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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   25141 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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Physics professor Steve Hsu's take: https://x.com/hsu_steve/status/1889350047004848291

Cutting ICs will only indirectly affect woke activities. The cuts will harm overall university budgets, but the main harm will be to very expensive STEM activities on campus, which require large IC charges to fund.

Building new labs, renovating old labs, hiring staff to deal with real regulatory and compliance requirements, etc. all require additional funds from ICs. Existing grants do not cover any of these costs which are very large and very real.

Without sufficient ICs a university could easily decide that STEM research is too expensive, while cash cow race-to-the-bottom courses in Sociology or Psychology become more attractive. There are fierce internal battles between factions within every university, and if STEM research becomes a big money loser, its advocates will lose more battles.

Overall this is a huge win for China because the appeal of working as a scientist at a US university is significantly diminished as the available resources decrease.

Overall this is a huge win for China

Steve Hsu is a weird guy.

I follow him on Twitter where he mostly posts about how great China is, despite living in the US and teaching at the University of Michigan. It's very black-pilling for the idea of assimilation.

He thinks every thing is a huge win for China because he loves China and wants them to defeat the US.

I do agree that he likes China, but I don’t think he wants it to defeat US. The way I read him is more like “if China defeats us, it will be deserved, because they’re doing a lot of right things, while we are just fumbling while being insanely overconfident about our abilities, and seriously underestimating China”.

I think you misread Hsu's motives. He's almost always giving his honest read of a situation and saying where US policy is working against itself. For example, export restrictions on high-end microchips. He said this is just going to bootstrap Chinese chip manufacturing that otherwise would have had to compete with imports. Manufacturers in China have the same incentives as anyone else and until the ban consumed a whole lot of imported chips.

Now we have DeepSeek R1 that was partly trained on Huawei chips.

On a recent podcast he talked about learning of Trump's win while hiking a mountain in China. And he fist-pumped and celebrated as an American happy that his country was getting back on the right track. And then shortly after was soliciting for technical experts to fill roles in the adminstration.

Maybe I am reading him wrong.

For what it's worth, I largely agree with his China takes, just minus the triumphalism.

He appears to be an unironic MAGA guy though. I suppose it's not contradictory if you believe a war between US and China isn't inevitable.

he loves China and wants them to defeat the US.

Seems pretty uncharitable. Why do you think he wants China to defeat the US?

I doubt this is an assimilation story. Hsu's dad was born in pre-revolutionary China and Hsu's granddad was a KMT general, so he'd have little familial reason to hold red China in high regard. Hsu himself was born in Iowa and has worked exclusively in American institutions - if he really loved China so much he could certainly move there.

Yeah, it doesn't seem to make any sense. And yet that's the read I get from seeing hundreds of his tweets. I think people have stickier ethnic loyalties than we might want to admit.

That's why Scott's recent take about Rotherham landed kind of flat. His take was something like this:

"Americans are mad about white girls getting raped by Pakistani man in England. But these same Americans aren't mad about the even bigger problem of Pakistani children being raped by Pakistani men in Pakistan. I thought they cared about Pakistani rapists, but I guess not. So inconsistent."

To which the answer from everyone was sorta, "d'uh".

hiring staff to deal with real regulatory and compliance requirements

Comes back to 'Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats'. The overhead is a result of the regulations. The removal of overhead doesn't remove regulations.

What funding do woke movements need ? They're staffed by privileged upper class volunteers who're signed up in unemployable non-STEM programs. Wokeism works precisely because it needs no funding.

Without sufficient ICs a university could easily decide that STEM research is too expensive, while cash cow race-to-the-bottom courses in Sociology or Psychology become more attractive. There are fierce internal battles between factions within every university, and if STEM research becomes a big money loser, its advocates will lose more battles.

When I was in college, several of the STEM professors brought up how many adjunct sociology professors their research grants were funding from the half-ish of the money that was "indirect". It was quite a few, because relatively little of tuition ends up paying for professors. I'm not saying this hypothetical couldn't happen, but that the reverse of it (STEM research is a cash cow for high-ranked multidisciplinary universities) has been true before.

Can you confirm this to be true ? It seems insane that funding money crosses department boundaries.

I don't know the financial details at play, but money is often very fungible. It could easily be "letting all the tuition funds pay for humanities" or something like that. Although I've also heard universities complain informally about earmarked gifts: rich benefactors want new named buildings, not expensive repairs to existing ones.

A common complaint with earmarked donations (& grants for that matter) in general: "buy the new shiny" is often far more attractive than "do the preventative maintenance to keep the previous workhorse running".

Won’t we just switch to funding the lab directly instead of indirect taxation?

This provides insufficient opportunities for grift.

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