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NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

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Re: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

#181

Post by muglug »

roenxi wrote: post #134
mensetmanusman wrote: post #21

Background: UCLA violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, "by acting with deliberate indifference in creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students." Outcome: These grants are likely in a temporary holding pattern until ucla settles the issue.

Additional Background: US government provides funding, US government tries to use that leverage to decide how the show will be run. Over the years I've come to accept the blind spot most people have where, despite all evidence, they assume that the government goals match their own. But it still isn't the case. The prudent approach is to set up institutions that are largely independent of government. Government fundin…

> Government funding is not an answer to long term problems

It has been said that government funding is the worst form of funding except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time

Re: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

#182

Post by andrepd »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #99
nyeah wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. We've coasted for a long time on importation of geniuses and on being the only un-bombed industrial nation ... in 1946. And now we've largely closed the door to geniuses from wealthy countries. (Why take the risk of living in the USA right now?) We've even taken the first few steps towards deliberately driving out the geniuses we have. I didn't expect that even six months ago.

Academic institutions in the last decade or two started pre-filtering based on ideology goals before taking into account actual research. In general the system was veering off as the massive bureaucracy gained mission creep.

What do you mean?

Re: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

#183

Post by [deleted] »

bananapub wrote: post #138
lotsofpulp wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is even if they had values, American voters chose to elect someone without values. I do not understand this griping about rolling over when over half the nation votes for a treasonous leader. At that point, the only option left is war.

that's an insane pov. is it really your sincere proposition that after an American presedential election, there should be no expectation of anyone to criticise the winner, no matter what they do? really?

[deleted]

Re: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

#185

Post by hermitcrab »

sitkack wrote: post #113
wiz21c wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering US support to Israel, I wonder if MAGA is Trump or not...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/christian-zionism-israel-anti...

I've never really understood the relationship between the US and Israel. The US gives Israel pretty much whatever it wants and in return the US gets ... nothing? Israel even (deliberately?) attacked a US ship during the 6 day war, with little (if any) consequences:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident

>While millions of American evangelical Christians have long been fervent supporters of the Jewish state because of End Times prophecies

Is that the main reason for this incredibly one-sided relationship?

Re: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

#186

Post by dandanua »

epistasis wrote: post #3

The past year has been utter chaos, madness, and sadness for STEM in the US. I hope that Tao's grad students don't suffer from this too much in the immediate term. In the long term, all science is being harmed greatly, and we are causing a gigantic bubble in the pipeline of the production of scientists, most severely damaging those who are graduating soon.

It's ok, USA doesn't need mathematicians after the AGI is built. If you need to compute something just ask AGI. The subscription, of course, will cost you multiple lifetimes' worth of the minimum working wage (luckily you could take a credit that will be payed off by multiple generations of your descendants), but you know, the progress can't be stopped!

Re: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

#188

Post by foobarian »

churchill wrote: post #132
lupusreal wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Support for Israel among Americans is starkly stratified along generational lines, with young people on both sides of the traditional partisan divide being broadly sick of Israel's shit. This has Israel freaked out, they know their support from America is now on borrowed time and without it, they are doomed. I think this is why they're pushing so hard now, they're trying to secure their strategic objectives (particul…

Exactly this. Glad someone else can see it. Having studied other settler colonial states (I believe), Israel realizes that Western weapons and doctrine guarantees they'll win every single confrontation with the Palestinians, just like the Rhodesians & Apartheid South Africa. Easily too, with insane KD ratios. Those two regimes won every battle easily, but what eventually did them in was sanctions. And, when the West…

What I don't understand is why not go along with letting at least WB or also Gaza get recognized as Palestine and do what India and Pakistan did going forward. Seems like it would be a lot more likely to work and a lot less risky. Maybe there are some special resources in either place?

Re: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

#189

Post by plemer »

throwaway290 wrote: post #147
Den_VR wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The root bsky post says “NSF is suspending roughly 300 grants with UCLA, following a DOJ finding on Tuesday that the university violated Title VI by "creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students."” Which is entirely par for the course with the administration and doesn’t seem particularly targeted at Tao. I’m shocked even more NSF grants haven’t been hit, this was a prime DOGE target. The…

> "creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students" Of course suspending grants is probably the wrong way to go about it anyway, but since you brought this up... do you imply that it's false? I'm not in the US but I heard pretty interesting things about what was happening in universities following Oct 7.

Allowing people to speak out against overt genocide committed by a foreign government = anti-semitism. Isn’t that self-evident? /s

Tbh, this standard argument is itself anti-Jewish as it implies this behavior is inherent to being Jewish, which of course is grotesque and inaccurate.

* Jewish /= Zionist

* Zionist /= Imperialist

* Imperialist /= Genocidal

What we have really imo is an extreme colonist policy that is only superficially Jewish. That doesn’t absolve Jews in Israel supporting it, it rather absolves all those who don’t and makes genocidal colonists take responsibility for their own actions.

Also, genocide is bad.

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