## Archive for the ‘Nerd Interest’ Category

### Amazing progress on longstanding open problems

Wednesday, April 11th, 2018

For those who haven’t seen it:

1. Aubrey de Grey, better known to the world as a radical life extension researcher, on Sunday posted a preprint on the arXiv claiming to prove that the chromatic number of the plane is at least 5—the first significant progress on the Hadwiger-Nelson problem since 1950.  If you’re tuning in from home, the Hadwiger-Nelson problem asks: what’s the minimum number of colors that you need to color the Euclidean plane, in order to ensure that every two points at distance exactly 1 from each other are colored differently?  It’s not hard to show that at least 4 colors are necessary, or that 7 colors suffice: try convincing yourself by staring at the figure below.  Until a few days ago, nothing better was known.
This is a problem that’s intrigued me ever since I learned about it at a math camp in 1996, and that I spent at least a day of my teenagerhood trying to solve.
De Grey constructs an explicit graph with unit distances—originally with 1567 vertices, now with 1585 vertices after after a bug was fixed—and then verifies by computer search (which takes a few hours) that 5 colors are needed for it.  Update: My good friend Marijn Heule, at UT Austin, has now apparently found a smaller such graph, with “only” 874 vertices.  See here.
So, can we be confident that the proof will stand—i.e., that there are no further bugs?  See the comments of Gil Kalai’s post for discussion.  Briefly, though, it’s now been independently verified, using different SAT-solvers, that the chromatic number of de Grey’s corrected graph is indeed 5.  Paul Phillips emailed to tell me that he’s now independently verified that the graph is unit distance as well.  So I think it’s time to declare the result correct.
Question for experts: is there a general principle by which we can show that, if the chromatic number of the plane is at least 6, or is 7, then there exists a finite subgraph that witnesses it?  (This is closely related to asking, what’s the logical complexity of the Hadwiger-Nelson problem: is it Π1?)  Update: As de Grey and a commenter pointed out to me, this is the de Bruijn-Erdös Theorem from 1951.  But the proofs inherently require the Axiom of Choice.  Assuming AC, this also gives you that Hadwiger-Nslson is a Π1 statement, since the coordinates of the points in any finite counterexample can be assumed to be algebraic. However, this also raises the strange possibility that the chromatic number of the plane could be smaller assuming AC than not assuming it.
2. Last week, Urmila Mahadev, a student (as was I, oh so many years ago) of Umesh Vazirani at Berkeley, posted a preprint on the arXiv giving a protocol for a quantum computer to prove the results of any computation it performs to a classical skeptic—assuming a relatively standard cryptographic assumption, namely the quantum hardness of the Learning With Errors (LWE) problem, and requiring only classical communication between the skeptic and the QC.  I don’t know how many readers remember, but way back in 2006, inspired by a $25,000 prize offered by Stephen Wolfram, I decided to offer a$25 prize to anyone who could solve the problem of proving the results of an arbitrary quantum computation to a classical skeptic, or who could give oracle evidence that a solution was impossible.  I had first learned this fundamental problem from Daniel Gottesman.
Just a year or two later, independent work of Aharonov, Ben-Or, and Eban, and of Broadbent, Fitzsimons, and Kashefi made a major advance on the problem, by giving protocols that were information-theoretically secure.  The downside was that, in contrast to Mahadev’s new protocol, these earlier protocols required the verifier to be a little bit quantum: in particular, to exchange individual unentangled qubits with the QC.  Or, as shown by later work, the verifier could be completely classical, but only if it could send challenges to two or more quantum computers that were entangled but unable to communicate with each other.  In light of these achievements, I decided to award both groups their own checks for half the prize amount ($12.50), to be split among themselves however they chose. Neither with Broadbent et al.’s or Aharonov et al.’s earlier work, nor with Mahadev’s new work, is it immediately clear whether the protocols relativize (that is, whether they work relative to an arbitrary oracle), but it’s plausible that they don’t. Anyway, assuming that her breakthrough result stands, I look forward to awarding Urmila the full$25 prize when I see her at the Simons Institute in Berkeley this June.

Huge congratulations to Aubrey and Urmila for their achievements!

Update (April 12): My friend Virgi Vassilevska Williams asked me to announce a theoretical computer science women event, which will take during the upcoming STOC in LA.

Another Update: Another friend, Holden Karnofsky of the Open Philanthropy Project, asked me to advertise that OpenPhil is looking to hire a Research Analyst and Senior Research Analyst. See also this Medium piece (“Hiring Analytical Thinkers to Help Give Away Billions”) to learn more about what the job would involve.

### Two announcements

Saturday, April 7th, 2018

Before my next main course comes out of the oven, I bring you two palate-cleansing appetizers:

1. My childhood best friend Alex Halderman, whose heroic exploits helping to secure the world’s voting systems have often been featured on this blog, now has a beautifully produced video for the New York Times, entitled “I Hacked An Election.  So Can The Russians.”  Here Alex lays out the case for an audited paper trail—i.e., for what the world’s cybersecurity experts have been unanimously flailing their arms about for two decades—in terms so simple and vivid that even Congresspeople should be able to understand them.  Please consider sharing the video if you support this important cause.
2. Jakob Nordstrom asked me to advertise the 5th Swedish Summer School in Computer Science, to be held August 5-11, 2018, in the beautiful Stockholm archipelago at Djuronaset.  This year the focus is on quantum computing, and the lecturers are two of my favorite people in the entire field: Ronald de Wolf (giving a broad intro to QC) and Oded Regev (lecturing on post-quantum cryptography).  The school is mainly for PhD students, but is also open to masters students, postdocs, and faculty.  If you wanted to spend one week getting up to speed on quantum, it’s hard for me to imagine that you’d find any opportunity more excellent.  The application deadline is April 20, so apply now if you’re interested!

### 30 of my favorite books

Wednesday, March 28th, 2018

Scott, if you had to make a list of your favourite books, which ones would you include?
And yes, you can put in quantum computing since Democritus!

Since I’ve gotten the same request before, I guess this is as good a time as any.  My ground rules:

• I’ll only include works because I actually read them and they had a big impact on me at some point in my life—not because I feel abstractly like they’re important or others should read them, or because I want to be seen as the kind of person who recommends them.
• But not works that impacted me before the age of about 10, since my memory of childhood reading habits is too hazy.
• To keep things manageable, I’ll include at most one work per author.  My choices will often be idiosyncratic—i.e., not that author’s “best” work.  However, it’s usually fair to assume that if I include something by X, then I’ve also read and enjoyed other works by X, and that I might be including this work partly just as an entry point into X’s oeuvre.
• In any case where the same author has both “deeper” and more “accessible” works, both of which I loved, I’ll choose the more accessible.  But rest assured that I also read the deeper work. 🙂
• This shouldn’t need to be said, but since I know it does: listing a work by author X does not imply my agreement with everything X has ever said about every topic.
• The Bible, the Homeric epics, Plato, and Shakespeare are excluded by fiat.  They’re all pretty important (or so one hears…), and you should probably read them all, but I don’t want the responsibility of picking and choosing from among them.
• No books about the Holocaust, or other unremittingly depressing works like 1984.  Those are a special category to themselves: I’m glad that I read them, but would never read them twice.
• The works are in order of publication date, with a single exception (see if you can spot it!).

Quantum Computing Since Democritus by Scott Aaronson

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill

The Autobiography of Charles Darwin by himself

Altneuland by Theodor Herzl

The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism by Bertrand Russell

What Is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches by Erwin Schrödinger

Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science by Martin Gardner

How Children Fail by John Holt

Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis by Paul Cohen

The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov (specifically, the middle third)

A History of Pi by Petr Beckmann

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein

Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges

Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman

The Book of Numbers by John Conway and Richard Guy

The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan

Gems of Theoretical Computer Science by Uwe Schöning and Randall Pruim

Fashionable Nonsense by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont

Our Dumb Century by The Onion

Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Michael Nielsen and Isaac Chuang

The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker

Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert

Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch

You’re welcome to argue with me in the comments, e.g., by presenting evidence that I didn’t actually like these books. 🙂  More seriously: list your own favorites, discuss your reactions to these books, be a “human recommendation engine” by listing books that “those who liked the above would also enjoy,” whatever.

Addendum: Here’s another bonus twenty books, as I remember more and as commenters remind me of more that I liked quite as much as the thirty above.

The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel

A Mathematician’s Apology by G. H. Hardy

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg

Breaking the Code by Hugh Whitemore

Adventures of a Mathematician by Stanislaw Ulam

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers by Paul Hoffman

Mathematical Writing by Donald Knuth, Tracy Larabee, and Paul Roberts

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

An Introduction to Computational Learning Theory by Michael Kearns and Umesh Vazirani

The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose

The Nili Spies by Anita Engle (about the real-life heroic exploits of the Aaronsohn family)

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics edited by Timothy Gowers

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Fear No Evil by Natan Sharansky

The Mind’s I by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett

Disturbing the Universe by Freeman Dyson

Unsong by Scott Alexander

### Hawking

Friday, March 16th, 2018

A long post is brewing (breaking my month-long silence), but as I was working on it, the sad news arrived that Stephen Hawking passed away. There’s little I can add to the tributes that poured in from around the world: like chocolate or pizza, Hawking was beloved everywhere and actually deserved to be. Like, probably, millions of other nerds of my generation, I read A Brief History of Time as a kid and was inspired by it (though I remember being confused back then about the operational meaning of imaginary time, and am still confused about it almost 30 years later).  In terms of a scientist capturing the public imagination, through a combination of genuine conceptual breakthroughs, an enthralling personal story, an instantly recognizable countenance, and oracular pronouncements on issues of the day, the only one in the same league was Einstein. I didn’t agree with all of Hawking’s pronouncements, but the quibbles paled beside the enormous areas of agreement.  Hawking was a force for good in the world, and for the values of science, reason, and Enlightenment (to anticipate the subject of my next post).

I’m sorry that I never really met Hawking, though I did participate in two conferences that he also attended, and got to watch him slowly form sentences on his computer. At one conference in 2011, he attended my talk—this one—and I was told by mutual acquaintances that he liked it.  That meant more to me than it probably should have: who cares if some random commenters on YouTube dissed your talk, if the Hawk-Man himself approved?

As for Hawking’s talks—well, there’s a reason why they filled giant auditoriums all over the world.  Any of us in the business of science popularization would do well to study them and take lessons.

If you want a real obituary of Hawking, by someone who knew him well—one that, moreover, actually explains his main scientific contributions (including the singularity theorems, Hawking radiation, and the no-boundary proposal)—you won’t do any better than this by Roger Penrose. Also don’t miss this remembrance in Time by Hawking’s friend and betting partner, and friend-of-the-blog, John Preskill. (Added: and this by Sean Carroll.)

### Practicing the modus ponens of Twitter

Monday, January 29th, 2018

I saw today that Ryan Lackey generously praised my and Zach Weinersmith’s quantum computing SMBC comic on Twitter:

Somehow this SMBC comic is the best explanation of quantum computing for non-professionals that I’ve ever found

To which the venture capitalist Matthew Ocko replied, in another tweet:

Except Scott Aaronson is a surly little troll who has literally never built anything at all of meaning. He’s a professional critic of braver people.  So, no, this is not a good explanation – anymore than Jeremy Rifkin on CRISPR would be…

Now, I don’t mind if Ocko hates me, and also hates my and Zach’s comic.  What’s been bothering me is just the logic of his tweet.  Like: what did he have in his head when he wrote the word “So”?  Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that I’m a “surly little troll,” and an ax murderer besides.  How does it follow that my explanation of quantum computing wasn’t good?  To reach that stop in proposition-space, wouldn’t one still need to point to something wrong with the explanation?

But I’m certain that my inability to understand this is just another of my many failings.  In a world where Trump is president, bitcoin is valued at $11,000 when I last checked, and the attack-tweet has fully replaced the argument, it’s obvious that those of us who see a word like “so” or “because,” and start looking for the inferential step, are merely insufficiently brave. For godsakes, I’m not even on Twitter! I’m a sclerotic dinosaur who needs to get with the times. But maybe I, too, could learn the art of the naked ad-hominem. Let me try: from a Google search, we learn that Ocko is an enthusiastic investor in D-Wave. Is it possible he’s simply upset that there’s so much excitement right now in experimental quantum computing—including “things of meaning” being built by brave people, at Google and IBM and Rigetti and IonQ and elsewhere—but that virtually none of this involves D-Wave, whose devices remain interesting from various physics and engineering standpoints, but still fail to achieve any clear quantum speedups, just as the professional critics predicted? Is he upset that the brave system-builders who are racing finally to achieve quantum computational supremacy over the next year, are the ones who actually interacted with academic researchers (sorry: surly little trolls), and listened to what they said? Who understood, for example, why scaling up to 50+ qubits only made a lot of sense once you had one or two qubits that at least behaved well enough in isolation—which, after years of heroic effort, many of these system-builders now do? How’d I do? Was there still too much argument there for the world of 2018? ### Should I join Heterodox Academy? Sunday, December 31st, 2017 Happy new year, everyone! An anonymous commenter wrote: Scott, you seem to admire Steven Pinker, you had problems with SJW attacks for your now famous comment 171 and, if I remember well, you said you have some “heterodox” ideas that you think it’s dangerous to make public. [Actually, I’m not sure I ever said that—indeed, if it were true, why would I say it? 🙂 –SA ] Why aren’t you in the Heterodox Academy? Didn’t you know about it? Heterodox Academy is an organisation of professors, adjunct professors, post-docs and graduate students who are for freedom of speech, founded by Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt and a few other academics, and now has over 1000 members. https://heterodoxacademy.org (I’m not a member, because I’m not an academic or graduate student, but I sympathize very much with their fight to protect freedom of thought.) By coincidence, just last week I was looking at the Heterodox Academy website, and thinking about joining. But then I got put off by the “pledge” for new members: “I believe that university life requires that people with diverse viewpoints and perspectives encounter each other in an environment where they feel free to speak up and challenge each other. I am concerned that many academic fields and universities currently lack sufficient viewpoint diversity—particularly political diversity. I will support viewpoint diversity in my academic field, my university, my department, and my classroom.” For some reason, I’m allergic to joining any organization that involves a pledge, even if it’s a pledge that I completely agree with. And in this case, maybe the issue goes a bit deeper. My central concern, with university life, is that academics share a baseline commitment to Enlightenment norms and values: e.g., to freedom of speech, reason, empiricism, and judging arguments by their merits rather than by the speaker’s identity. These are the norms that I’d say enabled the scientific revolution, and that are still the fundamental preconditions for intellectual inquiry. A diversity of viewpoints is often a good diagnostic for Enlightenment norms, but it’s not the central issue, and is neither necessary nor sufficient. For example, I don’t care if academia lacks “viewpoint diversity” in the UFO, creationism, or birther debates. Nor do I care if the spectrum of ideas that gets debated in academia is radically different from the spectrum debated in the wider society. Indeed, I don’t even know that it’s mathematically possible to satisfy everyone on that count: for example, a representative sampling of American political opinions might strike a European, or a Bay Area resident, as bizarrely clustered in one or two corners of idea-space, and the reverse might be equally true. More pointedly—and bear with me as I invent a bizarre hypothetical—if some sort of delusional, autocratic thug managed to take control of the United States: someone who promoted unhinged conspiracy theories; whose whole worldview were based on the overwhelming of facts, reason, reality, and even linguistic coherence by raw strength and emotion; whose every word and deed were diametrically opposed to any conceivable vision of the mission of a university—in such an extreme case, I’d hope that American academia would speak with one voice against the enveloping darkness, just as I would’ve hoped German academia would speak with one voice in 1933 (it didn’t). When Enlightenment norms themselves are under assault, those norms are consistent with a unified response. Having said that, I’m certainly also worried about the erosion of Enlightenment norms within academia, or specific parts of academia: the speakers shouted down rather than debated, the classrooms taken over, the dogmatic postmodernism and blank-slatism, all the stuff Jonathan Haidt reviews in this article. This is a development for which the left, not the right, bears primary responsibility. I view it as a huge unearned gift that the “good guys” give the “bad guys.” It provides them endless outrage-fodder. It stokes their paranoid fantasies while also making us look foolish. And it lets them call us hypocrites, whose prattle about science and reason and free inquiry has been conclusively unmasked. So if Heterodox Academy is making headway against the illiberal wing of liberalism, that does seem like something I should support, regardless of any differences in emphasis. Readers: what do you think? In the comments, give me your best argument for why I should or shouldn’t join Heterodox Academy. Feel free to call my attention to anything the organization has been up to; my research has been less than comprehensive. I’ll credit the most convincing argument(s) when I make a decision. Like, not that it’s especially consequential either way, but if commenters here are going to argue anyway, we might as well make something actually hinge on it… ### Classifieds thread Sunday, December 24th, 2017 In addition to the emails from journalists, I also get a large number of emails seeking interactions with me—a discussion of cryptocurrencies, help in planning a political campaign, whatever—that could probably be had just as well, or better, with some other reader of this blog. So inspired by Slate Star Codex, my lodestar of blog-greatness, I’ve decided to host Shtetl-Optimized‘s first ever classifieds thread. This is your place to post any announcement, ad, offer, proposal, etc. that you think would be of particular interest to fellow Shtetl-Optimized readers. As usual, I reserve the right to remove anything too spammy or otherwise unsuitable (“C@$H 4 G0LD!!!”), but will generally be pretty permissive.

Oh yes: Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it, from a spot roughly equal driving distance (about an hour 20 minutes) from Nazareth and Bethlehem!

Update: OK, let me start the ball rolling, or rather the photon propagating. Reader Piotr Migdal wrote to tell me about a quantum optics puzzle game that he created. I tried it and it’s excellent, and best of all clear: unlike virtually every other “quantum game” I’ve tried, it took me only a minute to figure this one out. (Admittedly, it’s less of a quantum game than an “optics game,” in the sense that the effects it teaches about also appear with laser beams and other many-photon coherent states, which you don’t really need QM for, even though QM provides their ultimate explanation. But whatever: it’s fun!) Piotr has lots of other great stuff on his website.

### Googatory

Thursday, December 7th, 2017

When I awoke with glowing, translucent hands, and hundreds of five-pointed yellow stars lined up along the left of my visual field, my first thought was that a dream must have made itself self-defeatingly obvious. I was a 63-year-old computer science professor. I might’ve been dying of brain cancer, but my mind was lucid enough that I’d refused hospice care, lived at home, still even met sometimes with my students, and most importantly: still answered my email, more or less. I could still easily distinguish dreams from waking reality. Couldn’t I?

I stared at the digital clock beside my bed: 6:47am. After half a minute it changed to 6:48. No leaping around haphazardly. I picked up the two-column conference paper by my nightstand. “Hash-and-Reduce: A New Approach to Distributed Proximity Queries in the Cloud.” I scanned the abstract and first few paragraphs. It wasn’t nonsense—at least, no more so than the other papers that I still sometimes reviewed. The external world still ticked with clockwork regularity. This was no dream.

Nervously, I got up. I saw that my whole body was glowing and translucent. My pajamas, too. A second instance of my body, inert and not translucent, remained in the bed. I looked into the mirror: I had no reflection. The mirror showed a bedroom unoccupied but for the corpse on the bed.

OK, so I was a ghost.

Just then I heard my nurse enter through the front door. “Bob, how you feeling this morning?” I met her in the foyer. “Linda, look what happened! I’m a ghost now, but interestingly enough, I can still..”

Linda walked right through me and into the bedroom. She let out a small gasp when she saw the corpse, then started making phone calls.

Over the following days, I accompanied my body to the morgue. I attended my little memorial session at the university, made note of which of my former colleagues didn’t bother to show up. I went to my funeral. At the wake, I stood with my estranged wife and grown children, who mostly remained none the wiser—except when they talked about how eerie it was, how it felt like I was still there with them. Or maybe I’d say something, and get no response from my family, but then five minutes later their conversation would mysteriously veer toward the topic I’d broached. It seemed that I still had full input from the world of the living, but that my only output channel was doing spooky haunted things that still maintained plausible deniability about my existence.

Questions flooded my mind: were there other ghosts? Why was I in this purgatory … or whatever it was? Would I be here forever? And: what was that column of yellow stars in the left of my visual field, the stars that followed me everywhere?

Once it seemed clear that I was here to stay, for some definition of “here,” I figured I might as well do the same stuff that filled my waking hours when I was alive. I pulled up a chair and sat at my laptop. I hit up The Washington Post, The Onion, xkcd, SMBC Comics, Slate Star Codex. They all worked fine.

Then I switched to the Gmail tab. Hundreds of new messages. Former students asking for recommendation letters, prospective students wanting to work with me, grant managers howling about overdue progress reports, none of them bothering to check if I was dead.

I replied to one randomly-chosen email:

Dear Ashish,
Thanks for your interest in joining our group. Alas, I’m currently dead and walking the earth as a translucent wraith. For that reason, I’m unable to take on new PhD students at this time.
Best of luck!
–Bob

I clicked “Send” and—part of me was expecting this—got an error. Message not sent. Email couldn’t cross the barrier from the dead to the living: too obvious.

Next I opened my “Starred” folder. I was greeted by 779 starred messages: each one a pressing matter that I’d promised myself I’d get to while alive but didn’t.

Dear Bob,
Hope you’re well. I think I’ve found another error in your 2002 paper ‘Cache-Oblivious Approximation Algorithms for Sparse Linear Algebra on Big Data.’ Specifically, in the proof of Lemma 4.2, you assume a spectral bound [har har, spectral], even though your earlier definition of the matrix A_i seems to allow arbitrary norm…

I chuckled. Well, I did spend most of my life on this stuff, didn’t I? Shouldn’t I sort this out, just for the sake of my intellectual conscience?

I opened up my old paper in Ghostview (what else?) and found the offending lemma. Then I took out pen and paper—they worked, luckily, although presumably my scribblings remained invisible to the living—and set to work. After an hour, I’d satisfied myself that the alleged error was nothing too serious, just a gap requiring a few sentences of clarification. I sadly had no direct way to tell my years-ago correspondent that, assuming the correspondent was still even alive and research-active and at the same email address. But still: good for my peace of mind, right?

Then something happened: the first intimation of what my life, or rather undeath, was to consist of from then on. Faintly but unmistakably, one of the tiny yellow stars in the left of my visual field became a blue-gray outline. It was no longer filled with yellow.

Excitedly, I clicked through more starred emails. Some I saw no easy way to deal with. But every time I could satisfy myself that an email was no longer relevant—whether it was an invitation to a long-ago workshop, a grant that I never applied for, a proposed research collaboration rendered moot by subsequent work—one of those yellow stars in my visual field lost its yellow filling. Before long there were ten blue-gray outline stars, then twenty.

One day, while I invisibly attended an old haunt (har har)—the weekly faculty lunch in my former department—I encountered a fellow ghost: a former senior colleague of mine, who’d died twenty years prior. He and I got to talking.

For the most part, my fellow specter confirmed what I’d already guessed. Yes, in some long-ago past, purgatory no doubt had a different character. Yes, it’s no doubt different for others, who lived different lives and faced different psychic burdens. For us, though, for the faculty, purgatory is neither more nor less than the place where you must reply to every last email that was still starred “important” when you died.

In the afterlife, it turns out, it doesn’t matter how “virtuous” you were, unless altruism happens to have been your obsession while alive. What matters is just that you free yourself from whatever burdened you every night when you went to sleep, that you finish what you started. Those unable to do so remain ghosts forever.

“So,” I asked the other polter-guest at the faculty lunch, “how long does it take a professor to finish answering a lifetime’s worth of emails?”

“Depends. I’ve been doing it for twenty years.  Hoping to finish in twenty more.”

“I see. And when you’ve dealt with the last email, what then?”

“You pass to another place. None of us know exactly where. But”—and here his voice dropped to a whisper, as if anyone else present could hear ghosts—“it’s said to be a place of breathtaking tranquility. Where researchers like us wear flowing robes, and sit under olive trees, and contemplate truth and beauty with Plato and Euclid, and then go out for lunch buffet. Where there’s no email, no deadlines, no journals, no grant applications, no responsibilities but one: to explore whatever has captured your curiosity in the present moment. Some call it the Paradise of Productivity.”

“Does everyone have to pass through purgatory first, before they go there?”

“It’s said that, among all the computer scientists who’ve lived, only Alan Turing went straight to Paradise. And he died before email was even invented. When his time comes, Donald Knuth might also escape purgatory, since he forswore email in 1990. But Knuth, alas, might spend tens of thousands of years in a different purgatory, finishing Volume 4 of The Art of Computer Programming.

“As for the rest of us, we all spend more or less time here with our wretched emails—for most of us, more. For one computer scientist—an Umesh Vazi-something, I believe, from Berkeley—it’s rumored that when he enters this place, even a trillion years won’t suffice to leave it. It’s said that the Sun will swallow the Earth, the night sky will go dark, and yet there Umesh will be, still clearing his inbox.”

After a few years, I’d knocked off all the easy stuff in my Starred folder. Then, alas, I was left with missives like this:

Hey, earth to Bob!
The rest of us have done our part in writing up the paper. We’re all waiting on you to integrate the TeX files, and to craft an introduction explaining why anyone cared about the problem in the first place. Also, would you mind making a detailed pass through Sections 4.3 and 5.2?

Ugh. There were so many slightly different TeX files. Which were the most recent? This could take a while.

Nevertheless, after weeks of … ghosting on the project, I got to work revising the paper. There was, of course, the practical difficulty that I couldn’t directly communicate my edits back to the world of the living. Fortunately, I could still do haunted stuff. One day, for example, one of my former coauthors opened her old TeX file, and “discovered” that I’d actually done way more work on the paper while I was alive than anyone remembered I had. The mysteries of when exactly I did that work, and why no one knew about it at the time, were never satisfactorily resolved.

Finally, after fourteen years, I’d succeeded in putting to rest 731 of my 779 starred emails. In the corner of my visual field was a vast array of blue-gray stars—but still, ominously, 48 yellow stars scattered among them.

“God in Heaven!” I cried. “Whoever you are! I can’t handle any of the remaining starred emails, and thereby pass to the Paradise of Productivity, without sending replies back into the world of the living. Please, I beg you: let me breach this metaphysical wall.”

A booming voice came down from on high. “YEA, BOB, WHAT THOU REQUESTETH IS POSSIBLE.  THOU WOULDST NOT EVEN BE THE FIRST GHOUL FOR WHOM I WOULDST GRANTETH THIS REQUEST: FAR FROM IT.  BUT I MUST WARN THEE: BREACHING THE WALL BETWEEN LIVING AND DEAD WILL BRINGETH FRUITS THAT THOU MAYST NOT LIKE.”

“I think I’ll take my chances with those fruits.”

“VERY WELL,” said God.

And that’s how it is that, half a century after my death, I remain in purgatory still, my days now filled with missives like the following:

Dear Bob,
Thanks for the reply! I’m sorry to hear that you’re now a ghost condemned to answer emails before he can pass to the next world. My sympathies. Having said that, I have to confess that I still don’t understand Section 4.2 of your paper. When you get a chance, could you please clarify? I’ve cc’ed my coauthors, who might have additional followup questions.

Note: To anyone who emailed me lately, I apologize for the delay in replying. I was writing this story. –SA

### Review of “Inadequate Equilibria,” by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Thursday, November 16th, 2017

Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck is a little gem of a book: wise, funny, and best of all useful (and just made available for free on the web).  Eliezer Yudkowsky and I haven’t always agreed about everything, but on the subject of bureaucracies and how they fail, his insights are gold.  This book is one of the finest things he’s written.  It helped me reflect on my own choices in life, and it will help you reflect on yours.

The book is a 120-page meditation on a question that’s obsessed me as much as it’s obsessed Yudkowsky.  Namely: when, if ever, is it rationally justifiable to act as if you know better than our civilization’s “leading experts”?  And if you go that route, then how do you answer the voices—not least, the voices in your own head—that call you arrogant, hubristic, even a potential crackpot?

Yudkowsky gives a nuanced answer.  To summarize, he argues that contrarianism usually won’t work if your goal is to outcompete many other actors in a free market for a scarce resource that they all want too, like money or status or fame.  In those situations, you really should ask yourself why, if your idea is so wonderful, it’s not already being implemented.  On the other hand, contrarianism can make sense when the “authoritative institutions” of a given field have screwed-up incentives that prevent them from adopting sensible policies—when even many of the actual experts might know that you’re right, but something prevents them from acting on their knowledge.  So for example, if a random blogger offers a detailed argument for why the Bank of Japan is pursuing an insane fiscal policy, it’s a-priori plausible that the random blogger could be right and the Bank of Japan could be wrong (as actually happened in a case Yudkowsky recounts), since even insiders who knew the blogger was right would find it difficult to act on their knowledge.  The same wouldn’t be true if the random blogger said that IBM stock was mispriced or that P≠NP is easy to prove.

The high point of the book is a 50-page dialogue between two humans and an extraterrestrial visitor.  The extraterrestrial is confused about a single point: why are thousands of babies in the United States dying every year, or suffering permanent brain damage, because (this seems actually to be true…) the FDA won’t approve an intravenous baby food with the right mix of fats in it?  Just to answer that one question, the humans end up having to take the alien on a horror tour through what’s broken all across the modern world, from politicians to voters to journalists to granting agencies, explaining Nash equilibrium after Nash equilibrium that leaves everybody worse off but that no one can unilaterally break out of.

I do have two criticisms of the book, both relatively minor compared to what I loved about it.

First, Yudkowsky is brilliant in explaining how institutions can produce terrible outcomes even when all the individuals in them are smart and well-intentioned—but he doesn’t address the question of whether we even need to invoke those mechanisms for more than a small minority of cases.  In my own experience struggling against bureaucracies that made life hellish for no reason, I’d say that about 2/3 of the time my quest for answers really did terminate at an identifiable “empty skull”: i.e., a single individual who could unilaterally solve the problem at no cost to anyone, but chose not to.  It simply wasn’t the case, I don’t think, that I would’ve been equally obstinate in the bureaucrat’s place, or that any of my friends or colleagues would’ve been.  I simply had to accept that I was now face-to-face with an alien sub-intelligence—i.e., with a mind that fetishized rules made up by not-very-thoughtful humans over demonstrable realities of the external world.

Second, I think the quality of the book noticeably declines in the last third.  Here Yudkowsky recounts conversations in which he tried to give people advice, but he redacts all the object-level details of the conversations—so the reader is left thinking that this advice would be good for some possible values of the missing details, and terrible for other possible values!  So then it’s hard to take away much of value.

In more detail, Yudkowsky writes:

“If you want to use experiment to show that a certain theory or methodology fails, you need to give advocates of the theory/methodology a chance to say beforehand what they think they predict, so the prediction is on the record and neither side can move the goalposts.”

I only partly agree with this statement (which might be my first substantive disagreement in the book…).

Yes, the advocates should be given a chance to say what they think the theory predicts, but then their answer need not be taken as dispositive.  For if the advocates are taken to have ultimate say over what their theory predicts, then they have almost unlimited room to twist themselves in pretzels to explain why, yes, we all know this particular experiment will probably yield such-and-such result, but contrary to appearances it won’t affect the theory at all.  For science to work, theories need to have a certain autonomy from their creators and advocates—to be “rigid,” as David Deutsch puts it—so that anyone can see what they predict, and the advocates don’t need to be continually consulted about it.  Of course this needs to be balanced, in practice, against the fact that the advocates probably understand how to use the theory better than anyone else, but it’s a real consideration as well.

In one conversation, Yudkowsky presents himself as telling startup founders not to bother putting their prototype in front of users, until they have a testable hypothesis that can be confirmed or ruled out by the users’ reactions.  I confess to more sympathy here with the startup founders than with Yudkowsky.  It does seem like an excellent idea to get a product in front of users as early as possible, and to observe their reactions to it: crucially, not just a binary answer (do they like the product or not), confirming or refuting a prediction, but more importantly, reactions that you hadn’t even thought to ask about.  (E.g., that the cool features of your website never even enter into the assessment of it, because people can’t figure out how to create an account, or some such.)

More broadly, I’d stress the value of the exploratory phase in science—the phase where you just play around with your system and see what happens, without necessarily knowing yet what hypothesis you want to test.  Indeed, this phase is often what leads to formulating a testable hypothesis.

But let me step back from these quibbles, to address something more interesting: what can I, personally, take from Inadequate Equilibria?  Is academic theoretical computer science broken/inadequate in the same way a lot of other institutions are?  Well, it seems to me that we have some built-in advantages that keep us from being as broken as we might otherwise be.  For one thing, we’re overflowing with well-defined problems, which anyone, including a total outsider, can get credit for solving.  (Of course, the “outsider” might not retain that status for long.)  For another, we have no Institutional Review Boards and don’t need any expensive equipment, so the cost to enter the field is close to zero.  Still, we could clearly be doing better: why didn’t we invent Bitcoin?  Why didn’t we invent quantum computing?  (We did lay some of the intellectual foundations for both of them, but why did it take people outside TCS to go the distance?)  Do we value mathematical pyrotechnics too highly compared to simple but revolutionary insights?  It’s worth noting that a whole conference, Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science, was explicitly founded to try to address that problem—but while ITCS is a lovely conference that I’ve happily participated in, it doesn’t seem to have succeeded at changing community norms much.  Instead, ITCS itself converged to look a lot like the rest of the field.

Now for a still more pointed question: am I, personally, too conformist or status-conscious?  I think even “conformist” choices I’ve made, like staying in academia, can be defended as the right ones for what I wanted to do with my life, just as Eliezer’s non-conformist choices (e.g., dropping out of high school) can be defended as the right ones for what he wanted to do with his.  On the other hand, my acute awareness of social status, and when I lacked any—in contrast to what Eliezer calls his “status blindness,” something that I see as a tremendous gift—did indeed make my life unnecessarily miserable in all sorts of ways.

Anyway, go read Inadequate Equilibria, then venture into the world and look for some \$20 bills laying on the street.  And if you find any, come back and leave a comment on this post explaining where they are, so a conformist herd can follow you.

### Not the critic who counts

Wednesday, October 11th, 2017

There’s a website called Stop Timothy Gowers! !!! —yes, that’s the precise name, including the exclamation points.  The site is run by a mathematician who for years went under the pseudonym “owl / sowa,” but who’s since outed himself as Nikolai Ivanov.

For those who don’t know, Sir Timothy Gowers is a Fields Medalist, known for seminal contributions including the construction of Banach spaces with strange properties, the introduction of the Gowers norm, explicit bounds for the regularity lemma, and more—but who’s known at least as well for explaining math, in his blog, books, essays, MathOverflow, and elsewhere, in a remarkably clear, friendly, and accessible way.  He’s also been a leader in the fight to free academia from predatory publishers.

So why on earth would a person like that need to be stopped?  According to sowa, because Gowers, along with other disreputable characters like Terry Tao and Endre Szemerédi and the late Paul Erdös, represents a dangerous style of doing mathematics: a style that’s just as enamored of concrete problems as it is of abstract theory-building, and that doesn’t even mind connections to other fields like theoretical computer science.  If that style becomes popular with young people, it will prevent faculty positions and prestigious prizes from going to the only deserving kind of mathematics: the kind exemplified by Bourbaki and by Alexander Grothendieck, which builds up theoretical frameworks with principled disdain for the solving of simple-to-state problems.  Mathematical prizes going to the wrong people—or even going to the right people but presented by the wrong people—are constant preoccupations of sowa’s.  Read his blog and let me know if I’ve unfairly characterized it.

Now for something totally unrelated.  I recently discovered a forum on Reddit called SneerClub, which, as its name suggests, is devoted to sneering.  At whom?  Basically, at anyone who writes anything nice about nerds or Silicon Valley, or who’s associated with the “rationalist community,” or the Effective Altruist movement, or futurism or AI risk.  Typical targets include Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Robin Hanson, Michael Vassar, Julia Galef, Paul Graham, Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk … and with a list like that, I guess I should be honored to be a regular target too.

The basic SneerClub M.O. is to seize on a sentence that, when ripped from context and reflected through enough hermeneutic funhouse mirrors, can make nerds out to look like right-wing villains, oppressing the downtrodden with rays of disgusting white maleness (even, it seems, ones who aren’t actually white or male).  So even if the nerd under discussion turns out to be, say, a leftist or a major donor to anti-Trump causes or malaria prevention or whatever, readers can feel reassured that their preexisting contempt was morally justified after all.

Thus: Eliezer Yudkowsky once wrote a piece of fiction in which a character, breaking the fourth wall, comments that another character seems to have no reason to be in the story.  This shows that Eliezer is a fascist who sees people unlike himself as having no reason to exist, and who’d probably exterminate them if he could.  Or: many rationalist nerds spend a lot of effort arguing against Trumpists, alt-righters, and neoreactionaries.  The fact that they interact with those people, in order to rebut them, shows that they’re probably closet neoreactionaries themselves.

When I browse sites like “Stop Timothy Gowers! !!!” or SneerClub, I tend to get depressed about the world—and yet I keep browsing, out of a fascination that I don’t fully understand.  I ask myself: how can a person read Gowers’s blog, or Slate Star Codex, without seeing what I see, which is basically luminous beacons of intellectual honesty and curiosity and clear thought and sparkling prose and charity to dissenting views, shining out far across the darkness of online discourse?

(Incidentally, Gowers lists “Stop Timothy Gowers! !!!” in his blogroll, and I likewise learned of SneerClub only because Scott Alexander linked to it.)

I’m well aware that this very question will only prompt more sneers.  From the sneerers’ perspective, they and their friends are the beacons, while Gowers or Scott Alexander are the darkness.  How could a neutral observer possibly decide who was right?

But then I reflect that there’s at least one glaring asymmetry between the sides.

If you read Timothy Gowers’s blog, one thing you’ll constantly notice is mathematics.  When he’s not weighing in on current events—for example, writing against Brexit, Elsevier, or the destruction of a math department by cost-cutting bureaucrats—Gowers is usually found delighting in exploring a new problem, or finding a new way to explain a known result.  Often, as with his dialogue with John Baez and others about the recent “p=t” breakthrough, Gowers is struggling to understand an unfamiliar piece of mathematics—and, completely unafraid of looking like an undergrad rather than a Fields Medalist, he simply shares each step of his journey, mistakes and all, inviting you to follow for as long as you can keep up.  Personally, I find it electrifying: why can’t all mathematicians write like that?

By contrast, when you read sowa’s blog, for all the anger about the sullying of mathematics by unworthy practitioners, there’s a striking absence of mathematical exposition.  Not once does sowa ever say: “OK, forget about the controversy.  Since you’re here, instead of just telling you about the epochal greatness of Grothendieck, let me walk you through an example.  Let me share a beautiful little insight that came out of his approach, in so self-contained a way that even a physicist or computer scientist will understand it.”  In other words, sowa never uses his blog to do what Gowers does every day.  Sowa might respond that that’s what papers are for—but the thing about a blog is that it gives you the chance to reach a much wider readership than your papers do.  If someone is already blogging anyway, why wouldn’t they seize that chance to share something they love?

Similar comments apply to Slate Star Codex versus r/SneerClub.  When I read an SSC post, even if I vehemently disagree with the central thesis (which, yes, happens sometimes), I always leave the diner intellectually sated.  For the rest of the day, my brain is bloated with new historical tidbits, or a deep-dive into the effects of a psychiatric drug I’d never heard of, or a jaw-dropping firsthand account of life as a medical resident, or a different way to think about a philosophical problem—or, if nothing else, some wicked puns and turns of phrase.

But when I visit r/SneerClub—well, I get exactly what’s advertised on the tin.  Once you’ve read a few, the sneers become pretty predictable.  I thought that for sure, I’d occasionally find something like: “look, we all agree that Eliezer Yudkowsky and Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom are talking out their asses about AI, and are coddled white male emotional toddlers to boot.  But even granting that, what do we think about AI?  Are intelligences vastly smarter than humans possible?  If not, then what principle rules them out?  What, if anything, can be said about what a superintelligent being would do, or want?  Just for fun, let’s explore this a little: I mean the actual questions themselves, not the psychological reasons why others explore them.”

That never happens.  Why not?

There’s another fascinating Reddit forum called “RoastMe”, where people submit a photo of themselves holding a sign expressing their desire to be “roasted”—and then hundreds of Redditors duly oblige, savagely mocking the person’s appearance and anything else they can learn about the person from their profile.  Many of the roasts are so merciless that one winces vicariously for the poor schmucks who signed up for this, hopes that they won’t be driven to self-harm or suicide.  But browse enough roasts, and a realization starts to sink in: there’s no person, however beautiful or interesting they might’ve seemed a priori, for whom this roasting can’t be accomplished.  And that very generality makes the roasting lose much of its power—which maybe, optimistically, was the point of the whole exercise?

In the same way, spend a few days browsing SneerClub, and the truth hits you: once you’ve made their enemies list, there’s nothing you could possibly say or do that they wouldn’t sneer at.  Like, say it’s a nice day outside, and someone will reply:

“holy crap how much of an entitled nerdbro do you have to be, to erase all the marginalized people for whom the day is anything but ‘nice’—or who might be unable to go outside at all, because of limited mobility or other factors never even considered in these little rich white boys’ geek utopia?”

For me, this realization is liberating.  If appeasement of those who hate you is doomed to fail, why bother even embarking on it?

I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog criticizing D-Wave, and cringeworthy popular articles about quantum computing, and touted arXiv preprints that say wrong things.  But I hope regular readers feel like I’ve also tried to offer something positive: y’know, actual progress in quantum computing that actually excites me, or a talk about big numbers, or an explanation of the Bekenstein bound, whatever.  My experience with sites like “Stop Timothy Gowers! !!!” and SneerClub makes me feel like I ought to be doing less criticizing and more positive stuff.

Why, because I fear turning into a sneerer myself?  No, it’s subtler than that: because reading the sneerers drives home for me that it’s a fool’s quest to try to become what Scott Alexander once called an “apex predator of the signalling world.”

At the risk of stating the obvious: if you write, for example, that Richard Feynman was a self-aggrandizing chauvinist showboater, then even if your remarks have a nonzero inner product with the truth, you don’t thereby “transcend” Feynman and stand above him, in the same way that set theory transcends and stands above arithmetic by constructing a model for it.  Feynman’s achievements don’t thereby become your achievements.

When I was in college, I devoured Ray Monk’s two-volume biography of Bertrand Russell.  This is a superb work of scholarship, which I warmly recommend to everyone.  But there’s one problem with it: Monk is constantly harping on his subject’s failures, and he has no sense of humor, and Russell does.  The result is that, whenever Monk quotes Russell’s personal letters at length to prove what a jerk Russell was, the quoted passages just leap off the page—as if old Bertie has come back from the dead to share a laugh with you, the reader, while his biographer looks on sternly and says, “you two think this is funny?”

For a writer, I can think of no higher aspiration than that: to write like Bertrand Russell or like Scott Alexander—in such a way that, even when people quote you to stand above you, your words break free of the imprisoning quotation marks, wiggle past the critics, and enter the minds of readers of your generation and of generations not yet born.

Update (Nov. 13): Since apparently some people didn’t know (?!), the title of this post comes from the famous Teddy Roosevelt quote:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.