Tuesday, June 07, 2016

More on Tao's endorsement

I mentioned mathematician Terry Tao's claim that it is common knowledge that Donald Trump is unfit, but that everyone is afraid to say it. A comment points out that the truth is more nearly the opposite:
Trump routinely gets about 40 percent in nationwide polls. It’s probably not a solid majority that privately thinks the way you are conjecturing. And if you restrict to white voters, Trump does seem to get over 50 percent support as of now. ...

If there are any secret opinions not being expressed, it’s the people who vote for Trump but keep quiet about it. In public he is routinely trashed. In academic circles you could conceivably lose your job for expressing his kind of views. On the other hand, there’s absolutely no need to hold back if you are a Clinton supporter.
This election reminds of the one in 1984, when academics claimed that it was common knowledge that Ronald Reagan was unfit. Many, including a famous New Yorker writer (I believe), said that never met anyone who liked Reagan or voted for him. Reagan went on to win a landslide, taking 49 states.

How can these folks live in such a bubble, and be so oblivious to it?

Tao is a brilliant mathematician, and one of the smartest men on the planet. And yet his political comments are pathetic.

By any objective measure, Trump is vastly more fit and competent than Hillary Clinton. She cannot give an unscripted speech, has not been able to do a press conference in a year, and cannot name an accomplishment to brag about. She has lived off the fame of her husband, failed at everything she has done, is a terrible manager, and no one likes her. She is also riddled with scandals.

Trump has successful businesses, wrote a widely praised book, starred in a successful TV show, deals with the press daily, and is brilliant. Most of all, he has successfully articulated the important issues of the day, and transformed the Republican party.

I have tried quizzing Clinton supporters for why they like her. Like Tao, they don't really say that they like her. All I ever get out of talking to them is that to complete the leftist agenda, they need to eliminate the white Christian American majority. Clinton will help flood the country with Third World migrants who will supply cheap labor, destroy the middle class, and eventually vote Democrat.

It is a little curious that Tao's post links to a puzzle where the solution is to kill all the blue-eyed people! Maybe that is the biggest clue to his reasoning.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tao may well be a brilliant mathematician, but that may well mean he also is a bit of an Asperger, which of course means he cannot read social issues well at all. I have encountered this many times over the years, computer scientists and mathematicians are often utterly clueless when it comes to social interactions and reading social situations be they personal or political in nature. They struggle to make or get joke and they are diabolically poor in the company of women. So, one of the smartest men on the planet? Please Roger, confine Tao to one of the smartest mathematicians on the planet and do not confuse him with a man competent at everything.

Anonymous said...


Good luck explaining Asperger's to Rain Man.

Roger said...

I do not think that Tao has Asperger, or that his problem is understanding jokes in social situations. I doubt that he has even encountered any Trump supporters in social situations.

Tao is a non-white immigrant, and has probably been brainwashed to think that flooding the USA with non-white immigrants is a good thing. After all, who writes blog posts about killing all the blue-eyed people?

Anonymous said...

But Roger, you really have no right to call him one of the smartest men on the planet. The same goes for Hawking or Witten. It's pure academic Romanticism. These people do not make major revolutions in thought and Tao sticks to fairly ordinary mathematics. The same goes for most contemporary people working on DERIVATIVES! To earn such recognition, you have to invent a whole new kind of math or make MAJOR connections. Frankly, Shinichi Mochizuki or Andrew Wiles do much harder work than Terry.