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:Yes, it is embarrassing that Russia and China can keep politics out of scientific conferences, but the USA and Europe cannot.
February 26, 2025 at 2:08 amI 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.
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. ...He makes an analogy to AI LLM models that turn evil.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 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?
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