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NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

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Re: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

#341

Post by petesergeant »

ben_w wrote: post #297
petesergeant wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's also two such places in the UK Oxford and Imperial?

Hah! No, the reason I'd say against Imperial isn't the college itself (but even then, is still third on the list of Oxbridge and ), it's similar to why I'm not tripping over smart people here in Berlin: fantastic public transit means the smart people aren't all squished together. Town and gown, massive town. Diluted organisational opportunity, less room for serendipity in meeting fellow nerds of whatever topic of int…

With the caveat that I have degrees from Oxford and Cambridge but not Imperial

> but even then, is still third on the list of Oxbridge

Is this still true? Any ranking I’ve seen recently generally has it right up there. It feels like it’s a name recognition thing rather than quality meter at this point, like Caltech vs MIT.

Your points about geography are well taken though.

Re: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

#342

Post by rahimnathwani »

UncleMeat wrote: post #336
rahimnathwani wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UCLA had even stricter rules about race in admissions coming from the state. Do you believe that UCLA currently complies with Proposition 209, and has done so since it came into force?

The law that permits the federal government to cancel these grants has less strict requirements than Prop 209. For admissions policies to be a justification here they'd need to be so incredibly flagrantly violating Prop 209 that it'd be a joke.

Under pressure, UCLA commissioned a UCLA professor (Robert Mare) to study the data and prepare a report.

You can read the full report here: https://sard.law/static/sard/pdf/Mare%20Report%202012.pdf#pa...

If you don't want to read the full report, one of the most interesting things is on page 67. It says that North Asians receive lower holistic scores, and African Americans receive higher holistic scores, than similarly situated applicants from other ethnic groups. And this when comparing like with like because (i) it's during 'Final Review' and (ii) Mare's model compared students who were otherwise alike (including on socioeconomic and hardship indicators).

He did a follow up a couple of years later, with newer data, and his findings were the same (although the numbers shifted a bit).

How did UCLA respond to this report? By issuing a press release saying all was good:

  The report confirms that the admissions process at UCLA honors academic achievement and prioritizes acceptance to applicants of exceptional academic accomplishment. Further, data suggest a full range of applicant academic and personal achievements are evaluated by the Comprehensive Review procedure. Professor Mare concludes that the Comprehensive Review ranking for UCLA freshman admissions functions in the manner intended by the faculty and the University. CUAS ...is satisfied with the quality, focus, and rigor of the study.
Sure, the ranking functioned in the manner intended, but that manner was illegal!

Re: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

#343

Post by JeremyNT »

dttze wrote: post #295
kj4211cash wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it really the Zionists that did this? Or a Trump administration that enjoys disrupting academia and experts in general.

This was already underway with Biden. It’s the Zionists and their apparent outsized influence within the US government.

But both things are true, and it's openly weaponized now in new ways.

The Zionists pushed a narrative that criticizing Israel was antisemitic, and center right publications like the NYT pushed the narrative that free speech for conservatives was under attack at college campuses.

Now the forces of conservatism and Zionism have made common cause to destroy higher education using the full force of the federal government, and the mainstream media is complicit in it all.

Re: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

#344

Post by doctorpangloss »

tolmasky wrote: post #213
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.

Over half the nation did not vote for Trump. 77M people of a total population of 340M did, which is around 23%. Trump didn’t even get over half of the total votes cast (49.8% vs. 48.3%). You are free to be dismayed by these numbers, but please stop supporting the notion that “more than one out of every two people you meet in the US voted for Trump”, it is wildly untrue and really misrepresents the strength of the mov…

Australia has compulsory voting at 90%+ participation and elects conservatives, by the standards of their politics, all the same. The opposite of what you're saying is probably true: if Democrats would focus less on the demographics-turnout based election model that has lost them 3 presidential and many, many congressional elections, they would win more often.

Re: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

#345

Post by throwaway290 »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #257
throwaway290 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a strawman. Of course there is free speech. It doesn't mean it's okay to talk on the phone in a cinema or recite the Bible aloud during a math lecture. It doesn't mean it's fair play to shout obscenities on the train and spit on people. Idk about US but there is a thing called "verbal abuse" and police is 100% callable for that. That out of the way so how about hostile environment for students again? I was do…

> I was downvoted for asking a question and this did not answer it. I am 100% sure your comment was downvoted for this sentence: > I'm not in the US but I heard pretty interesting things about what was happening in universities following Oct 7. People here don’t like propaganda-fueled speculation. The commenter also literally answered your question. You asked if it was meant to be implied as false and they said yes.

I was not reading propaganda and he did not answer the question. I will make it shorter to make it very clear. The question: "hostile environment for students?" the answer: "free speech, cudgel, fealty". I get it and I agree wit all of that. But it is answer to some other question that was more convenient to the "answerer"

Re: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

#346

Post by roenxi »

vharuck wrote: post #174
roenxi wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But government funding was set up in a way meant to counteract fickleness. Government actions are supposed to be proposed publicly, accept and consider public comments, and then allow legal arguments about the process and motivations. And funding is assigned by Congress, two legislative bodies with hundreds of members that follow extensive rules and procedures to do anything. The current "fickleness" is from a single…

> The current "fickleness" is from a single individual. The other branches of government are refusing to check out even criticize his actions.

Leading to the observation that it isn't a single individual. It is a large number of people agreeing on what the political priorities are.

> Government actions are supposed to be proposed publicly, accept and consider public comments, and then allow legal arguments about the process and motivations.

The Trump people have done all that on the way to where we are right now. It's been quite hard to escape the debate over the last decade or so. It was heated, public and quite interesting to follow. There were at least 3 elections involved (realistically a lot more, the internal mechanisms of the Republican party have been active), and his opponents have been comprehensive in their analysis of his flaws and the issues with his policies.

Re: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

#347

Post by throwaway290 »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #248
throwaway290 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice strawman. So how about the actual question which is hostile environment for students? I was downvoted for asking a question and this did not answer it. Edit to reply: what I remember reading was not about saying "end genocide", it was about saying "you are a jew so go die" kind of stuff. It seemed pretty crazy but I didn't save any sources

If I make a sign that says "Nazis are Evil", and a guy gets upset and says "you can't say that about me" - what do you call that guy? A Nazi. If I make a sign that says "End the Zionist Genocide", and a Jewish person says "you can't say that about me", they don't feel uncomfortable because they're Jewish .

"Zionist genocide" means a genocide of zionist people. Last time I heard it happened was WWII.

This thread and replies I got is wild!

Re: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

#348

Post by throwaway290 »

hackyhacky wrote: post #208
cvoss wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The accusation from DOJ isn't about student speech, though. It's about the university's actions or inactions, which are not protected and are governed by obligations to Title VI discrimination law.

You're right, but the university is not allowed to censor student speech based on content. The "actions" that the administration claims the university should have taken would have violated the constitution.

> the university is not allowed to censor student speech based on content

Hold on, didn't tenured professors get fired literally based on content of their speech a few years back under the other administration? I am confused

And this does not have to be about censoring speech. There are rules of a place. As I said, you start obstructing a lecture, you get thrown out in a good university

Re: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

#349

Post by tolmasky »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #344
tolmasky wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over half the nation did not vote for Trump. 77M people of a total population of 340M did, which is around 23%. Trump didn’t even get over half of the total votes cast (49.8% vs. 48.3%). You are free to be dismayed by these numbers, but please stop supporting the notion that “more than one out of every two people you meet in the US voted for Trump”, it is wildly untrue and really misrepresents the strength of the mov…

Australia has compulsory voting at 90%+ participation and elects conservatives, by the standards of their politics, all the same. The opposite of what you're saying is probably true: if Democrats would focus less on the demographics-turnout based election model that has lost them 3 presidential and many, many congressional elections, they would win more often.

I'm not making a demographics-turnout based election model argument?... I'm simply stating the, IMO objective fact, that dividing the number of people that voted for Trump by the total population is 23% and not 51%, and even dividing that number by the number of people that voted is 49.8%. I've made no statements whatsoever about what Democrats should focus on. I don't know where this is coming from, my only critique is that it is unnecessarily demoralizing to state as fact that the majority of the population voted a certain way when it simply isn't true. Look, you are allowed to believe that if everyone voted the result would have gone that way, you can also like OP assign blame to non-voters if you so choose, but just say that instead of misstating a voting percentage.

Separately, I honestly don't even know what possible strategy could be inferred from my statement. That I think that ~70% of the population might be open to your message? That I think we should tell people that more people are on their side than they know? Does that sound like a turnout-based strategy?

Re: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

#350

Post by [deleted] »

consumer451 wrote: post #296
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can agree that decades of soft power are gone. So it’d take twice as much to ameliorate.

> soft power This term appears to have been redefined by podcast and twitter bros as something really, really bad. They can't define it, but it's bad. Similar to that four letter word that starts with "w."

[deleted]
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