Boycott Math to Save Greenland

American professors have been whining about possible Trump administration budget cuts, as if this is the end of scientific research. Now Peter Woit wants to boycott the scheduled 2026 Philadelphia meeting of the International Congress of Mathematicians!

The 2022 meeting in St. Petersburg Russia was canceled, because of pro-Ukraine political activists. This was unfortunate. It only punished Russian mathematicians and conference organizers who had nothing to do with Ukraine politics. Russia was not using these conferences for political gain. Only the supposedly free westerners were.

American and European scientific organizations are sometimes more politicized than Russian ones under Stalin.

Woit is from Latvia, so maybe he hates Russia. But does he also hate Philadelphia? He laments that it may be hard to find a host country that meets his ideological purity test, as he says the world is going fascist.

John Baez chimes in that he moved to Scotland to escape Trump!

Here is the only sensible comment:

Alessandro+Strumia says:
February 26, 2025 at 2:08 am

I could attend the ICBS conference in China because it says «This conference is a purely academic event. It does not promote any political opinion». I cannot attend conferences at Perimeter, not even on zoom, because it forces to accept a Code of Conduct that contains political elements including DEI (“inclusivity, equity, diversity”) and I am not Marxist. Removing all these woke Codes of Conduct that did not exist a decade ago seems to me a better contribution to freedom than avoiding conferences in the US.

Yes, it is embarrassing that Russia and China can keep politics out of scientific conferences, but the USA and Europe cannot.

Scott Aaronson also has Trump derangement:

Trump and Vance’s total capitulation to Vladimir Putin, their berating of Zelensky in the Oval Office for having the temerity to want the free world to guarantee Ukraine’s security, as the entire world watched the sad spectacle. ...

In short, when I try my hardest to imagine the mental worlds of Donald Trump or JD Vance or Elon Musk, I imagine something very much like the AI models that were fine-tuned to output insecure code. ... It’s as though, by pushing extremely hard on a single issue (birtherism? gender transition for minors?), someone inadvertently flipped the signs of these men’s good vs. evil vectors.

He makes an analogy to AI LLM models that turn evil.

He is a smart man, but it is hard to believe that he really does not understand the USA's reluctance to guarantee Ukraine's security.

Russia and Ukraine are minor corrupt countries on the other side of the world with an ugly border dispute. It probably would have been resolved peacefully, except that the USA and Zelensky keep threatening to put NATO weapons on Russia's border. Russia says that it is defending itself from NATO expansion. Maybe Putin is lying, but USA involvement is making things worse, and it is time to pull out.

Maybe you disagree, and that's fine, but how it is that Aaronson cannot even see the logic behind Trump's position?

Professor Dave Blasts Dr. Bee Again

Professor Dave has a popular Youtube channel, with twice the subscribers of Dr. Bee. He posts a lot of good videos explaining textbook material, and sometimes debunks charlatans and quacks. I mentioned his attacks before.

Now he says she is a grifter for cash in a 1.5 hour rant:

Sabine Hossenfelder Can’t Stop Acting Like a Complete Fraud

Professor Dave Explains
3.64M subscribers

I've already made two videos about Sabine Hossenfelder's gradual decline into deception and charlatanry, but her behavior has gotten so bad lately that it's time to make another one. This time, after examining her latest pathetic stunt, it's time to bring in some physicists to comment on the ridiculous things she's been spewing. Those would be Eluned Smith, Aram Harrow, and Tracy Slatyer, all professors of physics at MIT. Most of you were already on board, but if you Sabine fanboys wouldn't listen to me before, maybe you'll listen to them.

He says a lot of her videos are okay, but she has drifted down the right-wing rabbit hole. He ends up calling her a nazi.

He interviews physics professors to explain that Physics really has been making big progress, and that he public taxpayers have benefited so greatly that they should happily fund further research.

Listen for yourself, and tell me whether you are convinced. One said that supersymmetry might have explained a few things, but those explanations have been ruled out by the LHC collider. That was progress. I agree that was progress, but I did not see any benefit to the taxpayers.

I think she is correct that most of the funded research is of no tangible value. The video guests do not directly rebut her, but instead ramble about how research often has value.

Strangely, they never address superdeterminism. Of all her videos, that is the subject where she has the greatest expertise, and it is also the one with her kookiest views. Superdeterminism is so kooky that it is reasonable to reject everything she has to say, if she believes in it. But that is not what he does.

It is true that high-energy theoretical physics has stagnated for about 50 years. We have had 50 years of 1000s of papers on new theories and models, and they have nearly all failed. The last big advance was the standard model. String theory, supersymmetry, grand unified theories, and many others have gone nowhere. Everyone thought that the LHC would discover new physics, but it did not.

He gives the argument that the electron was discovered as pure scientific research, and it had big commercial payoffs decades later. So maybe the Higgs boson will similarly have commercial payoffs someday. That is just silly. The Higgs is not going to have any commerical utility. It cost $10 billion jus to make one at the LHC accelerator.

Update: Dr. Quantum Supremacy piles on

Sabine #17: I very often agree with your acerbic takes, or at least enjoy them. Not always. To me, superdeterminism is a candidate for the most insane idea in the history of physics — certainly 1000x more insane than anything the string theorists have ever come up with. But even your superdeterminism advocacy wouldn’t merit a comparison to RFK Jr.

No, what merits the comparison to RFK Jr. is this recent video of yours. There, with comically unconvincing caveats (“I’m not necessarily saying this should happen, just that it will“), you speak approvingly about the imminent destruction of publicly-funded academic science, in favor of just letting Musk, Bezos, et al. fund whatever they feel like.

Yes, superdeterminism is insane, but so is many-worlds, and Aaronson endorsed it in 2021. So they are all promoting fringe and insane versions of quantion mechanics.

Aaronson is mainly upset that Hossenfelder predicts an end to taxpayer funding of whatever academics want to study, especially fringe ideas with no real world relevance. She compares academic research to Communism, where central government committees decide what to fund, and make political decisions with little public accoutability.

He praises this comment:

For instance, there’s a whole genre of articles claiming that some experiment has shown that quantum processes can rewrite the past, foresee the future, or take a negative amount of time. The AMO physicists hopefully all know the real story is “our experiment checked that textbook QM works exactly as expected, but if QM _wasn’t_ true you’d need some crazy retrocausality to get the same results”, but they choose not to communicate that subtlety. It seems to be a game they play to get into top journals. But then the public just gets more confused, and convinced that physicists don’t know what’s going on.

Yes, you could say the same about arguments for superdeterminism, many-worlds, or Bohmian mechanics. Those arguments all depend on QM not being true, but that subtlety get omitted. Most quantum weirdness arguments work that way. For example, Bell proved that if QM were false, and were a some sort of classical theory instead, then it would have nonlocal properties.