Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Terence Tao on the suspension of UCLA grants

mathstodon.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 328 posts

Re: Terence Tao on the suspension of UCLA grants

#301

Post by coderatlarge »

spencerflem wrote: post #261
coderatlarge wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is extremely hard to form a reasonable opinion of what is happening in gaza with the current level of vitriol online. i feel i’d have to do a substantial personal research project to see if i can believe the cumulative casualty numbers that are being bandied about. not to mention the numbers about deaths from starvation. i wish institutions would do the work to publish their sources in a way that is clear complete…

The guardian US does a good job IMO. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/02/gaza-famine-st... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/02/the-us... idk what you want, there’s mountains of evidence.

my wish would be for an article to have a section at the bottom explaining the source of the figures included in the body. for example they mention a number of dead but there’s no word about where it comes from.

Re: Terence Tao on the suspension of UCLA grants

#302

Post by roenxi »

exe34 wrote: post #270
roenxi wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

McEntarfer [0] had only been commissioner for around 18 months. The performance of the BLS in 1979 probably isn't reflective of her skills and talents. And I'm not going to bother digging through the manuals to figure out how the BLS is calculating their standard errors, but there is a pretty decent chance they've been calculated assuming that the error mean is 0 when in fact it appears to be biased. [0] https://en.w…

> but there is a pretty decent chance they've been calculated assuming that the error mean is 0 when in fact it appears to be biased. Could you explain a bit how you arrive at this conclusion?

I can't really call it a conclusion, I just don't know if the residuals are assumed to have a mean of 0 in their model or having a mean of 0 is simply standard practice. Alternatively if you mean the appearance of bias, you can plot the cumulative sum of the revisions (first chart in the mishtalk.com link) vs. a cumulative sum of a normal variable with the same standard deviation. A clear trend emerges because the mean adjustment isn't 0.

In fairness though, Trump's decision is clearly political, these sort of technical factors aren't important enough to rate an official press release and there isn't a cut and dried case that there is anything wrong with the BLS's methods looking in from the sidelines. But for the last few years they have been too optimistic with their estimates and that does strengthen Trump's case.

Re: Terence Tao on the suspension of UCLA grants

#303

Post by jaredklewis »

wisty wrote: post #292
eptcyka wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about math PhDs? What power do they have, politically?

Why suggest math PhDs unless it's in bad faith? Wouldn't economics and sociology PhDs have both more room for bias in their work, and tend to have power over the economy and society? "Experts" have a lot of sway over the public sector and legal system. The public sector has increased to take up a huge percentage of GDP, and the legal sector has also arguably expanded a lot in power. The perception is that a huge amou…

> Why suggest math PhDs unless it's in bad faith?

Maybe because this thread is about a math PhD (Terrence Tao)?

I’m also surprised you believe academic economists have much power. These days, most politicians from both parties in the US proudly reject more or less all of mainstream economics. Sometimes, the work of academic economists can have some small influence on decisions at the Fed, so I guess that is something.

Sociologists don’t even have that. They’re more or less just talking to themselves.

Re: Terence Tao on the suspension of UCLA grants

#304

Post by teiferer »

wisty wrote: post #292
eptcyka wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about math PhDs? What power do they have, politically?

Why suggest math PhDs unless it's in bad faith? Wouldn't economics and sociology PhDs have both more room for bias in their work, and tend to have power over the economy and society? "Experts" have a lot of sway over the public sector and legal system. The public sector has increased to take up a huge percentage of GDP, and the legal sector has also arguably expanded a lot in power. The perception is that a huge amou…

Please take a moment and consider what exactly you responded to and how. I'm pointing you out specifically since you seem to be familiar with the concepts of good faith vs bad faith arguments.

The post you responded to asked about a specific aspect, namely political power, of math PhDs.

Your response was to state that surely other PhDs have bias in their work.

Are you not realizing that that's quite obviously a bad faith argument? Somebody claims that A has B and your respond that C had D, insinuating GP made connections between A and D or C and B. They didn't.

It's quite common to argue like that, but you did throw around the "bad faith" term. You need to measure your own behavior by that standard when accusing others.

Re: Terence Tao on the suspension of UCLA grants

#305

Post by teiferer »

vesinisa wrote: post #206
Eisenstein wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is always correct or always unbiased or always honest, and everyone's bias benefits themselves, and every person in the United States lives in a way that has disproportionate costs to other people. None of those reasons explain any of the antipathy. What does?

Bigotry. They are completely open that LGBT and other minority rights offend them, and they want to punish those who support such rights. These people are far more concentrated in urban centers. Spite politics is the ultimate form of post industrial vanity. People are so well off and have so little to worry about that their biggest ask from their leaders is to bully those who they don't like. Though I don't agree wit…

Excellent observation. Either side can (and does) easily accuse their opponents of this.

Some don't like anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-climate rethoric. Others don't like trans-rights, anti-hate-speech, anti-christianity rethoric. For either side, those are not real problems which their opponents are concerned about.

That's an underappreciated aspect of current public discourse.

Re: Terence Tao on the suspension of UCLA grants

#306

Post by teiferer »

smt88 wrote: post #138
austhrow743 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Punishing urban intellectuals for being urban intellectuals appears to be a common theme in a lot of right wing American messaging and the Republican Party won the popular vote. You can’t put this on a few. It’s the genuine desire of the American voter.

Few Americans pay enough attention to politics to expect this, and less than a third of the country voted for this regime anyway.

Not voting is willingly accepting whichever outcome is achieved by those who did vote. Therefore, a majority of the country either actively chose or willingly accepted the current regime.

Don't marginalize the responsibility of the people in the democratic process. It's too easy to just blame those in power. It's the people who gave them that power.

Re: Terence Tao on the suspension of UCLA grants

#307

Post by teiferer »

sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #166
ghosty141 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

49,8% popular vote, 50,2 is a majority but at that point I would say it’s clearly half the American population that wanted him in power.

They're technically correct (the best kind etc) because they said "voted for people other than Trump" not "voted for Harris". Voted for Trump: 77.3M Voted for Harris: 75M Voted for other candidates: 2.6M Harris + others = 77.6M, which is greater than Trump's 77.3M

So, clearly about half the vote went to Trump. Stop splitting hairs please, there was enormous support for this. Whether there was an epsilon above or below some arbitrary 50% threshold is insubstantial to this discussion.

Re: Terence Tao on the suspension of UCLA grants

#308

Post by teiferer »

aaomidi wrote: post #290
nosianu wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Germany, in Berlin, these "protests" included wrecking a lecture hall and seriously injuring a Jewish student. - https://www.rbb24.de/politik/beitrag/2025/04/berlin-humboldt... (April 2025) - https://astafu.de/node/589 (February 2024) (Both links are German language - that should not be a problem anymore these days I hope) I don't see why you refuse to even consider that there is more than 1 and 0 absolutes.…

Anti Israel protests are the best opportunity for agent provocateurs. Something we have evidence of Israel actually doing: 1. https://mondoweiss.net/2012/05/operation-glass-houses-idf-ag... 2. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/4/10/mustaribeen-israels... Israel is probably the “strongest” nation in figuring out propaganda and mass disinformation campaigns. It is extremely easy to say an entire protest is invalid be…

> Israel is probably the “strongest” nation in figuring out propaganda and mass disinformation campaigns.

Then you are vastly underestimating what CIA and FSB are capable of.

Or Meta, but they don't count as a state actor (yet).

Re: Terence Tao on the suspension of UCLA grants

#309

Post by teiferer »

EasyMark wrote: post #279
mehulashah wrote: post #46

This is a tragedy. Our pre-eminence as a scientific and industrial powerhouse that really began post WWII is now disintegrating because of the actions of a few. The funding being pulled from Terence Tao and his institute without due process is not the start, it's merely one casualty among many that began at the start of this administration. This is like cutting one's nose to spite one's face.

The long term goal is to dumb down the populace, in anticipation that AI and machines can replace them. Billionaires have the money and resources to play the long game in order to set up an authoritarian society with only two levels. The peasants and the billionaires. Democracy is their enemy, although it served them for a time. It's not really about MAGAs vs Progressives in the USA if you pull back the Wizard's curt…

This sounds too much tinfoil hat to be taken seriously in a debate, thus the downvotes, but there is more truth to it than folks on HN would be comfortable with if they were honest with themselves.

Re: Terence Tao on the suspension of UCLA grants

#310

Post by [deleted] »

exe34 wrote: post #9
padjo wrote: post #5

It’s pretty clear that the only numbers this administration are interested in are ones that support the narrative that the great leader is infallible.

They just fired the commissioner of Labour Statistics. The great thing about autocrats is that they neuter their own country pretty quickly. When you make it risky for people to give you bad news, you end up with missiles that don't work and capital ships that sink.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN