For a long time I’ve been having difficulty making sense for myself of a lot of what is going on in the world around me. Recently I’ve found that a useful way of understanding some otherwise baffling things is as products of what is sometimes called “epistemic collapse”. By “epistemic collapse” I mean the collapse of a shared reality, caused by the loss of reliable sources for distinguishing what is true from what is false.
Someone I’ve found to have a very insightful take on this is Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins. Some of his best explanations of the problem are at threads on his Bluesky feed, for example here and this recent one, which includes:
The danger isn’t just that people believe lies. It’s that entire communities become locked into belief systems that can’t be challenged, where loyalty replaces evidence, and disagreement feels like betrayal. That doesn’t just distort truth, it breaks trust.
When this happens at scale, it’s not just bad information, it’s a breakdown in how society makes decisions. We lose the ability to deliberate, to find common ground, to hold anyone accountable. That’s what disordered discourse really is, a collapse in collective reasoning.
And when debate collapses, power doesn’t disappear, it just becomes unaccountable. Truth becomes tribal. Institutions become hollow. People are left shouting across a void, each group certain the others are insane or evil…
So the real question isn’t “who decides what’s true.” The question is, do we still have the ability to decide anything together at all? Because once we lose that, democracy isn’t under threat. It’s already gone.
I find thinking in these terms helps to make sense of the bizarre and disturbing new political situation in the US and elsewhere, with a new form of Fascism on the march. Autocrats are coming to power on a wave of lies and the destruction of institutions that can provide the facts needed for a shared reality. Efforts to fight this by just coming up with better policy proposals are doomed, what is needed is some way to bring back reality to our information environment. Absent this, we’re looking at a future dominated by autocrats governing through lies and a system of client oligarchs who work with them. The US is now well on its way there.
I don’t have any idea of how to deal with the epistemic collapse problem, other than a hope that if it becomes more widely recognized, people will somehow start finding answers. Thinking in these terms has made me realize that a lot of what I’ve been doing on this blog has been motivated by wanting to provide a source of reality-based information about topics that I have first-hand knowledge of but where at the same time I see the mainstream information environment as dominated by lies.
The situation in fundamental physics
The motivation for starting this blog was the situation in fundamental physical theory over twenty years ago. At the time, popular discussion of the subject was dominated by untruths about string theory, with for instance endless press articles claiming “physicists have finally found a way to test string theory!”. There’s a lot less of this now, and I hope some of that is due to the influence of this blog and the book that I wrote. Within physics departments, string theory was pursued in a very tribal manner, with the main conflict pitting the string theory tribe against the phenomenology and loop quantum gravity tribes.
Nowadays the situation is somewhat different, with the string theory tribe still dominant in formal theory, but mostly no longer doing string theory. The failed string theory ideology is now in the background, but publicly acknowledging its failure will still get you in big trouble with the tribe. Students are still being trained in the ideology (this fall here at Columbia the physics department is again offering an undergraduate course in string theory), but the mainstream research agenda is now elsewhere.
The problem of epistemic collapse in particle theory now goes way, way back. What kept the subject tightly tethered to reality was experiment, but from the 1980s on the main open questions lost useful experimental input. From then until now, the subject has been dominated by an evolving set of “hot topics”, Lacking any shared agreement about whether they were connecting in any useful way to reality, these were often driven more by tribal considerations than anything else. The tribal structure is now complicated, but well-understood to those working in the subject. One very over-simplified way to understand it is as subtribes governed by an oligarchy dominated by figures at Harvard and the IAS. These days if you want a career in the subject, you need to join a tribe, with your choice the Swampland (Vafa), celestial holography (Strominger), amplitudes (Arkani-Hamed), generalized symmetries (Seiberg) or black holes/information (Maldacena/Witten).
Yes, this is a caricature. Also worth noting is that the whole subject is facing a different sort of collapse, as physics departments and US federal funding agencies stop funding theoretical particle physics at all. The latest hep-th US faculty hiring rumor mill has only 8 people getting tenure track jobs this year, about half from the formal theory subtribes.
The situation at Columbia
I started writing about what is happening here at Columbia very specifically to counter lies being widely spread about the subject, which I often know to be lies based on first-hand information. That there is a serious antisemitism problem at Columbia is a lie, heavily promoted by those upset by criticism of the ongoing genocidal and ethnic cleansing policies of the Israeli government. About the truth of what is happening here and now locally, I’m mainly relying on my own eyes and conversations with others who are also here and have first-hand information. What’s going on is very much tribal warfare with on the ground massive killings of civilians happening in Gaza and here a campaign to deny this and paint anti-genocide protest as antisemitic terrorism.
About what’s happening in Gaza I don’t have first-hand information. There I have to rely on a long lifetime of reading various news sources and getting some idea of their reliability. If you don’t believe genocide and ethnic cleansing is going on in Gaza, you need to explain why this story from today’s Haaretz headlined
‘It’s a Killing Field’: IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid
is not true. I don’t see how “genocide” is not the right word for starving 2 million people and firing on them when they try and get food. As for “ethnic cleansing”, Israeli policy in Gaza appears to be to destroy all structures there, shooting civilians who get too close to the operation
“Today, any private contractor working in Gaza with engineering equipment receives 5,000 [roughly $1,500] shekels for every house they demolish,” said a veteran fighter. “They’re making a fortune. From their perspective, any moment where they don’t demolish houses is a loss of money, and the forces have to secure their work. The contractors, who act like a kind of sheriff, demolish wherever they want along the entire front.”
As a result, the fighter added, the contractors’ demolition campaign brings them, along with their relatively small security details, close to distribution points or along the routes used by aid trucks.
In order [for the contractors] to protect themselves, a shooting incident breaks out, and people are killed,” he said. “These are areas where Palestinians are allowed to be – we’re the ones who moved closer and decided [they] endangered us. So, for a contractor to make another 5,000 shekels and take down a house, it’s deemed acceptable to kill people who are only looking for food.”
What next?
My problem these days is that I’d really like to be spending my time on something very different, continuing to make slow progress on some ideas I find very promising, and getting the results written up. About the situation in fundamental physical theory, for a while I’ve been writing less and less. It’s a depressing topic, nothing is happening, epistemic collapse has led to intellectual collapse, and I’ve long ago said whatever I have to say about it.
About the situation at Columbia, it is changing and evolving. The bogus “antisemitism” campaign continues in force and I still believe it’s worth the time to try and challenge it with accurate information about what is really happening here, so I’ll keep blogging about it to some extent.
I have very limited time to moderate discussion in the comment section, so in particular no time to deal with those who want to conduct tribal warfare here. While I hope the notes on “epistemic collapse” are helpful to others, unfortunately I also don’t have the time to moderate a general discussion of that topic, outside it’s specific application to the subjects I’m trying to write about on the blog.
Update: Some thoughts caused by reading the latest from Stand Columbia explaining why Columbia must immediately make a deal with Trump.
Another aspect of epistemic collapse is collapse of the legal system, which depends on being able to distinguish truth from falsehood, and whether a law is being followed or not. The legal system can collapse if judges start accepting falsehoods as truth, or if the executive finds it can just ignore what a judge says about what is true and what is false. It can also collapse because people and institutions give up on it, decide it cannot provide any recourse against dictatorial power.
The trustees describe what they are doing as negotiating a “settlement”. I’ve been thinking of my disagreement with the decision of the trustees to not go to court, to not challenge the obvious illegality of what Trump is doing, as a disagreement about values and morality. But it actually is much more practical than that, and I suspect the trustees either have or will find this out.
Harvard has challenged the Trump illegalities in court through lawsuits. Like most lawsuits, they may some day decide to settle them out of court. If so, this will be a conventional “settlement” of differences within the legal system. What Columbia is doing though is very different. It is starting by accepting illegalities as valid governmental actions. They’ve abandoned the legal system, deciding that they’re better off outside of it, that we’re now in a dictatorship where legality is irrelevant. All that matters is the will of the dictator. If Columbia “settles” with Trump, it will be nothing more than a statement that “we give in to the dictator’s will by doing X”. Any thing they think they’re getting in return for this will have no legal basis, it’s just the current will of the dictator, which may change.
We’ll see how this works out, but my impression is that the Trump people understand this very well. They want the Columbia trustees to publicly humiliate themselves and the institution, by bowing down to dictatorial will and publicly supporting a new regime which operates outside the law. They have an agenda of defunding research universities and will pursue that separately. So, in opposition to Stand Columbia, I’d argue that, even if the trustees don’t believe anymore in the court system, they should not “settle”. Signing another “we give in to the dictator’s will” document will get them nothing but more humiliation.
Update: More lies about “antisemitism” from Trump. The idea that Harvard is currently “in violent violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin” is an absurdity. The threat to take away all federal funding if Harvard doesn’t do something about this is ridiculous. All federal funding already has been taken away, and since the accusations are lies, there’s nothing Harvard can do to answer them. These lies are a tactic to force Harvard to agree to the dictator’s will in the way Columbia did in the past, but we don’t know what actions the dictator is explicitly trying to force on Harvard or Columbia.
I hope Harvard will continue its policy of fighting this kind of thing in court.
Peter,
In relation to your, and others, discussion of the problem in fundamental physics, I would like to hear your response to the following argument. Take, as one possibility, that fundamental physics has now reached its limit, at least for, say, the next hundred years and no new advances are now possible. I would argue that it is still worthwhile maintaining graduate programs in the subject even though, by definition, it will not produce any really “new” information. There are many such graduate programs that, arguably, are in this category, eg, literature, philosophy, history, languages, etc. These fields survive because people are interested in them, they want to study them and learn about them, and they need people to teach them about it. If fundamental physics is in this situation, does it really matter if there are “tribal” fields (Swampland, holograpy, amplitudes, etc.) as long as students find them interesting to study and there are novel “problems” that they can work on and publish? I am a retired biophysicist, and I personally love trying to understand physics, most of which was been well understood for nearly a hundred years. I can certainly imagine young students that also love the field and want a career studying and learning about it. Even if nothing fundamentally new is left to discover, isn’t it valuable maintaining the field, in the same way, eg, as Shakespearian studies?
Regarding “What Next”: I hope you will continue to post about your own research, and also about interesting developments in pure mathematics.
David,
Yes, it’s possible that fundamental physics has reached a limit where it’s just too hard for humans to make progress. The problem with the idea that all is well, people can just happily work on things and publish papers, is one of honesty. If the oligarchs of the field honestly argued “real problems are too hard, let’s just work on this fake one I find entertaining” that would be fine. Instead, this work is advertised as making progress on real problems, that’s what attracts funding, and ambitious young people.
To reiterate a main point of the posting, I really find lying offensive. Some people seem fine living in an environment full of lies, I’m not fine with it.
“These days if you want a career in the subject, you need to join a tribe, with your choice the Swampland (Vafa), celestial holography (Strominger), amplitudes (Arkani-Hamed), generalized symmetries (Seiberg) or black holes/information (Maldacena/Witten).”
I am an assistant professor who posts to hep-th and I just want to give this a thumbs up. This is exactly how it works. The interesting thing for the future is that most of these people are retirement age. What happens in 5-10 years? There is nobody in the younger generations with anything close to the stature of the people in that group (at last in hep-th). Mainly because the last big results in hep-th were in the 1990’s.
Anthony,
Will certainly write more about my own research. To write more about developments in mathematics also is something that requires time I don’t have enough of. I’ve always spent a lot of my life happily learning about new areas of mathematics and what was happening in them, but that’s a time-consuming activity.
Hi – You wrote,
“That there is a serious antisemitism problem at Columbia is a lie, heavily promoted by those upset by criticism of the ongoing genocidal and ethnic cleansing policies of the Israeli government.”
I don’t know anything about it – I came here for the physics. As someone at Columbia, I wonder how your experiences compare with reporting by the NY Times about a Project Esther, led by the Heritage Foundation, which they say is carrying out something similar to what you describe:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/us/project-esther-heritage-foundation-palestine.html
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000010154898/inside-a-plan-to-shut-down-pro-palestinian-activism.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/opinion/antisemitism-israel-palestine-esther.html
https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/report/project-esther-national-strategy-combat-antisemitism
Albert E.,
I mentioned this in one of my blog postings, see the end of
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=14770
The Project Esther story is only a small piece of the larger story of how anyone critical of the Israeli government’s actions quickly finds themself attacked as an “antisemite” and targeted by individuals and organized groups (Canary Mission, Betar) which have been at this for years.
In my case, time between publicly saying that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza for the first time and getting attacked by Scott Aaronson as an “antisemitic piece of shit” was about an hour or so.
Checking I realized that was in the comments to the blog entry linked to above which discussed project Esther.
I would argue that it is still worthwhile maintaining graduate programs in the subject even though, by definition, it will not produce any really “new” information. There are many such graduate programs that, arguably, are in this category, eg, literature, philosophy, history, languages, etc.
I think the idea that there is no new information in the humanities couldn’t be further from the truth. There has been faster progress in my own area, archaeology, in the last 25 years than there was in the previous 150 years. History is no different. Linguistics has seen massive strides. I’d put up the discoveries of any of those fields up against any of the ‘hard’ sciences.
Scott P.,
Thanks. Different academic fields have developed very different understandings over the years of how to judge the work being done in the field. The two fields I’m most familiar with, pure mathematics and fundamental theoretical physics are very different. Mathematics does not have the same problems as physics, or at least to a much lesser degree. Likely people in other fields could point to some sort of “epistemic collapse” going on in part of their field, but that’s a different topic I don’t want to get started on.
The camel doesn’t see its hump.
You refused to engage with people who disagreed with you about Columbia, you called them delusional, you told Scott to fuck off, and you are flirting with antisemitism. You know what is “reality” by having conversation with your tribe. As someone who despised Netanyahu probably long before you even heard about him, I find the betrayal of so many of the western intellectuals like you very painful and very disappointing.
Yiftach,
I know what the reality at Columbia is because I’ve been here and seen what has happened with my own eyes. Your reaction to protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza is not to join these but to throw around offensive accusations of antisemitism and “betrayal” and join the evil forces in this country that are using you to try and destroy this institution. Sorry, but what’s “painful and very disappointing” is collaboration with Fascists in defense of genocide.
Today’s Haaretz report
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-26/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/100-000-dead-what-we-know-about-gazas-true-death-toll/00000197-ad6b-d6b3-abf7-edfbb1e20000
has the Gaza death toll at 100,000. If that’s not genocide, how many more of the 2 million people there will need to die before you’ll agree that’s the right word? Or, maybe you agree that it’s the right word, but you’re fine with it?
I’ve paid close attention to Scott’s obsessive arguments about his interpretation of what he had heard that Columbia protesters chanted at protests. I also paid close attention to his views on what is happening in Gaza: that the people there (except for the very young and a small number of anti-Hamas people) all want to kill him and his family, so, rationally, he has to support them getting killed.
For an example of epistemic collapse in math (or non-collapse, which would be equally interesting), one might look at the ABC Conjecture broo-ha-ha.
Of course, this comment is just my way of trying to manipulate you into writing more on that…
By “epistemic collapse” I mean the collapse of a shared reality, caused by the loss of reliable sources for distinguishing what is true from what is false.
For a novel-length fictional exploration of this topic, with (I think) valuable insights, take the time to read Neal Stephenson’s “Fall: or Dodge in Hell.” Most of the relevant bits are in the first 1/3 or so. He imagines a fake nuclear attack in Moab, Utah. This hoax spawns ‘Moab truthers’ who are alternatively convinced it was a real enemy attack that the US is trying to make look fake to save face, convinced it was a real internal false flag attack, and then a third group that thinks it was what it was: an elaborate ruse. “What was it like before,” one character asks, “when people agreed on facts?”
I’ll close with this response from arguably the voice of the author:
Enoch pondered it for a bit. “I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And I think that the main thing it conferred on people was social mobility, so that if you were a smart kid growing up on a farm in Kansas or a slum in India you had a chance to do something interesting with your life. Before it—before that three-hundred-year run when there was a way for people to agree on facts—we had kings and warlords and rigid social hierarchy. During it, a lot of brainpower got unlocked and things got a lot better materially. A lot better. Now we’re back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.”
lnthga,
I guess I’ll take the bait…
The IUT story is one of the math community resisting epistemic collapse, so far successfully. By the usual community standards Mochizuki doesn’t have a proof (he can’t convince most other experts in the field that it’s a valid proof). He and Fesenko have created an “epistemic fracture”, but it’s a small one: for a small group of people around them it’s a proof, but not for the great bulk of the math community.
Math may in the end be the subject that most successfully resists epistemic collapse, since it is so strongly devoted to careful understanding of exactly what in the mathematics world is true, what is not true, and what we don’t yet know is true or untrue.
I have to agree with Yiftach. Epistemic collapse doesn’t just mean “those people over there are bad and wrong”.
I didn’t follow any of your links because I know before clicking on them that they will be filled with garbage that will make me sad and angry. From my POV you’re the one in an echo chamber disconnected from reality.
But the point is that we need to bridge that divide somehow, rather than just finding a new buzzword to insult the other side.
Bacchus (and Lino D’Ischia commenting in earlier posting),
Again I need to emphasize that my blogging here about what is happening at Columbia is based largely on first-hand observation. About the supposedly antisemitic, violent protests going on here I’m not telling you what I’ve read in an information bubble, I’m trying to fight epistemic collapse with first-hand information.
The links to information about the ongoing genocide in Gaza are something very different. They typically are from the New York Times or Haaretz and there for two reasons:
1. They show what the motivation for the Columbia student protests is. It’s not antisemitism.
2. There’s good evidence that the Israeli government is starving a population, destroying their homes and slaughtering people on a large scale. The links are there precisely for people like you who refuse to believe what is happening. If you can show me competing evidence that the people of Gaza are well-fed, doing just fine and enjoying their intact homes, I won’t refuse to read it.
Some comments on epistemic collapse and one more data point. While in the context of this blog math is generally described as a healthier field than high energy physics, I don’t know if that picture is true locally. In a field close to my own, because of the fights people had some 20-25 years ago (which proofs are correct, who proved what) etc, that field is essentially dead for the last 20 years because no young person dared enter it. And the situation is kind of opposite string theory where outsiders knew no real world physics can come out of string theory anytime soon, for this particular field in math everyone kind of knows there’s lots of interesting things to be mined there, but no one dared venture. Hopefully things clear out a little better in the future…
Just stating my agreement with a couple other commenters that your claims of epistemic collapse are really just a way for you to justify your opinion that “those people I disagree with are bad, and I’m right”. You’re not fooling anyone but yourself.
I’m interested in the comparison of the situation today in HEP compared to the 60s. In the late 50s and early to mid 60s, HEP seemed to be somewhat stuck. Bootstrap theory seemingly replaced standard field theory due to the “failures” of field theory for strong coupling problems. However field theory didn’t disappear-there was still work going on throughout this era-both on symmetries in fundamental particles (leading to the eventual postulation of quarks) as well as understanding of broken symmetry and non-Abelian gauge theory which led to the spectacular completion of the standard model we have today.
If we (inaccurately?) equate string theory with the bootstrap program in that it leads to some interesting and useful relations but otherwise as a physical theory you can get anything you want-is the issue that we have nothing like the countervailing approaches of that era to throw it aside…or are people simply not creative enough to see deeper given what we currently understand?
Congrats on your phase change and best of luck for your future research. I’ll miss the math blogging. There are lots of links in your sidebar; any suggestions for the kind of general interest coverage you currently do?
Max,
It you think our new normal of having a president who lies about everything all the time, and no one cares is not a new situation, or evidence of epistemic collapse, well, you’re a moron.
Some things really are true, some things really are lies, it can be difficult to distinguish these. Some people care about saying true things and not lying, others don’t, distinguishing these is not so difficult.
Dave,
The main problem is that we’re lacking what they had in the 60s, a huge amount of unexplained data, some of which could point the way forward. As an example, the deep inelastic scattering experiments at SLAC were showing strong evidence of point-like constituents in protons, something incompatible with the bootstrap and with the usual understanding of field theory. The breakthrough was the understanding that there were asymptotically free field theories (non-abelian gauge theories, eg QCD), which explained the data.
My guess has always been that string theory is the same mistake as in the 60s, saying “you can’t get what we want from QFT”, so it has to be something very different, like a string theory. This mistake was based on not understanding unexpected possibilities within QFT, in particular within gauge theories: asymptotic freedom (realized in QCD) and spontaneous symmetry breaking (realized in the electroweak theory).
To answer questions that the SM + GR can’t answer, the conventional wisdom is that there is no answer within QFT (because, for instance, “spacetime is doomed”). My suspicion is that ultimately the same thing will happen that happened in the early 70s: realization that there are aspects of QFT we’ve never properly understood, and that once one understands those one will see that QFT can explain unexplained aspects of the SM as well as quantum gravity.
Very specifically, I believe we’re missing something in the current understanding of quantized chiral spinor fields, which one sees when one tries to look at the Euclidean Wick rotated versions. This is normally considered to be an irrelevant technicality, but I think something much more interesting is going on.
Art,
I’ll try and update those links when I get a chance. One thing to say about reporting about math is that the conventional science media, when they cover math, is relatively good, much more so than in physics. For example, Quanta’s articles on pure math tend to be reliable, those on the latest news in fundamental physical theory, not so much.
For an example of good blogging about math, see John Baez at
https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez
He’s been at the blogging thing even longer than I have…
Epistemic collapse is destiny, we just didn’t know it. The Information Age was to vanquish ignorance. Instead it offered limitless access to other people who will tell one exactly and only what , deep down, they always wanted to hear. One never need cope with cognitive dissonance again. There’s always someone out there who thinks like you do, knows what you do, groks the big conspiracy enough to see through it, like you. The Truth really is out there, whichever version makes one most comfortable and self-assured. “Facts” are now just commodified memes, algorithmically curated to maximize profit through addictive engagement. I don’t see how anything can stop it that does not involve existential crisis.
You may as well relax a bit, or focus on your research. Eat more bread in Paris. It’s bigger than anything, this collapse. Like a body with too much mass. The singularity will be nothing like what the futurists foretold.
Peter,
Let me try and answer you. I have seen in previous discussions on this blogs that not everyone from Columbia (like Dave) completely agreed with your descriptions on the rosy reality in Columbia. When I started these discussion I was very careful about believing what people say. However, your claims that what happened in Columbia is reactions to Israeli actions are ridicules. The issues started, from what I have heard, even before October 7th and the demonstrations against “genocide” started on October 8th before Israel invaded Gaza while Hamas forces were still in Israel. You evade “antisemitism” claims by saying that even some jews supported the pro-Palestinians demonstrations. Well, I don’t care how you call things, the relation between being a Jew and being a “Zionist” is complicated. However, as far as I know, Israelis were discriminated in Columbia before and after October 7th. This is racism against an ethnic group whatever you think its relations to the Jewish people are.
About Gaza, no one really knows how many people died in Gaza. There are lots of numbers coming from Palestinians sources, namely Hamas, those were proved to be unreliable. Anything else is speculation. Moreover, the sources of information in Gaza are either Palestinians (control by Hamas), UN people (often Palestinians and definitely working with Hamas), IDF, or people approved by IDF. The truth is the first casualty of war or as House says “everybody lies”. Hamas have strong motivation to create the impression that the IDF is preforming a genocide. Moreover, they actually have motivation to fail any Israeli attempt to feed Palestinians because controlling the food gives them power and money. They have already showed they are willing to sacrifice Palestinian lives, so if there is a shooting of Palestinians why should we believe its from the IDF? To be clear, I don’t know what is going on, I just don’t believe the reports coming from Palestinians sources and their supporters. I should also add, I am sure some Israeli soldiers preformed war crimes. This happens in all wars. For example, as far as I remember the British government went to great length to hide war crimes of the SAS, let alone what Americans did.
Finally, Haaretz is not the most reliable source. They used to be a very goo newspaper 30 years ago. However, in the last decade or more they moved more and more into click baiting by claiming quite outrages stuff.
It is hard to find reliable analysis of the situation with all the noise surrounding it. The people I try to listen to are Nadav Eyal and Haviv Rettig Gur which have a lot of knowledge from inside Israel. They are often on the Call Me Back podcast, also on the Israeli side is the FDD podcast. If you would like more neutral podcasts I highly recommend Chris Cappy who used to be an American infantryman and Preston Stewart who used to be a captain in the American army. Both of these guys cover military issues in general.
Yiftach,
“However, as far as I know, Israelis were discriminated in Columbia before and after October 7th.”
Actually you don’t know. You can find plenty of lies about this. If you want more accurate information, you can read through the 300 or so pages of the Sundial report describing the details of what happened at Columbia in 2023-2024, and find examples to make whatever argument you want. These though have nothing at all to do with the current situation of intense security, and very successful suppression of pro-Palestinian protests.
But the main question is: why are you doing this? This is a place you know nothing about and have no connection to. As far as views about Israel/Palestinians/Gaza, it is not any different than 100s of other similar universities in the US and around the world. The one difference is that we are under a scary and extremely damaging attack by a Fascist dictator based on “antisemitism” accusations. Why do you want to get involved in this, on the side of the dictator? What is wrong with you? Do you like Fascism and want to see the destruction of my university? Are you so dedicated to the murder of civilians in Gaza that you feel joining with Fascists is worth it? Do you understand why my reaction to people like you and Scott who want to come join in the Fascist attack on us is that you should all just fuck off?
If you really feel that doing this kind of thing is important to you, the dictator’s people have just issued a huge report about how Harvard is violently antisemitic and so all of its federally funded science must be terminated. Of course it’s complete bullshit, but since you like this sort of thing why don’t you spend your time trying to help the Fascists destroy Harvard and leave us alone?
I just took your advice and spent some time listening to the latest podcast of Nadav Eyal. The part about Gaza is all about how terrible it is that IDF soldiers are getting killed there. He shows zero interest in what is happening to Palestinian civilians, other than frustration that starving and killing lots of them is bad for PR. Yes, Haaretz’s stories may be exaggerated, but I’ve seen nothing to indicate that Scott doesn’t represent pretty well the current Israeli point of view that ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza is justified.
Yiftach,
Just did a search to see if Nadav Eyal has ever shown any interest in what is happening to Palestinian civilians. Nothing much turned up, except this
https://substack.com/home/post/p-165336013
where Eyal reports that 76.5% of Israelis say that what happens to civilians in Gaza doesn’t matter to them. If the military campaign against Hamas slaughters them all, that’s fine. They’re on board with genocide.
This seems to be yours and the mainstream Israeli position: what’s really upsetting and something must be done about is the slogans chanted by college students at Columbia protesting the genocide in Gaza. Not only are you fine with genocide, you’re so devoted to it that you will go far out of your way to stop anyone protesting it on the other side of the world.
Peter,
You are putting words in my mouth which I did not express. I do not support Trump (and the same is true for Scott as far as he said). The WHY is because I care about the truth and because I do not like racism, especially against my people.
Contrary to you I do not think the problems with US universities can be fixed by insisting that there are no problems. You are so defensive that you are willing to ignore the reality. That is not how I think, in my view you need to look at the reality and deal with it. It seems that you do not care why a lot of people (probably the majority) do not support universities. All you care about is to continue living in your ivory tower.
Like you, the “left” in the US, UK, and Israel all try to colour the reality rather than deal with it. For instance, for many years many in the Israeli “left” (and worldwide in general) implied that if Israel will just give the Palestinians the Occupied Territories, somehow the Palestinians will stop hating jews and everyone will live peacefully. This was bullshit. Hate does not work like this. It is a shame because fundamentally I am much closer to the “left” than to the “right”. This kind of attitude is the main reason the democrats lost, the majority of the people do not really like Trump, as far as I can say, they just don’t like being told there are no problems when there are.
I didn’t say Nadav Eyal or anyone else is neutral. I am not sure there is anyone completely neutral, there are just people pretending they are. But you should listen to more voices than the ones you do. This is exactly what I was saying on the hump. You listen in order to confirm your POV rather than expend it. The people I mentioned try to tell the truth as far as I can say and they do not support Netanyahu in general.
When polling people during a war about what they wish for their enemy you should expect some unpleasant answers. Try to think what the British wished the German after the Blitz, you do not need to use too much imagination, look at Dresden. So stop muddying the water. There are a lot of problems in the Middle East, many of them due to the stupid Israeli behaviour, but ignoring the responsibility of the Palestinians is not helping anyone. The same is true for ignoring how wide spread is antisemitism in the “left” and the Muslim world.
Yiftach,
Scott made very explicit in his public comments and in his private emails to me that he supported Trump’s action against Columbia. He believed the situation at Columbia was so dangerous that he was telling his students not to come here. In his language, Columbia was full of dangerous velociraptors threatening the lives he cared about, so, T.Rex was necessary to deal with them.
Yes, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is complicated. Yes, the US politics that gave us Trump is complicated. Yes, universities have problems of a complicated sort. What is not complicated is the mass slaughter of civilians in a genocidal campaign. What is not complicated is Fascist dictatorship. You and Scott are so intent on supporting genocide by arguing that the real problem is “antisemitism” at student protests that you will join up with a Fascist dictatorship because it promises to “fix the problem” of anti-genocide protests at Columbia.
Don’t you have anything better to do?
Peter,
I don’t have something better to do than support the truth about something I care about. Don’t you have something better to do than putting words in my mouth? While you care about your ivory tower (it seems that your main problem is going through security), I care about the future of my family and friends and the death of so many of my people. I also care about the death of Palestinians, however, it is very hard to help them when they do not help themselves and moreover they wish my people dead.
So, we have it in black and white here, from “Yiftach”.
And entire people are being criminalized and can, by implication, be targeted.
* “..death of Palestinians, however, it is very hard to help them when they do not help themselves and moreover they wish my people dead..”
* “..Palestinians will stop hating jews and everyone will live peacefully..”
Proof of criminal intent, expressed insouciantly.
Not much of a debate left here, now.
Yiftach, I will agree that Dr. Woit has not been temperate in discussion of the issues, but I feel, from the outside, he has made a better case over all than his detractors. For example, stating that his main problem is the inconvenience of added security provisions seems baseless to me. His three most primary problems as stated here are Trump, Trump, and Trump. The security issue is somewhere way down on the list.
Although I went to college long ago in the 1960’s, there was considerable student unrest then over atrocities in the Vietnam war, and the assassination of Martin Luther King. Young people tend to start of with heightened senses of morality before the world wears them down. It is much easier for me to believe that was what was going on among Columbia students than some Hamas-coordinated program. That is, there may well have been some such involvement, but it was probably not the purpose of most of the participants.
As to what is going on in Gaza, I read (I think from the NY Times) statements by an American doctor who spent several months volunteering in a Gaza hospital, that he saw many young, male Palestinian children with bullet holes in their heads or chests. On his way home he met a British doctor who had also volunteered in Gaza, who told him that he had seen the same thing, every day there. There are numerous other reported examples. The impression I have formed is that the Israeli government at this point would rather 1000 (or some large number) of real or potential Palestinian warriors die in Gaza than one IDF soldier. Perhaps after living through similar events I would feel the same way, but I hope not, because with such instincts humanity is doomed.
Peter,
I’ve made the “mistake” of straying into this conversation on your blog before…let me just say I applaud your more recent vocalism of the problem here. Many of us are unwilling to express the same sentiments re “the Gaza issue” as a result of the public pressure campaign to annihilate the earnings power, or speech, or freedom in general, of anyone who disagrees with the current Regime — whether the Executive, the Columbia Trustees, or otherwise. Your ability to cut through the noise with regard to Columbia and the current Fascists is a welcome respite.
Yiftach makes one important point — which is to say that there is a tremendous distrust on both sides in the Gaza conflict. At this point I see no way forward through the pain of generational loss — a result of the most recent campaign to destroy Gaza — that will not include further devastation. Ultimately, this is not a conflict which we can logic ourselves out of; there will inevitably be retaliation that will provide fodder for the Israelis to say I told you so. It seems likely Gaza will be leveled, and its loss will be described in the coming centuries as yet another artifact of human fallibility and another “Never Forget”.
But I just wanted to say that I for one (and though I have a mathematics degree, am closer in personal philosophy to The Dude than someone of your academic pedigree) applaud the sense of clarity, thoughtfulness, and longing for Truth that your blog expresses. Keep fighting the good fight.
Regards.
FormerStringsFan,
Yiftach and Scott make clear the eliminationist logic that now governs Israeli policy, with their support: the murder of women and children is justified since they want to kill us. What we’re doing to them is their fault, not ours. It’s the same logic that justifies supporting Trump’s effort to destroy Columbia and Harvard: we allowed students to chant “Free Palestine”, thus supporting those who want to kill Israelis, so we should be destroyed and deserve what is happening to us.
JimV/john_o,
Thanks.
My repeated references to the intense security environment at Columbia are not complaints about its inconvenience. I’m trying to report what I see, and remind everyone that claims that students are in danger at Columbia due to violent protesters are absurd lies, that’s not what’s going on. The university’s highest priority now is to stop any sort of anti-genocide protest on campus.
Yes, my main reason for getting involved in this is to fight what Trump is doing. But a second one is that it is becoming more and more obvious that what is going on in Gaza really is genocide. Looking at the Israeli government’s actions, there is no viable plan for a future with Palestinians living in Gaza. The plan appears to be to kill enough people to convince the rest to leave Gaza, based on an eliminationist logic with wide support (they want to kill us, so we have to do this).
Dear Professor Woit,
I come from the math community, and therefore, as I am very far from being an expert in physics, I have benefited from your posts throughout the years, in order to try and understand the current state of things.
This is the first time that I’m posting, just to comment on a couple of things.
Regarding mathematics, I do agree with your opinion that (even though there are several “local” problems) the field is healthy. I think that this has to do with the following interesting and unique property of modern mathematics (so maybe a definition?), found in footnote #32 of https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.00710:
“A related fact is that in mathematics, unlike elsewhere, wrong notions die off easily. Our capacity for understanding is hampered, foremost, by the inability to dispel false concepts.”
I cannot talk about physics, but in mathematics, I believe that most great mathematicians share one thing: their student status. In my opinion, the correct stance towards math is that of learning. When one stops learning and starts only explaining, thus keeping their perspective fixed and becoming an “expert”, they have lost the game. (The aforementioned article has several ideas on the concept of “being a fool”).
For the general situation around the world, I have found the following quote from Olga Tokarczuk’s “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” to be fitting:
“I grew up in a beautiful era, now sadly in the past. In it there was great readiness for change, and a talent for creating revolutionary visions. Nowadays no one still has the courage to think up anything new. All they ever talk about, round the clock, is how things already are, they just keep rolling out the same old ideas. Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism — it ages. Just like the cells of the body, its tiniest components — the senses, succumb to apoptosis. Apoptosis is natural death, brought about by the tiredness and exhaustion of matter. In Greek this word means ‘the dropping of petals.’ The world has dropped its petals.”
Thank you and wish you a pleasant summer!
Because you, essentially, have a love affair with Grothendieck, you might find his remarks at the link,
https://github.com/Lapin0t/grothendieck-cern
relevant.
Vocabulary is essential to competent reasoning. You seem to have found a worthwhile expression for moving forward.
FormarStringFan, it seems that you have learned from Peter to put words in my mouth which I never said. You are quoting parts of sentences from my comments and even these parts taking out of context saying nothing like what you claim. I am starting to understand why physics is in troubles if this is the level of understanding you and Peter show.
On the other hand, if you do wish to hear something much closer to my views from someone who knows a lot more than me, then you might wish to listen to Haviv Rettig Gur, https://youtu.be/J59b2XWAVe0?si=ZFiuJTOHWKKH0QZT. He talks about the Haaretz article and what is going on in Gaza. You might disagree with him, nevertheless, you can get information about the POV of some Israelis.
Yiftach,
Took a look at what you suggest and other things by Haviv Rettig Gur. Sure, he opposes Smotrich/Ben-Gvir and explicit calls for genocide and ethnic cleansing. But, most of his coverage is devoted to explaining how difficult it is for the IDF to carry out its genocidal campaign. It’s not easy forcing millions of people out of their homes and turning their neighborhoods to rubble, using starvation to control them, etc. without sometimes just straightforwardly shooting into crowds of innocent people with a variety of lethal weaponry. It’s all about feeling sorry for those doing the genocide, no sympathy for its victims (this is all their fault, right?). Yes, this likely is the POV of Israelis.
Peter, this is not what he said and now you are just lying.
Yiftach,
I just spent about a half hour listing to Haviv Rettig Gur on Gaza, e.g. at the link you gave and at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6Zisl4_VpU&t=2415s
I don’t think my characterization of what he says is incorrect. Others can make up their own minds.
What he’s mainly concerned with is not the morality of what is happening to civilians in Gaza, but the bad PR Israel is getting about it. His complaints about Netanyahu/Smotrich/Ben-Gvir are not about their decision to wage a genocidal war but about the fact that they sometimes say honestly what they are trying to do, which makes his efforts to fight the bad PR much more difficult.
What you refuse to acknowledge is that the current Israeli military campaign in Gaza is inherently criminal, inescapably going to slaughter thousands of innocent people. There is no believable goal to this slaughter other than ethnic cleansing. People like Haviv Rettig Gur who are not calling for an immediate end to the campaign, but fighting the PR battle to defend it are just accomplices to the slaughter.
Yiftach,
what’s especially baffling to me is that even if one adopts an entirely utilitarian view of doing whatever it takes to increase Israel’s long term security:
if Israel still hasn’t destroyed Hamas after 1.5 years of absolute military superiority, total destruction, and tens of thousands of civilian deaths… how is the daily shooting of scores of Palestinians at food distribution centers (which are a vision of hell on earth, for the whole world to see) accomplishing anything positive long term for the security of Israel, which is also tied to its image (the claim it’s a center of enlightenment)?
And if the idea is to teach all Palestinians a lesson they won’t forget for a thousand years, it’s just going to insure a thousand years of hatred, just like October 7th did, but the other way around.
Bob Sinclair,
I think if you look at Israeli public opinion and the policies of the Israeli government, there is a straightforward answer to your question: ethnic cleansing. The goal of the current military campaign is to force the Palestinians out of Gaza by destroying their homes, killing and starving enough to get the rest to leave. The goal of the West Bank settler movement and the ongoing pogroms is to destroy Palestinian villages and force Palestinians off the land in the West Bank, bit by bit. The overall goal is: Israeli control of the entire land (“from the river to the sea”), no Palestinian state, most Palestinians refugees in other countries, only the manageable current number of Palestinian Israeli citizens left. Israel will be a heavily-armed nuclear power, able to deal with military threats from its enemies.
Oct. 7 provided the opportunity to put this policy in place in Gaza, we’re just waiting for the endgame. On the West Bank, this policy has been in place for decades. With no Oct. 7 to justify genocide there, the current plan seems to be to move towards a South African Bantustan sort of system.
The only problem with executing this is that a successful genocide in Gaza will be very bad for PR and threatens to make Israel a pariah state internationally. So, the current effort is to do everything possible to, at any cost, paint Palestinians as terrorists and anyone who tries to defend them as an antisemite. That part of the Gaza war is going on around the world, with a significant battle happening right here, right now (it’s the reason for the two levels of security checkpoints I go through every day).
Peter,
well, you’re right about that since Netanyahu isn’t even trying to conceal any of those goals at this point…
The irony is – the world never cared all that much about the fate of the Palestinians, and it’s not the US college protests that changed that.
No, what changed it is the insistence of Israel to expect its long term allies to be okay with the brutal tactics employed in Gaza – starvation as a weapon, systematic destruction of homes, targeted shooting of civilians and aid workers, etc… things never done before when fighting for freedom.
And, if that wasn’t enough, on top of that Israel is actively helping anyone willing to dismantle free speech and democracy in the West, in the name of forcing their truth down everyone’s throat… our systems are being abused from within in the name of supressing any support for Palestinians… so far such corruption of free speech was something only used by Islamists, and not expected from a friendly democratic nation.
This is why Israel is now losing all support and why Palestinians are finally getting sympathy.
Bob Sinclair,
Yes, support for Israel has completely collapsed among Democrats. See this from March
https://news.gallup.com/poll/657404/less-half-sympathetic-toward-israelis.aspx
especially
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/ZFmhe/gallupchart.png
Historically about 50% of Democrats were sympathetic to Israel, 25% the Palestinians. By this March that had changed to 59% sympathetic to the Palestinians, 21% the Israelis. With the Trump “antisemitism” campaign and the new and more brutal military campaign I’d guess the numbers are even worse now for the Israelis.
Pursuing genocide is not good for PR, and making Trump your enforcer in the US means you’ll be fine with the supporters of the dictator, but your support among his opponents will collapse.
The reason for the hysteria you see from people like Scott is that they see this happening all around them, are desperate to do anything to stop it, even collaborate with Fascists.
I understand that accusing Columbia and other universities of antisemitism is a tactic to fight them. But something I do not understand, is why is Trump and republicans so ok with Israel action ? Even from the most cynical point of view, what is the interest of Trump in supporting Israel’actions so blindly ? In the past, fascists were not supporting at all to Jewish.
martibal,
Maybe the simplest thing to say is that there has been a long bipartisan tradition in US politics of blindly supporting Israel, no matter what it does. One reason for this is the perception that a significant number of Jewish voters are single-issue voters,who will vote against a candidate solely for insufficiently supporting Israel.
To see how strange this gets, note that in the NYC mayoral campaign debate, when asked what country they would first visit after becoming mayor, all candidates in a long list said they would go to Israel. The interesting exception was Mamdani.
The majority of Jewish voters in the US have traditionally been Democrats. In recent years there has been a major effort by the Republican party to convince Jewish voters that Democrats are “antisemites” (e.g. Palestinian sympathizers). The Trump attack on “antisemitism” is part of that effort.
Another thing to say though is that Trump surely doesn’t care at all about Israel or the Palestinians. Surrounding him are people fanatically devoted to Israel, as well as others who would like to see the US not be so devoted to doing what Israel wants. For now, the pro-Israel group is winning his attention.
The Israeli government refuses to acknowledge having any plan about what happens to Gaza after the war. They point to Trump and his crazy “plan” to expel the Palestinians from Gaza and turn it into a Miami Beach style resort. This would be ideal for them, they would get the ethnic cleansing they want, but could make the US responsible for it. For now their policy seems to be to keep bulldozing as much of Gaza as possible, killing civilians at the 100/day rate, and sucking up to Trump, hoping to get him to ethnically cleanse the area for them.
Hi everybody,
I do not see why framing matters under “epistemic crisis” clarifies anything. When it comes to ideological, theological, and political disputes (and other high-stakes conflicts), sharply different interpretations of reality (along with deceptions of various sorts) were always common.
When it comes to fundamental physics and mathematical physics, the five directions that Peter mentioned seem intellectually and academically very interesting. I don’t see why research in these topics represents “epistemic crisis”, and I don’t see what is gained by talking about “tribes” (with negative connotation) rather than about “communities”.
A general remark: the background for much of the discussion is that now, more than a year and a half after it was started by Hamas, the terrible war that began on October 7 continues. The war is marked by senseless horror, death, and destruction in both Israel and Gaza and by Israeli hostages still remaining in captivity. These are bad times, and, naturally, the hopes for coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians and even for peace were shattered for many people. But these hopes may revive once the war ends.
Coping with this reality is difficult and our daily lives and work are intertwined with the ongoing trauma of this war. As for doing mathematics (or physics) in such times, Ednund Landau who was among the founders of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem wrote in 1925 that engaging with mathematical problems can be a source of solace in times of war. In another, he expressed the more ambitious idea that mathematics has the potential to lower the barriers between people and nations.
Two specific points
1) Peter wrote: “That there is a serious antisemitism problem at Columbia is a lie”.
Once you add the term “serious” to the claim, this statement becomes a matter of judgement. I think (and correct me if I am wrong) that it is indisputable that there were some antisemitic expressions in the protests and among the leaders of the protests. For example, (according to Wikipedia) one of the leaders asserted that “all Zionists deserve to die” (and then retracted, and later retracted the retraction).
Moreover, according to a August 2024 report by the university’s Task Force on Antisemitism (before the presidential elections) “Jewish students at Columbia University have been driven out of their dorm rooms, chased off campus, compelled to hide their Jewish identity, ostracized by their peers and denigrated by faculty”. As far as I can see, an assessment of antisemitism in Columbia University needs to address these specific claims.
It is only natural that there is a dispute on how serious antisemitism was. People that have first-hand experience of the events indeed have advantage, but I see no reason to prefer Peter Woit’s perspective on those of Ester Fuchs, Shoshana Shendelman or Shai Davidai. Also I do not see how Peter can have first-hand knowledge whether and to what extent Jewish students were harassed.
2) “Amplitudes” and other directions in fundamental physics/mathematical physics
I followed some of the developments on “amplitudes” (which are close to my mathematical interest in convex polytopes). Peter’s claim that research in this field is “often driven more by tribal considerations than anything else” seems simply incorrect. I also partially followed the attempts to relate quantum gravity (and the study of black holes) with quantum information and quantum computation theory. This research direction is also interesting and the “tribal consideration” claim does not make sense to me. More generally, in my opinion, the academic discourse is very different from the political discourse and speculative directions and ideas are welcome and can be quite important.
Gil Kalai,
What I’m writing about is not “epistemic crisis”, but “epistemic collapse”. I really do recommend the writings of Eliot Higgins that I linked to for mote specifics about what this refers to. In fundamental high energy theoretical physics I don’t think the fact that post-1970s theory has decoupled from experimental fact is controversial. This is one sort of “epistemic collapse” that I’ve lived through. Some may claim that the election of Trump and what the US is living through now is normal, but I think that’s nonsense. We’ve never before seen anything like this level of lies, lawlessness, and autocracy. It’s a complex phenomenon, but “epistemic collapse” I believe describes part of what has happened.
About “antisemitism” at Columbia. I will not get involved in arguing over the details of what happened here in late 2023-early 2024. It’s a complicated story. I will state that there are a huge number of lies being told about what happened then. In some cases I know these are lies because of what I saw with my eyes and heard with my ears. In other cases this is based on what I consider highly reliable information.
Here are three reasons I won’t get involved in such arguments:
1. It would be a huge waste of time, since the details are complicated and the people who want to argue about this seem unlikely to be swayed by facts. I know this from bitter experience.
2. The details of what happened during this period are the topic of multiple Title VI investigations and lawsuits. If I were to enter into public discussion of these details I would open myself to significant legal jeopardy.
3. Even accepting as fact that there were significant antisemitism problems in late 2023-early 2024, the Trump attempt to destroy this university (and Harvard) using bogus Title VI antisemitism charges is based upon the claim that the university has not addressed them and that they still exist. This is what I am willing to argue about and I claim it is nonsense. On the blog I have attempted to explain in detail what the current state of life on the campus is, based largely on personal observation. I have also discussed the details of any accusations about what is happening now that I am aware of.
About “tribalism”, the negative connotations are very much intentional. In the case of “string theory” I’ve wasted far too much time already documenting the “tribal” behavior and its negative effects. The current state of theoretical physics research and things like the amplitudes program is a complex topic. I do think that a striking aspect of the current sociology of such research is that it is organized around a small number of topics, led by a small number of influential people. To some extent this is not unusual for academia, but it is different than what was going on pre-1973 when the driving factor was new experimental results.
The Grimstrup book explores this in some detail and I think it’s apparent to anyone trying to pursue a career in the subject. See also the comment
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=14999#comment-251764
above. This sort of organization of research does have significant negative aspects, with “tribal” I think a good way to indicate those.
“So, in opposition to Stand Columbia, I’d argue that, even if the trustees don’t believe anymore in the court system, they should not “settle”. Signing another “we give in to the dictator’s will” document will get them nothing but more humiliation.”
So what should the Trustees do? Shut down schools and departments? Cut financial aid? Spin off the medical school? It would be helpful if you could be specific on what Trustees *should* do, instead of what they *should not* do. Your standard response seems to be to throw up your hands and say “Well, I’m not competent to advise on that.”
Jeremy,
The obvious point I’m trying to make is that, besides a lot of humiliation, Columbia is not going to get anything from Trump, other than maybe calling off various sorts of legal harassment. They’ll save a bit on legal fees, but the research funding is mostly not coming back. My understanding is that the trustees already realize this.