background. But when elite schools, such as Harvard, are forced to offer remedial instruction it is a clear sign that former standards no longer apply to at least some of the applicants.
Unfortunately, saying anything about this is considered racist and can get you fired or as a minimum severely disciplined. Look at what happened to Amy Wax, a tenured law professor at Penn. The case of Roland Fryer, a professor at Harvard, is much the same, but on a somewhat different subject. In both cases, and there are many others, the operative principle is “Don’t like the message? Kill the messenger.” “
Comment #69 April 17th, 2025 at 10:06 am
Luysii #68: When even the anonymous right-wing blog commenters obsessed with black SAT scores think that Trump is going too far … that’s when you really know he’s going too far.
Comment #70 April 17th, 2025 at 10:34 am
Alan Dershowitz just published a newsletter on this very topic:
https://dersh.substack.com/p/harvard-surrenders-university-professor
A quote why Columbia remains under pressure. It’s not despite their apparent surrender; it’s because the attempted reform has been aborted:
“Witness what happened when Columbia University’s temporary president, Dr Katrina Armstrong, appeared to capitulate to White House demands last month and, among other reforms, appoint a new official to oversee departments that offer biased courses on the Middle East.
Armstrong was unceremoniously pressured to resign.”
Quotes about the problems at Harvard and the duplicity of the academic freedom defense:
“reforming our corrupted academic elitist class and fighting antisemitic bigotry is not wrong”
“Harvard does have a serious lack of intellectual, ideological, and political diversity. It is largely a left-wing institution where many points of view are effectively muzzled, largely by self-censorship and peer pressure.”
“Finally, for those who claim that their defense of university autonomy and academic freedom is ideologically neutral, it is important to remember the 1950s, when I was a college student. In those bad old days, many recalcitrant southern universities had been forced by the federal government to integrate their student bodies, yet the schools were still tolerating the harassment of African American students and teaching racist curricula.
Had the federal government threatened to withhold funding from such racist universities unless there were changes, many liberals, civil libertarians and advocates of academic freedom would have applauded.”
I pretty much agree with his points.
Comment #71 April 17th, 2025 at 12:09 pm
Hi Scott,
I take the opportunity of you posting the abstract for asking you a question about Goedel’s theorems which is bugging me since long time.
Would it be true that if I set “maximum” integer number N making the set of the integers finite, then Goedel’s theorems will not be valid anymore? If all the business of Goedel and Turing has to do with infinity (sets, tapes, …) and we live in a finite world (we can also truncate real numbers..) what is the relevance of these theorems? Complexity theory looks more relevant, since (as you say) we live with limits of space and time.
I do not want to “play down” Gödel and Co. but just understand the interplay between infinity and these results and understand why they are so relevant even if they are based on (unphysical) “infinity”.
Sorry for the long question skipping more urgent political issues and thanks.
K. (a physicist).
Comment #72 April 17th, 2025 at 1:03 pm
Scott #45: your take is that without mandating a Jewish majority in Israel, seven million Jews would be murdered. I sincerely doubt (to put it mildly) that that is the only conceivable longterm outcome of a 1-state solution, but probably there would be some amount of violence, at least at first, no matter what. My beliefs are that 1) the number of people cheering the deaths of Jews on these campuses is vanishingly small, and 2) the vast majority of the protestors chanting “from the river to the sea” or “globalize the intifada” are chanting those things from a generalized desire that the area be one that is open and free to all people. It’s a call for a 1-state democratic society. How do I know that? Because I know plenty of these people personally! Again, you might be right and they might be wrong as to the ultimate, inevitable consequences of the 1-state “solution,” but what I’m confident about is that that sort of speech should absolutely be protected on college campuses. As a previous commenter mentioned, I think one of your biggest issues around this matter is your theory of mind. It’s just incorrect.
Comment #73 April 17th, 2025 at 1:31 pm
On a somewhat lighter note, the hatred of Trump by academe in general, and Penn in particular is nothing new, as the following post written 8 years ago will show.
Penn’s Wokeness is nothing new
I graduated Penn Med in 1966 so I get the Alumni Magazine, Universities being relentless in their search for funds. The following post appeared in March 2017. See if you can figure out why the Penn Alumni Magazine of January/February 2017 was so peculiar before reading to the end
How diverse are thy articles oh alumni magazines
College Alumni Magazines love to brag about the wonderful things their graduates are doing. The recent Jan/Feb issue of one they send to me bragged about the exploits of two of their business school alums in the sports business, one graduating in 1968 the other in 1997. They also had profiles of 7 alums receiving awards at the 2016 reunions.
I didn’t get one even though attending my 50th medical school reunion. There was a lot of congestion as Donald Trump was attending the graduation of one of his kids while running for president. Our med school classmate and Nobel Laureate addressed the college graduation. He didn’t get an award either, they thought he had enough.
The issue also had room for a nice recipe for Chocolate Chip Banana Cookies.
There was also an article about the president of the school deciding what US laws the University would and wouldn’t obey, declaring the University to be a “Sanctuary”
In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories the following dialog appears
Gregory (Scotland Yard): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
It wasn’t until I read the letters to the editor in the March/April issue, that I realized just what was curious about the Jan/Feb issue.
They failed to have an article about another graduate of their business school in 1968.
Donald Trump Wharton 1968.
The first United States President from the University of Pennsylvania in its 227 years of existence.
To be fair they did have an extremely wimpy note from the editor concerning why they didn’t have an article about Trump.
Ah diversity of thought and opinion in the Ivy League
Res ipsa locquitur
It’s been over 50 years since McLuhan noted “the medium is the message”. It’s still very true
One final note: Antisemitism at Penn ’62 – ’66 was minimal, it being a later ‘improvement’ due to wokeness.
Two examples.
One Jewish fraternity, ZBT was known as Zillions, Billions and Trillions.
There were undergraduate fraternities that didn’t admit Jews, and I was very impressed with the older brother of a girl I dated, who refused to join them for that reason. He was definitely a catch for any social climbing fraternity as his father was on the board of governors of the NYSE
Comment #74 April 17th, 2025 at 2:26 pm
Luysii wrote
“One final note: Antisemitism at Penn ’62 – ’66 was minimal, it being a later ‘improvement’ due to wokeness.
One Jewish fraternity, ZBT was known as Zillions, Billions and Trillions.”
For anyone else who may be as confused as I am by the style of that guy’s ramblings:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeta_Beta_Tau
Zeta Beta Tau (ΖΒΤ) is a Greek-letter social fraternity based in North America. It was founded on December 29, 1898. Originally a Zionist youth society, its purpose changed from the Zionism of the fraternity’s early years when, in 1954, the fraternity became non-sectarian and open to non-Jewish members, changing its membership policy to include “All Men of Good Character” regardless of religious or ethnic background, while still being recognized as the first Jewish Fraternity.
The society was called Z.B.T., which referred to the first letters in the transliteration of the Hebrew phrase צִיּוֹ בְּמִשְׁפָּט תִּפָּדֶה “Zion Be-mishpat Tipadeh”, which translated means “Zion shall be redeemed with justice”.This is taken from Isaiah 1:27 — “Zion be-mishpat tipadeh ve-shaveha be-tzedakah” (Zion shall be redeemed with judgment, and they that return of her, with righteousness”).
Comment #75 April 17th, 2025 at 2:55 pm
TheoristIsrael #14: The deposition is hilarious.
Scott, in what sense has Columbia capitulated? The deposition says a completely different story (not as bad as the hearings from last year, but in the same ball park).
Comment #76 April 17th, 2025 at 2:58 pm
John #72
> […] the vast majority of the protestors chanting “from the river to the sea” or “globalize the intifada” are chanting those things from a generalized desire that the area be one that is open and free to all people. It’s a call for a 1-state democratic society. How do I know that? Because I know plenty of these people personally!
Looks like it’s analogy time again. Imagine a group of men going around chanting “women back in the kitchen” or “put out and shut up”, and a person who claims that based on knowing plenty of these men personally, what they really mean is that they want to make gender relations better, which’ll make both men and women happier. How do you think women will see (a) the group of men, and (b) the person claiming they actually mean well?
Comment #77 April 17th, 2025 at 5:38 pm
Luysii #55: It’s worth noting that the “remedial” math class MA5 covers differential calculus. I suspect that it has small enrollment, mostly athletes. This is similar to peer institutions: Stanford offers Math 18 (Foundations for Calculus); Princeton offers Math 100 (Calculus Foundations); Yale offers Math 110-111 (a two-course sequence covering precalculus and calculus). Harvard is guilty of poor messaging if they used the term “remedial.”
Also, at schools like Harvard, the standard intro calculus class is substantially harder than AP Calculus, taken mostly by students that already took calculus in high school.
Comment #78 April 17th, 2025 at 6:07 pm
Michael P#70
That’s demonstrably false. All of those measures are being carried out. We already saw 2 of the most contentious ones put in place- special public safety officers helped physically remove protesters 2 weeks ago who chained themselves to the gates, and just yesterday it was announced that Miguel Urquiola will head the review of Middle Eastern programs. As with a lot of things Dershowitz is completely wrong.
Comment #79 April 17th, 2025 at 6:25 pm
Hi Scott,
I just got home from your lecture, which I thoroughly enjoyed! During the lecture, you said something to the effect that you thought finding the next value of BB was beyond Humanity, and would require an AI. Was that a joke, or what kinds of problems do you imagine being better suited to AIs than to us Homo Saps?
Comment #80 April 17th, 2025 at 6:52 pm
Thanks for the talk today, it was very enjoyable!
Regarding our ongoing crisis, the phrase “stop engaging with the pretext!” has been rattling around my head for several days. The subject matter of the pretexts they give are important (antisemitism is important!). Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of people are still grabbing at the pretexts and trying to turn them into something that they can fight against:
Executive Branch of the United States Government: “We had to grab this person in the middle of the night and deport them to a foreign prison, they are a terrorist in a gang, we know because they have tattoos!”
Somebody somewhere: “Actually, if you look at those tattoos, they don’t mean the thing that you say they do!”
Executive Branch of the United States Government: “We had to cancel this kid’s student visa, they have a criminal record!”
Somebody somewhere: “It’s just a speeding ticket, that’s not a real criminal offense!”
Executive Branch of the United States Government: “We have to cut grants at Columbia and Harvard, they have a huge antisemitism problem!”
Somebody somewhere: “Yes, but those cuts will harm the people they are meant to protect!”
Everyone is free to engage with the issues as they see fit, but for me there is no point trying to win these arguments. For me, the only correct response is “No, you are arguing in bad faith.” Who am I going to convince by shooting down the pretext?
Comment #81 April 17th, 2025 at 7:44 pm
John#72
try read again what you have written. You think that killing jews is OK, if not every of 7 000 000 is killed? Really? It is exactly people like you who would make me consider voting Trump if i were american. Are you secretly running his PR campain?
“the vast majority of the protestors chanting “from the river to the sea” or “globalize the intifada” are chanting those things from a generalized desire that the area be one that is open and free to all people.”
The area is already “open” and “free” to all people. Also Israel is already “1-state democratic society.” so no need for this “call”. What your friends are calling is for destruction of existing state and nothing more. Exactly like in Russia they speak about Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia. Every bit of this rhetoric is the same.
Comment #82 April 17th, 2025 at 8:01 pm
Timothy Snyder,
Fomenting Antisemitism
Not Combating It
https://snyder.substack.com/p/fomenting-antisemitism
Comment #83 April 17th, 2025 at 8:03 pm
Hi Scott
Was the talk recorded and made available online ?
Thanks
Comment #84 April 17th, 2025 at 8:42 pm
ira #83: I’m checking on that now; will let y’all know!
Comment #85 April 17th, 2025 at 8:51 pm
Dave G #79:
I just got home from your lecture, which I thoroughly enjoyed! During the lecture, you said something to the effect that you thought finding the next value of BB was beyond Humanity, and would require an AI. Was that a joke, or what kinds of problems do you imagine being better suited to AIs than to us Homo Saps?
No, it wasn’t a joke. From what we now know, proving the value of BB(6) seems like it could require solving a huge number of different Collatz-like number theory problems that are each both
(1) unbelievably hard (beyond mathematicians’ current abilities), but also
(2) not really motivated or interesting beyond the nerdy, esoteric goal of determining BB(6).
That’s why I say that this doesn’t seem like a job for humans.
Eventually, for better or worse, every problem might be better suited to AIs than to “us Homo Saps.”
For now, just like a layperson might guess, LLMs seem to have an advantage in math when lots of drudgery and application of standard techniques is required, and a disadvantage when an idea is needed that’s fundamentally new. But note that the pool of humans capable of “beyond-LLM mathematical creativity and insight” has been rapidly shrinking over the past few years! 🙂
Comment #86 April 17th, 2025 at 8:52 pm
Scott,
“were you aware that that specific article was recently completely rewritten and then locked down by a group of anti-Israel radicals, who (we now know) organized to infiltrate Wikipedia for the specific purpose of rewriting Zionism-related articles from their previously neutral tone into agitprop?”
Wow! I don’t think many people are aware of it! I certainly wasn’t; just checked the Wikipedia, and it remains biased as of now.
Is there an efficient mechanism to request Wikipedia rollback these edits and lock the articles? To your knowledge, is anybody working on this?
Comment #87 April 17th, 2025 at 9:24 pm
Scott #85
The matrix multiplication algorithm invented by AlphaTensor seems fundamentally new, so isn’t AI already there in some sense ? Its just that current LLM+RL methods still require lot of human involvement to pluck out those fundamentally new ideas ?
Comment #88 April 17th, 2025 at 10:12 pm
Sych #81: first of all, I said on this thread that I don’t call myself an anti-Zionist. Part of that is because I’m worried about what would happen, violence-wise, if the requirement of maintaining a Jewish majority in Israel were removed gone. Second, I said that if we went with a 1-state solution (which is not the case now–what planet are you living on?), I don’t think it would be anything near the disaster Scott assumes. Third, there’s already a lot of violence. The 1-staters I know think that in the end, longterm, it would be overall better and more human for everyone. Better reading comprehension and critical reasoning skills next time, dumbass.
Comment #89 April 18th, 2025 at 12:26 am
RemedialCalculus #77:
Thank you for calling out that “remedial” has a very specific meaning in this context. I also want to highlight (from the link in #55):
> “They’ll have the same psets, they’ll have the same office hours, they’ll have MQC, they’ll take the same exams,”
So it’s not even an easier class; the students just get more structured support. MIT offered equivalent help when I attended 20 years ago, just not phrased as a distinct course number. At the end of the day, passing Harvard’s math class, especially starting from a weaker background, is a sign of a strong student.
I would also posit that Harvard’s mission is not to accept the strongest possible freshman class. It’s to train the strongest possible senior class. That means accepting strong freshmen, obviously, but it also means spotting the “diamonds in the rough” and ramping them up quickly.
(In this same vein, I’d like to push back on Scott’s assertion in #58 that holistic processes are less “merit-based” than score-based ones. They are less objective, and they certainly _can_ be worse. But they can also be better. The devil is in the details.)
Comment #90 April 18th, 2025 at 1:45 am
Scott, I understand but the “MAGA bosses” have two options: either recovering institutions taken by the opposite party, or dismantling them (by replacing funds with taxes). The “opposite-party bosses” prefer the second option to losing their power. So, the destructive option can be avoided if the majority of moderates thinks that the long term goal is restoring what universities used to be, strategically accepting short-term Trump excesses to avoid hosting a messy war.
Instead, the moderates who watched while their universities were turned into something not worth defending, now proudly endorse fighting against their democratically-elected government with childish 1933 rhetoric.
Comment #91 April 18th, 2025 at 10:49 am
fighting illegal authoritarian actions of the Trump administration requires building a serious alliance.
it is unfortunate that many institutions that would be representative of the classical enlightenment ideals like rule of law and democratic norms have been taken over by radicals on the left, but maybe this is a wake up call for them to fight for something very serious rather than their own favorite wedge issues.
that said, we should also reflect seriously on how these institutions got to a state that have caused such a big anger in the general public against our institutions that is exploited by radical right wing populists. blaming media and misinformation is a scapegoat, the underlying anger is real and not fake.
the institutions which are an integral and critical part of our republic needs to clean themselves from excesses of the past (including being too much woke) and need to show more empathy to the general public that is unhappy with how things have gone.
the only way this country polarized between radical left and radical right survives is strengthening of common sense center based on hard fought gains made over centuries that are represented in the US constitutions.
most Democratic politicians unfortunately are still playing politics rather than understanding the seriousness of the situation and are waiting for Trump’s economic policy failures to give them back power in the mid-terms. It is extremely unfortunate that they do not grasp that their own excesses on the left, particularly on supporting minority groups have caused the alienation of the the majority groups (like men, women, white, working and middle class) and opening the possibility for radical right populism to gain political power by exploiting that anger. it is really unfortunate that among the Democrats I don’t see a single person who is smart and complement and charismatic, is not a chameleon politician but has real value and convictions, and those convictions are not radical left ideals, and has a serious realistic and hopeful future for our country.
Comment #92 April 18th, 2025 at 11:13 am
some commentators here also don’t seem to grasp the seriousness of the situation it seems.
the issue is not the democratically elected president (even if it was a pretty slim majority) exercising its legitimate policy decisions.
they are going around all other means of the system if checks and balances. they are refusing to follow the rulings but federal courts, including rulings by conservative judges appointed by Republicans. they are going around the Congress using executive orders to implement things they know they cannot pass through the democratically elected representatives of people, and intimating the representatives on various ways including money from the richest person in the world.
the president does NOT have unlimited power to do whatever he wants. I assure you you would NOT want that system if I’m the next election and because of a few percentages of votes moving to Democrats you get a president from the opposing side.
presidents are not supposed to enact laws but to implement them, and whatever policy they want to implement, they need to get buy in for it from the Congress. and they cannot go outside what courts deem as the essential parts of our constitutional order.
the current administration is behaving more like a third world dictatorship rather than the US republic, this behavior is not inline with anything we have seen from our presidents over the past 300 years, not even Nixon, not even McCarthy years.
this populist demagogue is trying to change the foundations of our country, and I don’t get how any conservative can stand there and defend these.
Either we keep this Republic, or we turn into any of various failed and unstable countries around the world, or even worse, we become a fascist dictatorship.
This _real genius_ that is currently holding the reins of power is causing chaos. everyone might have their unhappiness with how our system works, but almost every one of them will regret changing it to one-person rule system, particularly by a vicious megalomaniac, without checks and balances.
this 4 years will determine whether we keep the republic or not and end up with kings.
Comment #93 April 18th, 2025 at 12:17 pm
I’m not a US resident nor a US citizen, so my view is an outside impression. But I’ve spent 3 years in the US, one year as an elementary school student, one year in high school and another one as a graduate student in Berkeley. Every time I have been received with an extreme hospitality and friendliness, which I very fondly remember. The melting pot metaphor, which I heard of as a young boy in an English lesson, looked real.
Sadly the melting pot seems to turn into an antiseptic tank, with the goal of being absolutely clean in the inside while the outside is deemed dirty.
I’m really puzzled by the governments action against Columbia and Harvard. If their DEI or harassment policies violate law, e.g. the civil rights act, then why isn’t this settled in court? It is not the decision of the executive branch of the government whether these policies are lawful or not. Since the government seems to be attacking the iudiciary, it seems to attack one of the pillars of democracy.
With respect to funding, the government may or may not do so. But I think both universities are excellent educational institutions, which every country that would harbor them could be proud of. Tax money invested into education pays off well and as a result of this the US belong to the per capita wealthiest nations world wide.
The effect of defunding education is long term, so Trump will probably be long gone before disaster strikes. This is markedly different from his decision on tariffs, which led to a sudden devaluation of stock market values and the US dollar. So he needed to revise that. That is really the crux of many political decisions, that their long term effects become visible too late.
Comment #94 April 18th, 2025 at 2:58 pm
The great thing about “being on the right side of history” is that you really don’t have to do all that much because the other side is doing all the work for you, by definition… still true if you’re even willing to sacrifice yourself for your side of history.
But the downside is that if the other side actually wins, then history will only have one side left, with absolutely no trace of you.
Comment #95 April 18th, 2025 at 5:10 pm
Remedial Calculus #77, Jeremy H #89. I’m likely a lot older than you guys, and I saved the Princeton University Catalog of 1957 from when I was there.
There was no remedial calculus, and the mathematicians among you would be interested to know that Emil Artin taught the honors course in Calculus and Analytic Geometry “for students who have completed four or more years of school mathematics with records that indicate superior ability and promise”.
This was quite typical of Princeton back then and hopefully now. They had their best faculty teaching undergraduates (unlike Harvard). I had John Wheeler for (not even honors) Physics. He once brought in Neils Bohr to talk to us.
Comment #96 April 18th, 2025 at 5:46 pm
anon#91 and #92 — very well said, sadly
upspring#93 — the problem with DEI is that they were trying to correct male-white bias in universities and workplace. They overcorrected, giving rise to what in the past was called reverse-discrimination, which in the past (as you supposed) was something that could be settled in court.
Why not now? A variety of reasons (including the rise of use of social networks for everything – note 1) too long to enumerate in this margin. Read anon#91 and #92 for some
note 1 — in the past, people could have different values, but tried to understand each others and reach middle ground consensus. Politicians still went to dinner together after “fighting” in the chambers. Now social networks control people live, from entertainment to (most critically) news. The tyranny of the advertisements and the “likes” has created the extremely unfortunate case that the networks need to keep you “engaged” (read: glued) to the screen as long as possible to get ad money, and they use the “likes” as a proxy to decide what you would like — that has caused for a positive loop of reinforcement of opposite, extremist views and the destruction of the understanding other people’s problems, which then become anger.
note 2 — I sincerely hope to be wrong, but I see only two ways out: civil war or tyranny. I don’t see how our democracy can survive current situation — and I don’t mean (only) current administration, but the current social environment
Comment #97 April 18th, 2025 at 6:42 pm
According to Attorney General Bondi, torching a Tesla is domestic terrorism, but doing the same to the house of a Jewish Democrat Governor is a nothing-burger…
Comment #98 April 18th, 2025 at 11:41 pm
fred #97: You do realize that the arsonist was a far-leftist pro-Palestinian Islamist? I don’t see any reason why anyone of Jewish faith would still want to support the Democrat party…
Comment #99 April 19th, 2025 at 12:21 am
Del #96: I keep seeing people blame social media for the current political environment, as if we didn’t have wars or ethnic and religious conflict before social media was invented. Social media surely gives this stuff a new flavor, but the basic phenomena have been around for thousands of years, or arguably as long as life has existed on Earth (e.g. look up the “squirrel reconquista”). I also see people blaming Trump specifically, and ignoring the underlying structural factors that Peter Turchin pointed out in his book “Ages of Discord.” I just read through the 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election” again and it serves as a good reminder that most of the obvious signs of national decline that people try to pin on Trump had already been going on for years before he was elected (and also obviously continued for the last four years under a different president), and arguably help explain why he was elected.
Comment #100 April 19th, 2025 at 9:32 am
Ryan#99
True, social media platforms are not the only cause of this situation, of which many similar ones have happened before since the dawn of time. However in all previous historical cases I can think of, an essential element of the problem was that the opposing parties dehumanized their opponents and did not speak/argue with them, let alone significantly and peacefully mingle in society. Either because of language barriers, economics, geography, segregation, etc.
As I wrote, in the US society after desegregation and before social media, we did peacefully (start) mingling together in a society, spoke (mostly) decently with our opponents, and almost never dehumanized them. We never had serious language barriers, however we did (and still do) have some economics barriers. But we did work together with our opponents in a reasonable manner. As I wrote representatives of different parties fighting in congress used to go to dinner together (look it up!!)
Social media destroyed this social fabric, and reinforced negative attitudes. That is their fault. In a sense that was nothing else than sending us back in history, but yet a very clear and bad responsibility. Perhaps I should have also stated the obvious, namely that such a thing *alone* would not have been able to cause this mess we are in, because as you wrote the actual grievances were others. But social media definitely stopped any mind from searching for any reasonable options to understand the opponent’s grievances, and finding reasonable compromises. It seems clear to me that without social media we would *just* be arguing with each others like (say) during the Reagan years.
I agree with you that Trump is simply the fruit of the situation and not the cause, yet with his lies and incendiary comments (not to mention his actions) he is definitely make things worse, in “concert” with the social media platform problem mentioned above
Comment #101 April 19th, 2025 at 11:55 am
Del #96:
I don’t get, why reverse discrimination cannot be stopped on legal grounds based on the civil rights act. Social media shouldn’t have any influence on the decision of courts. So the question is, why doesn’t Trump hire a bunch of lawyers to file a suit against e.g. Columbia? If he fails in court, he could try to get the appropriate legislation on the way. And he shouldn’t fire people on the basis of their political beliefs but only on criminal behaviour.
Ryan Landay #99:
What looks new under the new government is the circumvention of the iudiciary. Can you name a behaviour of this scale under previous administrations? I’d like to frame the discussion not in terms of left, woke, right or fascist but in terms of adherence to the constitution and law.
Comment #102 April 19th, 2025 at 12:02 pm
Re Luysii #95:
You seem very hung up on the word “remedial” and the fact that this section of the course got a separate listing in the catalog. So again:
* same psets
* same office hours
* same MQC
* same exams
And lest you worry that the math majors aren’t being challenged enough, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55 is still available.
Comment #103 April 19th, 2025 at 12:39 pm
The word and thought called “Moderation” has become a dirty thought and word in our country.
If the so called elite universities would have governed their universities with moderation, the antisemitism could have been avoided and if the federal govt would have governed this country with moderation we wouldn’t be in this mess. alas we have already lost our way, our country is eaten by both left and right extremism to the point of no return. I have lost all the hopes that this country coming back to moderation in it’s governance and thought process is long gone. sometimes I think it’s better to leave this country but it’s a hard decision. Sorry scott for my comment.
Comment #104 April 19th, 2025 at 1:22 pm
Daniel #98
I’m not the one who needs to “realize” anything, it’s Bondi who needs to recalibrate and sort out all her conflicting narratives here… and of course they’re quiet about the politics of the florida campus shooter…
Comment #105 April 19th, 2025 at 3:25 pm
Uspring#101
For an authoritative question, you should ask them not me. As a centrist, I am appalled by the situation like you sound you are.
I can only speculate (as I wrote in my other posts) that social media have placed in everybody’s mind an attitude of “I am right and all who disagree are wrong”, so people (including the president) rather than trying to understand the other part, follow due process, and seek compromise, they just try to get what is “right” in the fastest (and most damaging for the opponent) possible way.
IMHO, this administration has reached the highest level of this disrespect of the rule of law, but in fairness this process was started by some extreme-left activists who tried (and sometimes succeeded) to damage in any possible way people who said something they disagreed with. Scott blogged about many such occurrences such as https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2221 or https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4522 or https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4859 and many other you can google about.
Comment #106 April 19th, 2025 at 3:26 pm
I remember Scott once mentioning, that if he would be given the choice of either living in a country, where the laws are obeyed and democratic structures are intact or live in a country, where his values are shared by everybody, he would prefer the latter. Obviously the latter kind is not the US for almost everybody living there. So they’d better be like the first choice.
Comment #107 April 19th, 2025 at 6:24 pm
Uspring #106: I don’t remember ever saying anything of the kind — could you please show me a link?
It’s a bizarre comparison to me, since liberal democracy and rule of law are themselves two of my most important values.
Comment #108 April 19th, 2025 at 9:06 pm
“Oops, we did it again”
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=50
Comment #109 April 19th, 2025 at 9:49 pm
Del #100: Mark Zuckerberg infamously thought Facebook would make the world more open and connected, that being connected to people on the other side of the world who’s from a different country, religion, etc. would make us all realize we’re not so different after all. Instead what happened is people realized, actually we are different, and a lot of people really do hate each other. Basically everyone who’s run a large enough social media platform (or even this blog) has realized that actually you do need some sort of content moderation or a lot of “normal people” will become alienated, and people might actually start killing each other or themselves in the real world over content shared on your platform. This is impossible to avoid entirely, so some people ask, “why bother?” but it’s far from clear at this point that this is a better idea; there was a very funny congressional hearing where members of Congress were asking the TikTok CEO why in the US, we have the “NyQuil chicken challenge” and other forms of content encouraging teenagers to harm themselves, but the Chinese app Douyin doesn’t. I think the Chinese “Great Firewall” model will become more popular in the future.
Uspring #101: The classic example of circumventing the US judiciary is FDR threatening to pack the Supreme Court in 1937 in order to get them to approve his New Deal programs.
Comment #110 April 19th, 2025 at 10:10 pm
Events are proceeding at a crazy pace, almost as if the administration is trying to cover up one major self-inflicted gash (let’s go Mafioso on Ukraine!) with another (let’s tariff the penguins!). They seem to be stopping only to rip up excellent institutions just for the heck of it – NOAA? NIH? what on the planet are they trying to do here? Maybe they went after Harvard that week to just to distract from some other act of insanity.
What’s being achieved by all of this? On the matter of international students: The NYT reports ‘Losing foreign students could also be bad for the broader economy, experts say. International students pumped nearly $44 billion into the American economy and generated 378,000 jobs last year alone, according to NAFSA: Association of International Educators, which promotes international education.’ Yet students are now having their visas revoked for traffic violations long ago, or face deportation over essays in a school newspaper. Is the intent to lose $44 billion per year in this sector alone?
In these times (as in every time), clear and reasonable voices like yours are truly important. So, thanks.
Comment #111 April 19th, 2025 at 10:19 pm
Daniel#98
It’s amazing — the lack of any fact checking the right does in their hot takes on…anything.
The radical ‘Islamist’, ‘far-leftist’, ‘pro-Palestinian’ arsonist you characterize is none other than…
Cody Balmer; white, male, 38 years old. Former veteran, “equipment repairer in the Army Reserve from April 2004 to June 2012”.
Wild leftist that — ‘posted negative content about President Joe Biden and seemed to reject Biden’s 2020 presidential win. He shared posts on Facebook criticizing Biden during his term, including a picture with the text “Joe Biden owes me 2 grand” and a post that said, “Biden supporters shouldn’t exist.”‘
You’re a clown.
Comment #112 April 20th, 2025 at 3:02 pm
Scott, how did you find the Harvard campus on your visit?
Comment #113 April 20th, 2025 at 4:37 pm
John_o #111:
Thx for letting me know. I must admit I messed up in #98.
What still bothers me though is the fact that Balmer is quote-unquote anti-Semitic reason about “not taking part in his plans for what [Shapiro] wants to do to the Palestinian people.” The primary conclusion I get from this is that extreme intifada-type bs isn’t as far from alt-right bs. Which to be fair is/should have been obvious.
Comment #114 April 20th, 2025 at 11:07 pm
“rule of law” is not following whatever the laws are. I’m a dictatorship, the dictator can make arbitrary laws.
rule of law means that no one is above the law, not even those who rule. they cannot just announce their desires and turn them into law. the term for that is “rule by law”.
rule of last on the other hand means that there are fundamental things that not even the people in power can violate.
in the case of the US, a bunch of these are codified in the US constitution, but they informally are more basic than the constitution. when the supreme court rules against the administration or invalidates some law passed by the congress because it violated the constitution or basic legal framework, that is a sign of rule of law working.
when the US president is given immunity from criminal persecution, even after his term had ended, and even if the crime goes against the foundations of this republic and the basic legal framework, when the US administration resist obeying the rulings of the US supreme court, that is a sign that we are at a very dangerous juncture.
in this country, what we have hold above anything else, is the US constitution, and that is what any official in the US government takes an oath to.
the constitution is not unchangeable, but the founding fathers were very intelligent to make that hard, so it cannot be done with just simple majorities, and there are fundamentals parts there that cannot be changed ever legally, and anyone trying to change them illegally would be considered to be attempting to overthrow the republic.
young people are idealist and often driven by the zeal and passion of values and righteousness, but that is not how you set up a country that had lasted for hundreds of years. we should be extremely thankful that the founding fathers were wise men, wiser than many leaders and politicians these days.
Comment #115 April 21st, 2025 at 12:23 am
Your last line was particularly brilliant and an important insight.
Great post.
Comment #116 April 21st, 2025 at 4:04 am
What do you think about https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/NCRI-Report_The-Corruption-of-the-American-Mind.pdf ?
A fabrication? I don’t think that I’ve seen any mentions of the direct external influence in the discussion.
The picture I’ve got from the discussion is that the faculty has become a bit too lenient for certain transgressions (though it is in the process of correcting itself), while Trump exploits that to his advantage.
The external influence changes things in a way that could make the “correcting itself” part much more difficult. As well as complicating the overall picture.
Comment #117 April 21st, 2025 at 10:18 am
Is your Yip lecture available on YouTube or transcript, please?
Comment #118 April 21st, 2025 at 11:50 am
Phillip Dukes #117: Soon, they tell me! Will share here as soon as it’s available.
Comment #119 April 21st, 2025 at 3:28 pm
Scott #107:
I’ve searched through a lot of recent comments of yours but couldn’t find a corresponding quote. I apologise for bothering you with what might have been a hallucination. I haven’t yet given up on looking for which of your statements might have triggered my post…
Comment #120 April 21st, 2025 at 3:35 pm
John #112:
Scott, how did you find the Harvard campus on your visit?
That’s worth a followup post of its own! Briefly, though, I had an extremely nice visit, saw tons of old friends, but also got depressed hearing how terrified everyone is about their funding and their visas and green cards.
Comment #121 April 22nd, 2025 at 12:44 pm
Even worse than cutting off funding to Harvard, is cutting off foreign talent. Back in 1960 fellow chemistry grad student, the late Don Voet (“Biochemistry”) said the universal scientific language was broken English. Of the 7 Chemistry Nobels in the department since then, 3 were Jews hiding out or fleeing Europe during WWII — Konrad Bloch, Roald Hoffman, Martin Karplus.
Comment #122 April 23rd, 2025 at 5:19 pm
luysii #121:
One way to put it is “cutting off foreign talent”. Another way to put it is “cutting off jewish talent.” Jewish admission rates plummeted 5x in the recent years, worse than when Harvard instituted quotas a century ago. 5 times drop in admissions! Besides Jews, Harvard is discriminating against Asian Americans. Don’t you think something should be done about this? Most of Trump demands are aimed at moving hiring and admission policies toward meritocracy. Don’t you think it’s a good thing, and long overdue?
Comment #123 April 23rd, 2025 at 7:10 pm
Your lecture is on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VplMHWSZf5c
Comment #124 April 23rd, 2025 at 11:01 pm
Michael P #122:
Do any of you goofballs read about the topics you’re breathlessly ranting about or are you so ideologically captured that facts are meaningless?
Jews make up 16% of the population at Penn, 10% at Harvard, 12% at Yale, 21% at Cornell, and 24% at Brown. Pretty impressive for a demographic that makes up 2% of the US population (by the way, your made up statistic — whatever a 5X decrease means — would imply that…I’m not even sure what, it’s clearly a bad metric, but I guess what you’re trying and failing to say is something along the lines of Jewish acceptance rates went from 50% to 10%?)
From Leonard Saxe, who directs the Steinhardt Social Research Institute and Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University: “Jewish students now go to a much larger number of schools than was ever the case,” he said. “Twenty years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, there might have been 100 to 150 schools, which were the only schools Jewish students went to. Today there are hundreds and hundreds of schools.”
From Mark Oppenheimer, the host of Gatecrashers, a podcast about the history of Jewish quotas at the Ivies: “Today I don’t think there’s anyone in college admissions who’s deliberately trying to squeeze Jews out,” he said. But he believes admissions priorities at the Ivies and demographic trends within Jewish communities themselves have shifted in ways that affect Jewish enrollments.
From Joyce Gordon, director of Jewish life at Duke University: she disagrees with the idea that the “sky is falling” because Jewish students are enrolling elsewhere. The Jewish student population at Duke has grown from 10 percent to 12 percent of undergraduates over the last five years. And moreover that “The hand-wringing that is out there about declining Jewish enrollment, if there is declining Jewish enrollment, it can’t come at the expense of celebrating increasing enrollment—of other minoritized groups.”
From Joshua Bolton, executive director of Hillel at Brown University: Jewish students are going to different campuses in part because more campuses now have the infrastructure to support them, such as kosher dining halls. Brown, for example, is building two new kosher kitchens set to open this fall, and Hillel has a beit midrash, a Jewish library where students can study texts together.
You’re a clown. Get a grip.
Comment #125 April 24th, 2025 at 6:48 am
[…] The Blog of Scott Aaronson If you take nothing else from this blog: quantum computers won't solve hard problems instantly by just trying all solutions in parallel. Also, please read Zvi Mowshowitz's masterpiece on how to fix K-12 education! « I speak at Harvard as it faces its biggest crisis since 1636 […]
Comment #126 April 24th, 2025 at 1:27 pm
Michael P #122, John_o #124 I wouldn’t equate “foreign talent” with Jewish talent, although this was closer to the truth 65 years ago than it is now because of the massive emigration of Jews out of Europe starting in the 30’s due to the Nazi’s. Don Voet’s parents were Dutch Jews who were smart enough to see what was coming.
The immense contributions of foreign talent from the Indian subcontinent, and Asia since that time can’t be ignored.
Another cause of the Asian diaspora became obvious to me when our son entered Cornell in 1986. Lacking much contact with Asians, I viewed them as a pretty homogenous bunch. I quickly found out that there was no love lost between the Chinese and Japanese (I was told that China gave Japan its written language), Japanese and Koreans, Vietnamese and Chinese etc. etc. etc. The bright kid from any of these countries had two choices, go back to their home country or come to the states. The Korean kids knew better than to try to make it in Japan etc. etc., although I’m sure a few did.
Comment #127 April 29th, 2025 at 4:31 pm
While Harvard is to be commended for standing up to the Trump administration’s demands, which, I agree, use antisemitism as a smokescreen for total government control, Harvard’s continuing practice of admitting legacies and Dean’s List (big money) candidates, at rates eight and ten times higher, respectively, than everyone else, remains equally nauseating and repugnant. These admissions practices remain outrageously unfair, clearly favor the rich, privileged, white, wealthy, and well connected, to the detriment of more highly qualified applicants from the lowest income backgrounds, for whom a Harvard education would mean the difference in their lives. Shame on you, Harvard, for continuing to hold onto an inequitable practice originally created out of a fear of enrolling too many jews and people of color.
Comment #128 April 30th, 2025 at 9:21 am
Scott – 3 blue 1 brown aka Grant Sanderson has made a video about Grover’s algorithm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQWpF2Gb-gU
It starts from a place of wanting to get right the exact thing about QC that you emphasize it is important to get right.
Would love to hear your thoughts on it, including “it is good”!
Comment #129 May 3rd, 2025 at 8:06 am
Thank you so much for writing Shtetl-Optimized! I’m a huge fan! I agree with almost everything you say!