I've worked in/around/through the field that measures results of "international development" interventions for nearly 3 decades, witnessing an avalanche of moral decay subsuming not only any good in the efforts but any ethical impulse in individuals pushing always for more more more. The further I tried to move out of that field, the more I discovered this collapse was endemic to 'altruism', whether projects or research.
Human nature is something, isn't it? Follow my bliss becomes Following my bliss is my right and others should pay me for it. I want to help others becomes My sinecure must never be touched. And of course, I want to do good becomes Do-gooders are always right and anything that goes wrong in a scheme is the fault of peasants, who are kinda dumb or superstitious or backwards.
Recently a former colleague reached out to "reconnect" with a few introductory blasts about losing her high-six-figures job managing 'nonprofit' projects, and might I have job search tips or leads. She sat in that job for 15 years past when I was forced out for discomfiting management by insisting on measuring results correctly instead giving clients empty/shallow numbers to help them keep Congress happy so we could all keep making ever more money. Here's a tip, honey: you should have banked that dough while it was pouring in, and shouldn't complain how unfair it is that taxpayers don't want to support your lucrative hobby anymore.
Mathematician here. Most of us are pretty apolitical (I'm an exception) with a slight preference for left of centre politics (I'm an exception) which I think largely stems from a deep lack of understanding of human nature mixed with an unsophisticated version of a "do as you would be done by" philosophy.
I very much doubt that any of Tao's students are in the anti-semitic camp (although I fully accept that they might be). Moreover, IPAM is definitely not "his institution". Indeed he is not even a director.
Whether Tao might provide vocal support for actual hostages is unclear. He might. See above comments about mathematicians.
No, I see you are right. He is scheduled to become a director (there are several), according to a search engine which is not Google. I made the mistake of checking the IPAM website.
Your correction is still valid, "a director" means he has less control than "the director" would. Although that doesn't stop him and his fellow directors for working together to take IPAM out of UCLA's grasp
Small point here, but I am not in charge of anything at any of my schools but I still reference to them as “my schools”. I was never the Captain of any ship I served aboard, yet they were “my ships”.
Saw some good stuff on his blog, looked at other stuff, found some stuff I disagree with. (Or, at least the 'good' stuff is not stuff I could check myself, and it did not contradict my prejudices. The other stuff, I did have some additional information about.)
From first principles, my guess of whether Tao is a Jew hater would not be 'no'. Now, I might go with 'no', if I could only select from 'no' or 'yes'.
But, basically, there are several questions relating to government funding for academics, and the scientific value of academics. Tao might have a wrong enough position on those to be worth cutting, without having been stupid enough to get caught going all in on making US universities Judenfrei.
For example, we can generalize from Brook's mythical man month, to conclude that adding more people to a wrong consensus can make the consensus more wrong. If the added people have the same incentives, probably the same sort of systemic errors. Adding different incentives or different biases may be where you get the broadening effect that makes things more widely palatable.
The current nature of PhD programs mean that we could never broaden faculty to completely match to the public, and we may have also added a bunch of bad actors of various sorts to reach the current point.
With pure mathematics, if you cut all tertiary research funding, the addicts who cannot quit would still not quit. There's an argument that such a remaining population of obsessive lunatics would have less of the low quality fraudulent work, and there is the counter argument that the applied mathematics world would lose any influence over where pure mathematics is going.
I'm massively disgruntled with the accepted consensus around applied mathematics, where the theory of what service we provide is concerned.
One, we cannot self-deal between only PhDs and set the value that the public must put on our results. Austrian economics, and some other trails of thought.
Two, the elite race war ideology that academic elites have pushed offsets a little positive results that local faculty may have provided here. Right now, might still be more positive than negative, but the crazy faculty would not need to get very many crazy students to burn down section eight housing to change that.
Three, the public actually needs some assurance that faculty will not self deal to screw the public over again. (I recall that Tao was orthodox/mainstream on covid.)
Four, 'decolonization' introduced the idea that faculty think the public could be justly exterminated, leaving the public with the possible alternative that is also decolonization of cutting faculty with a machete. Cutting funding instead is an American cultural preference, and may be appropriate given how certain faculty have damaged the American peace consensus.
Five, critical theory was pretty much a repudiation of the traditional liberal arts, and fucked over a lot of the business of teaching applied maths to anyone who will pay. I can understand faculty standing quiet in the face of it, but going along with it undermines credibility in trying to defend a cultural place for mathematics.
Six, PhDs make up 1-2% of adult population, tops, and cannot win power and influence by naked force of arms. They have to persuade people. Every area of expensive policy where government can fund a field to provide a 'consensus', and then pretend to 'just be following orders' from academia, is a risk for the university business, and for the public. The correct basis for arguing with the public is to a) document and provide the arguments b) in a way accessible to the public, that they can sort and test for themselves c) if that way of perceiving does not have popular support, cut one's losses instead of doubling down. burying things inside a government access controlled dataset, or in literature behind a paywall, is not appropriate when the costs to the public are high enough. (On one key issue, where IIRC Tao is also on the side of wrong, academics have just happened to overlook the key details that show that the the costs of the recommend policy are not as low as proposed, but instead could possibly be on the same order as mass murder.)
If academics wanted to minimize the loss of research funds, the correct time and place was four damned years ago, when I was losing my mind with despair over the senior leadership not having the vision to understand that they had fucked up, and needed to be proactive if they did not want outsiders coming in to try to fix things.
Two years ago, maybe the red state governors could have quietly instructed the leadership fo public (state) universities to make some corrections, but apparently none of them were close enough to understand that they needed to.
The time to quietly pretend that the university administration had never implicitly endorsed the Jew hating was last year, after the election and before Trump took office.
Yes, interruption in research funding has opportunity costs that may not be fixable later with more money. WEll, so does shutting down food manufacturing and transport parts of the economy. These were and are precisely parallel cases. Where a mainstream lack of regard for Austrian economics did not equip scholars in 2020 to articulate publicly that there were limits to what they should be trusted to shut down from a distance.
I absolutely do not buy that 100 million dollars in official valuation for medical research is actually matching to 100 million real world dollars. Mengele's research value seems to have actually been near zero to negative. We don't quite have the evidence to justify valuing academic medical research funding at actually zero, but we do have evidence to discount it to some degree.
I'm blackpilling when I evaluate it at zero, yes. My inside baseball is that nobody is openly whispering about the internal reforms that need to be made to restore confidence.
Pauses to tertiary education, or to research funding, are probably inherently less harmful than all of the fucking around with food industry or with security that academics have pushed for, or proposed.
Neither Trump nor anyone else is aggressively and offensively cutting tertiary funding enough for my political taste. However, I would not feel comfortable making the full of my position clear to my colleagues nor coworkers.
Basically, if academics had been willing to openly abandon Harris for Trump before the election, they would have been able to buy an arrangement more favorable for them. But, they thought Harris was a good bet, and good ad copy. This is basically directly evidence that they do not understand Americans very well. Which is not a ding against all of their academic abilities. But, it does itself raise questions about their competence to set prices or values for the whole of human activity.
"we can generalize from Brook's mythical man month, to conclude that adding more people to a wrong consensus can make the consensus more wrong. If the added people have the same incentives, probably the same sort of systemic errors. Adding different incentives or different biases may be where you get the broadening effect that makes things more widely palatable. "
And there we see how DEI with its Diversity of skin color but uniformity of mental outlook dooms institutions to failure. As opposed to real Diversity of outlook which ought to lead to improved results
Just reading his complaint is first two paragraphs is nauseating. It’s a grant, thus it is not earned and can be withdrawn at any time. No process is needed. The US is, what 33 trillion dollars in debt, we cannot afford such luxuries.
How inconvenient for Professor Tao. The intention of the federal sanctions are to get the institution to provide equal opportunities for Jewish students. Tao should aim his complaints at the administration that ignored and then allowed the mistreatment of so many students by other students (and sometimes faculty?) No one should be threatened with harm, especially on campus. So, yeah, Professor Tao, you want to straighten this out? Leave and take your best students with you. If you let it be known you're looking for place to go that doesn't have a clear record of allowing anti semitism there will be a bidding war for your services. I'd be willing to represent you for a very small commission and I'll still make a bundel. But don't consider MIT. You're the wrong color and ethnicity.
I've worked in/around/through the field that measures results of "international development" interventions for nearly 3 decades, witnessing an avalanche of moral decay subsuming not only any good in the efforts but any ethical impulse in individuals pushing always for more more more. The further I tried to move out of that field, the more I discovered this collapse was endemic to 'altruism', whether projects or research.
Human nature is something, isn't it? Follow my bliss becomes Following my bliss is my right and others should pay me for it. I want to help others becomes My sinecure must never be touched. And of course, I want to do good becomes Do-gooders are always right and anything that goes wrong in a scheme is the fault of peasants, who are kinda dumb or superstitious or backwards.
Recently a former colleague reached out to "reconnect" with a few introductory blasts about losing her high-six-figures job managing 'nonprofit' projects, and might I have job search tips or leads. She sat in that job for 15 years past when I was forced out for discomfiting management by insisting on measuring results correctly instead giving clients empty/shallow numbers to help them keep Congress happy so we could all keep making ever more money. Here's a tip, honey: you should have banked that dough while it was pouring in, and shouldn't complain how unfair it is that taxpayers don't want to support your lucrative hobby anymore.
tl;dr: My sympathy likewise is limited.
Well said.
Good post (but slightly mistaken, I think)
Mathematician here. Most of us are pretty apolitical (I'm an exception) with a slight preference for left of centre politics (I'm an exception) which I think largely stems from a deep lack of understanding of human nature mixed with an unsophisticated version of a "do as you would be done by" philosophy.
I very much doubt that any of Tao's students are in the anti-semitic camp (although I fully accept that they might be). Moreover, IPAM is definitely not "his institution". Indeed he is not even a director.
Whether Tao might provide vocal support for actual hostages is unclear. He might. See above comments about mathematicians.
Happy to be corrected.
I thought he was about to be made director of IPAM. I guess I misunderstood some of what I read.
No, I see you are right. He is scheduled to become a director (there are several), according to a search engine which is not Google. I made the mistake of checking the IPAM website.
Your correction is still valid, "a director" means he has less control than "the director" would. Although that doesn't stop him and his fellow directors for working together to take IPAM out of UCLA's grasp
Small point here, but I am not in charge of anything at any of my schools but I still reference to them as “my schools”. I was never the Captain of any ship I served aboard, yet they were “my ships”.
I've seen some things about Tao.
Saw some good stuff on his blog, looked at other stuff, found some stuff I disagree with. (Or, at least the 'good' stuff is not stuff I could check myself, and it did not contradict my prejudices. The other stuff, I did have some additional information about.)
From first principles, my guess of whether Tao is a Jew hater would not be 'no'. Now, I might go with 'no', if I could only select from 'no' or 'yes'.
But, basically, there are several questions relating to government funding for academics, and the scientific value of academics. Tao might have a wrong enough position on those to be worth cutting, without having been stupid enough to get caught going all in on making US universities Judenfrei.
For example, we can generalize from Brook's mythical man month, to conclude that adding more people to a wrong consensus can make the consensus more wrong. If the added people have the same incentives, probably the same sort of systemic errors. Adding different incentives or different biases may be where you get the broadening effect that makes things more widely palatable.
The current nature of PhD programs mean that we could never broaden faculty to completely match to the public, and we may have also added a bunch of bad actors of various sorts to reach the current point.
With pure mathematics, if you cut all tertiary research funding, the addicts who cannot quit would still not quit. There's an argument that such a remaining population of obsessive lunatics would have less of the low quality fraudulent work, and there is the counter argument that the applied mathematics world would lose any influence over where pure mathematics is going.
I'm massively disgruntled with the accepted consensus around applied mathematics, where the theory of what service we provide is concerned.
One, we cannot self-deal between only PhDs and set the value that the public must put on our results. Austrian economics, and some other trails of thought.
Two, the elite race war ideology that academic elites have pushed offsets a little positive results that local faculty may have provided here. Right now, might still be more positive than negative, but the crazy faculty would not need to get very many crazy students to burn down section eight housing to change that.
Three, the public actually needs some assurance that faculty will not self deal to screw the public over again. (I recall that Tao was orthodox/mainstream on covid.)
Four, 'decolonization' introduced the idea that faculty think the public could be justly exterminated, leaving the public with the possible alternative that is also decolonization of cutting faculty with a machete. Cutting funding instead is an American cultural preference, and may be appropriate given how certain faculty have damaged the American peace consensus.
Five, critical theory was pretty much a repudiation of the traditional liberal arts, and fucked over a lot of the business of teaching applied maths to anyone who will pay. I can understand faculty standing quiet in the face of it, but going along with it undermines credibility in trying to defend a cultural place for mathematics.
Six, PhDs make up 1-2% of adult population, tops, and cannot win power and influence by naked force of arms. They have to persuade people. Every area of expensive policy where government can fund a field to provide a 'consensus', and then pretend to 'just be following orders' from academia, is a risk for the university business, and for the public. The correct basis for arguing with the public is to a) document and provide the arguments b) in a way accessible to the public, that they can sort and test for themselves c) if that way of perceiving does not have popular support, cut one's losses instead of doubling down. burying things inside a government access controlled dataset, or in literature behind a paywall, is not appropriate when the costs to the public are high enough. (On one key issue, where IIRC Tao is also on the side of wrong, academics have just happened to overlook the key details that show that the the costs of the recommend policy are not as low as proposed, but instead could possibly be on the same order as mass murder.)
If academics wanted to minimize the loss of research funds, the correct time and place was four damned years ago, when I was losing my mind with despair over the senior leadership not having the vision to understand that they had fucked up, and needed to be proactive if they did not want outsiders coming in to try to fix things.
Two years ago, maybe the red state governors could have quietly instructed the leadership fo public (state) universities to make some corrections, but apparently none of them were close enough to understand that they needed to.
The time to quietly pretend that the university administration had never implicitly endorsed the Jew hating was last year, after the election and before Trump took office.
Yes, interruption in research funding has opportunity costs that may not be fixable later with more money. WEll, so does shutting down food manufacturing and transport parts of the economy. These were and are precisely parallel cases. Where a mainstream lack of regard for Austrian economics did not equip scholars in 2020 to articulate publicly that there were limits to what they should be trusted to shut down from a distance.
I absolutely do not buy that 100 million dollars in official valuation for medical research is actually matching to 100 million real world dollars. Mengele's research value seems to have actually been near zero to negative. We don't quite have the evidence to justify valuing academic medical research funding at actually zero, but we do have evidence to discount it to some degree.
I'm blackpilling when I evaluate it at zero, yes. My inside baseball is that nobody is openly whispering about the internal reforms that need to be made to restore confidence.
Pauses to tertiary education, or to research funding, are probably inherently less harmful than all of the fucking around with food industry or with security that academics have pushed for, or proposed.
Neither Trump nor anyone else is aggressively and offensively cutting tertiary funding enough for my political taste. However, I would not feel comfortable making the full of my position clear to my colleagues nor coworkers.
Basically, if academics had been willing to openly abandon Harris for Trump before the election, they would have been able to buy an arrangement more favorable for them. But, they thought Harris was a good bet, and good ad copy. This is basically directly evidence that they do not understand Americans very well. Which is not a ding against all of their academic abilities. But, it does itself raise questions about their competence to set prices or values for the whole of human activity.
"we can generalize from Brook's mythical man month, to conclude that adding more people to a wrong consensus can make the consensus more wrong. If the added people have the same incentives, probably the same sort of systemic errors. Adding different incentives or different biases may be where you get the broadening effect that makes things more widely palatable. "
And there we see how DEI with its Diversity of skin color but uniformity of mental outlook dooms institutions to failure. As opposed to real Diversity of outlook which ought to lead to improved results
Just reading his complaint is first two paragraphs is nauseating. It’s a grant, thus it is not earned and can be withdrawn at any time. No process is needed. The US is, what 33 trillion dollars in debt, we cannot afford such luxuries.
How inconvenient for Professor Tao. The intention of the federal sanctions are to get the institution to provide equal opportunities for Jewish students. Tao should aim his complaints at the administration that ignored and then allowed the mistreatment of so many students by other students (and sometimes faculty?) No one should be threatened with harm, especially on campus. So, yeah, Professor Tao, you want to straighten this out? Leave and take your best students with you. If you let it be known you're looking for place to go that doesn't have a clear record of allowing anti semitism there will be a bidding war for your services. I'd be willing to represent you for a very small commission and I'll still make a bundel. But don't consider MIT. You're the wrong color and ethnicity.