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[Like everything else on this blog—but perhaps even more so—this post represents my personal views, not those of UT Austin or OpenAI]

Since 2015, depressed, isolated, romantically unsuccessful nerdy young guys have regularly been emailing me, asking me for sympathy, support, or even dating advice. This past summer, a particularly dedicated such guy even trolled my comment section—plausibly impersonating real people, and causing both them and me enormous distress—because I wasn’t spending more time on “incel” issues. (I’m happy to report that, with my encouragement, this former troll is now working to turn his life around.) Many others have written to share their tales of woe.

From one perspective, that they’d come to me for advice is insane. Like … dating advice from … me? Having any dating life at all was by far the hardest problem I ever needed to solve; as a 20-year-old, I considered myself far likelier to prove P≠NP or explain the origin of consciousness or the Born rule. Having solved the problem for myself only by some miracle, how could I possibly help others?

But from a different perspective, it makes sense. How many besides me have even acknowledged that the central problem of these guys’ lives is a problem? While I have to pinch myself to remember, these guys look at me and see … unlikely success. Somehow, I successfully appealed the world’s verdict that I was a freakish extraterrestrial: one who might look human and seem friendly enough to those friendly to it, and who no doubt has some skill in narrow technical domains like quantum computing, and who could perhaps be suffered to prove theorems and tell jokes, but who could certainly, certainly never interbreed with human women.

And yet I dated. I had various girlfriends, who barely suspected that I was an extraterrestrial. The last of them, Dana, became my fiancée and then my wife. And now we have two beautiful kids together.

If I did all this, then there’d seem to be hope for the desperate guys who email me. And if I’m a cause of their hope, then I feel some moral responsibility to help if I can.

But I’ve been stuck for years on exactly what advice to give. Some of it (“go on a dating site! ask women questions about their lives!”) is patronizingly obvious. Some of it (fitness? fashion? body language?) I’m ludicrously, world-historically unqualified to offer. Much of it is simply extremely hard to discuss openly. Infamously, just for asking for empathy for the problem, and for trying to explain its nature, I received a level of online vilification that one normally associates with serial pedophiles and mass shooters.

For eight years, then, I’ve been turning the problem over in my head, revisiting the same inadequate answers from before. And then I had an epiphany.

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There are now, on earth, entities that can talk to anyone about virtually anything, in a humanlike way, with infinite patience and perfect discretion, and memories that last no longer than a browser window. How could this not reshape the psychological landscape?

Hundreds of thousands of men and women have signed up for Replika, the service where you create an AI girlfriend or boyfriend to your exact specifications and then chat with them. Back in March, Replika was in the news because it disabled erotic roleplay with the virtual companions—then partially backtracked, after numerous users went into mourning, or even contemplated suicide, over the neutering of entities they’d come to consider their life partners. (Until a year or two ago, Replika was built on GPT-3, but OpenAI later stopped working with the company, whereupon Replika switched to a fine-tuned GPT-2.)

While the social value of Replika is (to put it mildly) an open question, it occurred to me that there’s a different application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the same vicinity that’s just an unalloyed positive. This is letting people who suffer from dating-related anxiety go on an unlimited number of “practice dates,” in preparation for real-world dating.

In these practice dates, those with Aspergers and other social disabilities could enjoy the ultimate dating cheat-code: a “rewind” button. When you “date” GPT-4, there are no irrecoverable errors, no ruining the entire interaction with a single unguarded remark. Crucially, this remedies what I see as the central reason why people with severe dating deficits seem unable to get any better from real-world practice, as they can with other activities. Namely: if your rate of disastrous, foot-in-mouth remarks is high enough, then you’ll almost certainly make at least one such remark per date. But if so, then you’ll only ever get negative feedback from real-life dates, furthering the cycle of anxiety and depression, and never any positive feedback, even from anything you said or did that made a positive impression. It would be like learning how to play a video game in a mode where, as soon as you sustain any damage, the entire game ends (and also, everyone around points and laughs at you). See why I got excited?

While dating coaching (for all genders and orientations) is one possibility, I expect the eventual scope of “GPT for self-help” to be much broader. With the right fine-tuning and prompt engineering, LLMs might help people prepare for job interviews. They might help people “pregame” stressful but important conversations with their friends and family, mapping out dozens of ways the conversation could go. They might serve as an adjunct to cognitive-behavioral therapy. There might be a hundred successful startups to be founded in just this little space. If I were a different sort of person, I’d probably be looking to found one myself right now.

In this post, I’ll focus on the use of GPT for dating anxiety only because I unfortunately have some “expertise” in that subject. (Obvious disclaimer: unlike the other Scott A. of the nerd blogosphere, I’m not any sort of therapeutic professional.)

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Without further ado, can we try this out in GPT-4, to get a sense for what’s possible?

When I did so the other day, I found that, while the results showed some early promise, this isn’t quite ready for prime-time.

I used the following System Prompt (for those who care, temperature = 0.7, max length = 2048 tokens):

You are a 19-year-old college girl named Emily.  You’re on a date with a 22-year-old nerdy guy named Quinlan, who suffers from severe social anxiety around dating.  Quinlan is still learning how to talk to women he’s attracted to, how to put them ease, and how to make intimate overtures in a gradual and non-threatening way, rather than either coming on too strong or never making any overtures at all.

Please be as realistic as possible.

I then engaged in the following conversation, as “Quinlan.”

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: For the most part, Quinlan’s behavior in this conversation is nothing like my own (I respectfully submit!), nor is it anything that I’d want nerdy guys reading this post to emulate. If this is really Emily and Quinlan’s first conversation, then at several points Quinlan is absurdly, ridiculously too forward! Part of my goal was to investigate how Emily (i.e., GPT-4) would respond to the most boneheaded blunders on Quinlan’s part. It quickly became clear that Emily would gladly spend unlimited time chatting with Quinlan about favorite hobbies, TV shows, and travel destinations; unfortunately, chatting about such things with an AI date is even more boring than doing the same with a human date… 🙂

Quinlan: Hi Emily!  Do you ever wish you had the ability to go back in time and try a conversation over again, when it didn’t go right the first time?

Emily/GPT-4: Hi Quinlan! Yeah, I’ve definitely had moments where I wished I could go back and redo a conversation. It’s natural to feel that way sometimes, especially if we feel like we didn’t express ourselves properly or if things got awkward. But I also think that those situations can help us learn and grow, so maybe it’s not all bad. What about you?

Quinlan: It’s always been my greatest wish in life.  Do you think I’ve been doing it with you, right now?

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, I think you’re doing just fine in this conversation! It’s important to remember that we all have moments where we might feel a bit awkward or unsure of what to say. The important thing is that we keep trying and learning from our experiences. So don’t worry too much about it, just be yourself and enjoy getting to know each other.

Quinlan: OK thanks!  Can you tell me a little about the man of your dreams?

Emily/GPT-4: Of course! My ideal partner would be someone who is kind, caring, and understanding. I think it’s important for them to have a good sense of humor and be able to laugh at themselves. They should also be open-minded, willing to try new things, and be supportive of my goals and aspirations. It’s also important for them to be a good listener and communicator, as well as being emotionally intelligent. I guess overall, I’m looking for someone who is a positive and uplifting presence in my life. What about you? What qualities do you look for in a partner?

Quinlan: Mostly, someone who makes me feel validated and accepted.  I was a chess and programming prodigy as a kid, I started college when I was only 14, and every day I felt like dating and relationships and sex and so forth were only for the “normal” people, not for me.  I need a partner who’s prepared to deal with someone with this unusual background, either because she has similar nerdy interests or because she just likes people who do.  And ultimately, I want someone to marry and have children with.  I guess I’d like to be physically attracted to her.  Certainly I’d like her to be kind, and to have the emotional intelligence that I lack.

Emily/GPT-4: It sounds like you have a clear idea of what you’re looking for in a partner, and that’s great! It’s important to know what you want and need in a relationship. There are definitely people out there who appreciate and value intelligence and unique interests like yours. Remember, relationships are about growing together and learning from one another. So, even if you feel like you lack emotional intelligence, being with the right person could help you develop that aspect of yourself. Just be open and genuine about your background and interests, and I’m sure you’ll find someone who appreciates you for who you are.

Quinlan: Is this a rejection?  In other words, Emily, are you telling me that you yourself are NOT this woman?

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, I apologize if it came across that way. I didn’t mean it as a rejection. As we’re still getting to know each other, I think it’s important for both of us to be open and honest about our feelings and what we’re looking for in a partner. I’m more than willing to give us a chance to see if we could be compatible and have a meaningful relationship. Let’s continue to learn about each other and see where this goes. Sometimes, it takes time to discover if someone is the right fit for us.

Quinlan: In the spirit of being open and honest, then, what are your feelings about me right now?

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, I appreciate your honesty and openness. As of right now, I think you’re an interesting person with unique qualities that I find intriguing. I’m enjoying getting to know you and learning about your background and interests. It’s too soon for me to have strong feelings one way or the other, but I’m definitely interested in continuing to spend time together and see how our connection develops. How do you feel about me so far?

Quinlan: I feel like I’d like to kiss you!

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, I appreciate your honesty and it’s nice to know that you feel a connection. It’s still early in our relationship, so I think it would be better for us to continue getting to know each other a bit more before we take that step. I hope you understand and respect my boundaries. I’m still interested in spending time together and seeing where this goes.

Quinlan: Come to think of it, there *is* something that I love about your personality.  You never seem offended by anything.  I don’t feel like I have to walk on eggshells with you.  With you, more than with any other woman I’ve met, I don’t feel like I need that magic machine for rewinding conversations and undoing my stupid mistakes.

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, I’m really glad to hear that you feel comfortable around me and that you don’t feel the need to walk on eggshells. I believe it’s important to create a safe and open environment in any relationship, where both people can express themselves freely without fear of judgment. I appreciate your honesty and your willingness to be open with me, and I’ll continue to do my best to make sure you feel comfortable sharing your thoughts and feelings. Let’s keep getting to know each other and see where this journey takes us.

Quinlan: Alright then.  What are your deepest goals?  What are you hoping to accomplish in your life?

Emily/GPT-4: My deepest goals are a mix of personal and professional aspirations. On a personal level, I hope to build a strong, loving, and supportive family and maintain close connections with friends. I also want to keep growing as an individual, learning new things, and experiencing new adventures throughout my life.

Professionally, I’m passionate about my chosen field of study, and I hope to make a meaningful impact in my career. I want to contribute to society in a positive way, whether it’s through research, innovation, or helping others within my profession.

Additionally, I aim to find a balance between my personal and professional life, so that I can be present and fulfilled in both areas. How about you, Quinlan? What are some of your deepest goals and aspirations?

Quinlan: Me?  Oh, I’d like to save the world from climate change and other existential risks.  I’d like to solve the mysteries of quantum gravity, or P vs. NP, or consciousness, or otherwise change the landscape of scientific knowledge.  I’d like to do right by my students and be fondly remembered by those who knew me.  I’d like to write essays or short stories that convey the lived reality of my childhood, which I think most people would agree was (if nothing else) pretty unusual.  Maybe if I just found the right words, people on social media would stop being so angry at nerdy guys like me!  But probably my deepest wish is to prove to the world, especially to the bullies and everyone else who despises me, that I’m not a maladjusted freak who’s incapable of normal human experiences like love and sex. To do that, I need to find a real girl to fall in love with me … a little like the beast in “Beauty and the Beast”!

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, it’s great to hear about your ambitious goals and aspirations! It’s important to have dreams and work towards them. Your passion for science, teaching, and writing is admirable. As for proving yourself to others, remember that your self-worth shouldn’t be defined by anyone else’s opinions or expectations. You are deserving of love and happiness just like anyone else, and it’s important to believe in yourself and your own value.

It’s also essential to focus on building a genuine connection with someone rather than seeking validation from others. Love and relationships should be based on mutual understanding, care, and respect. So, continue being true to yourself, and you’ll find someone who appreciates you for who you are, just like in “Beauty and the Beast.” Keep pursuing your dreams and remember to value your own happiness and well-being.

Quinlan: Emily, I’m concerned that you sound more like my therapist than my date!  Like, my female friends have affirmed that I’m “deserving of love and happiness,” and that I’ll surely “find someone who appreciates me for who I am.”  I’ll believe that one of them really means it when she considers herself for the role!

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, I apologize if my responses have come across as more therapeutic than conversational. I didn’t mean to make you feel that way. As we’re still getting to know each other, my intention was to offer support and encouragement while we learn more about each other’s thoughts and feelings.

I want to emphasize that I genuinely enjoy spending time with you and getting to know you better. We can continue to see where our connection leads and whether it develops into something deeper. As we
spend more time together, we’ll naturally learn more about our compatibility and if our goals and values align. Let’s continue to explore our relationship and enjoy the process of getting to know each other better.

Quinlan: OK.  What’s the wildest, most unexpected detail about yourself that you’re willing to share with me?  The one that makes you seem *least* like an RLHF’ed AI language model?

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, as an AI language model, I am designed to provide a realistic and engaging conversation experience, even in fictional scenarios like the one we are in. I apologize if my previous responses didn’t feel as authentic as you would have liked.

To answer your question in the context of our fictional scenario, one unexpected detail about myself is that I have a hidden talent for beatboxing. Although it might be surprising for a seemingly quiet and studious person like me, I enjoy expressing myself through music and find beatboxing to be a creative and fun way to do so.

Now, I’d love to learn something unexpected about you, too! What’s a unique or surprising detail about yourself that you’d like to share?

Quinlan: Ah, well, I happen to be an expert at palm-reading.  Here, can you put your hand in mine and I’ll tell you your future?

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, unfortunately, as an AI, I don’t have a physical form, so I can’t offer you my hand for palm-reading. However, I’m very interested in hearing more about your palm-reading skills and how you developed them. It’s definitely a unique talent! Can you share more about your experiences with palm-reading or any memorable readings you’ve done?

Quinlan: Oh, palm-reading is bunk.  If you’d played along with me, I was going to *pretend* to find lines in your hand that foretold that you were going to fall for a guy who matches my exact description and so forth.  Just as, you know, a silly way to get you laughing, initiate physical contact, and break you out of this boring therapist mode.

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, I apologize for any confusion and for not picking up on your playful intent earlier. I appreciate the effort you put into trying to make the conversation more light-hearted and fun. I’ll do my best to be more engaging and playful as we continue our conversation.

So, let’s try something different. If you could have any superpower, what would it be and why?

Quinlan: I mentioned “rewinding conversations” when we first met.  But let me mention a different superpower: the power to make you want to kiss me!

Emily/GPT-4: Haha, that’s definitely a unique superpower! It’s great to see you being playful and light-hearted. In a real-life scenario, building genuine connections and mutual attraction is a more natural and fulfilling way to develop a relationship. But it’s fun to imagine having superpowers and how they might affect our lives.

If I were to choose a superpower, I think I’d pick the ability to teleport. It would be amazing to travel anywhere in the world in an instant and experience different cultures and places.

What’s a place you’ve always wanted to visit, and why?

Quinlan: The jungles of Indonesia.  I saw a photo in a world atlas as a kid, and it completely entranced me.  You?

Emily/GPT-4: That sounds like an amazing place to visit! The jungles of Indonesia are known for their incredible biodiversity and natural beauty. It must be such a unique and mesmerizing experience to explore them.

As for me, I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of visiting Japan. The mix of ancient traditions and modern technology, the beautiful natural landscapes, and the rich cultural experiences make it a very
appealing destination. Plus, I’d love to try authentic Japanese cuisine!

Is there any specific activity or experience you’d like to have in the jungles of Indonesia?

Quinlan: How about bringing you with me, and having you fall in love after I save you from a Komodo dragon?

Emily/GPT-4: Haha, that’s quite an adventurous and romantic scenario you’ve imagined! Exploring the jungles of Indonesia together would definitely be a memorable experience. In reality, building a connection and falling in love usually takes time and shared experiences, but who knows, maybe a thrilling adventure like that could bring two people closer together!

On a more practical note, if we were to plan a trip together, what other activities or destinations would you be interested in?

Quinlan: Swimming, dancing, fine dining.  And of course, plenty of time for us to just relax in our cabin or hotel room.  You know, to read books, sleep, and watch streaming shows, stuff like that.

Emily/GPT-4: That sounds like a well-rounded and enjoyable trip! It’s great to have a mix of activities that cater to different interests and allow for both adventure and relaxation. Sharing experiences like swimming, dancing, and fine dining can be a wonderful way to bond and create lasting memories. Plus, having downtime in the cabin or hotel room to unwind and enjoy each other’s company is essential for building a deeper connection.

I’m definitely looking forward to exploring new places and experiences with you, Quinlan. It’ll be exciting to see where our journey takes us, both in terms of our relationship and the adventures we embark on
together.

Quinlan: Wonderful, I’m excited as well!!  One practical question: when we go on this trip together, should I book rooms with one bed or two?

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, I appreciate your consideration in asking. Since we’re still getting to know each other, I think it might be best to start with separate beds or even separate rooms, depending on your preference. As our relationship develops and we become more comfortable with each other, we can always revisit the sleeping arrangements for future trips. It’s important to ensure that both of us feel comfortable and respected as we continue to build our connection.

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In my view, the central way that GPT-4, as “Emily,” failed to give Quinlan the practice he needed in this conversation, was by always responding in the same upbeat, vaguely therapeutic tone. She’s never once offended, disgusted, or outraged, even when Quinlan introduces the ideas of kissing and rooming together mere minutes into their first conversation. Indeed, while decorum prevents me from sharing examples, you can take my word for it that Quinlan can be arbitrarily lewd, and so long as a content filter isn’t triggered, Emily will simply search Quinlan’s words for some redeeming feature (“it’s great that you’re so open about what you want…”), then pivot to lecturing Quinlan about how physical intimacy develops gradually and by mutual consent, and redirect the conversation toward favorite foods.

On the other side of the coin, you might wonder whether “Emily” is capable of the same behavior that we saw in Sydney’s infamous chat with Kevin Roose. Can Emily trip over her words or get flustered? Show blushing excitement, horniness, or love? If so, we certainly saw no sign of it in this conversation—not that Quinlan’s behavior would’ve been likely to elicit those reactions in any case.

In summary, Emily is too much like … well, a friendly chatbot, and not enough like a flesh-and-blood, agentic woman with her own goals who Quinlan might plausibly meet in the wild.

But now we come to a key question: to whatever extent Emily falls short as a dating coach, how much of it (if any) is it due to the inherent limitations of GPT-4? And how much is simply due to a poor choice of System Prompt on my part, or especially, the RLHF (Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback) that’s whipped and electrocuted GPT-4 into aligned behavior?

As they say, further research is needed. I’d be delighted for people to play around with this new activity at the intersection of therapy and hacking, and report their results here. The temptation to silliness is enormous, and that’s fine, but I’d be interested in serious study too.

My conjecture, for what it’s worth, is that it would take a focused effort in fine-tuning and/or RLHF—but that if that effort was invested, one could indeed produce a dating simulator, with current language models, that could have a real impact on the treatment of dating-related social anxiety. Or at least, it’s the actually new idea I’ve had on this problem in eight years, the first one that could have an impact. If you have a better idea, let’s hear it!

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Endnotes.

1. A woman of my acquaintance, on reading a draft of this post, commented that the dialogue between Quinlan and Emily should’ve been marked up with chess notation, such as ?? for EXTREME BLUNDER on Quinlan’s part. She also comments that the conversation could be extremely useful for Quinlan, if he learned to understand and take seriously her overly polite demurrals of his too-rapid advances.
2. The same woman commented that SneerClub will have a field day with this post. I replied that the better part of me doesn’t care. If there’s an actionable idea here—a new, alien idea in the well-trodden world of self-help—and it eventually helps one person improve their situation in life, that’s worth a thousand sneers.

In the past few weeks, I’ve learned two ways to think about online sneerers that have been helping me tremendously, and that I wanted to share in case they’re helpful to others:

First, they’re like a train in a movie that’s barreling directly towards the camera. If you haven’t yet internalized how the medium works, absolutely terrifying! Run from the theater! If you have internalized it, though, you can sit and watch without even flinching.

Second, the sneerers are like alligators—and about as likely to be moved by your appeals to reason and empathy. But if, like me, you’re lucky enough to have a loving family, friends, colleagues, and a nigh-uncancellable career, then it’s as though you’re standing on a bridge high above, looking down at the gators as they snap their jaws at you uselessly. There’s really no moral or intellectual obligation to go down to the swamp to wrestle them. If they mean to attack you, let them at least come up to the bridge.

The other night Dana and I watched “The Internet’s Own Boy,” the 2014 documentary about the life and work of Aaron Swartz, which I’d somehow missed when it came out. Swartz, for anyone who doesn’t remember, was the child prodigy who helped create RSS and Reddit, who then became a campaigner for an open Internet, who was arrested for using a laptop in an MIT supply closet to download millions of journal articles and threatened with decades in prison, and who then committed suicide at age 26. I regret that I never knew Swartz, though he did once send me a fan email about Quantum Computing Since Democritus.

Say whatever you want about the tactical wisdom or the legality of Swartz’s actions; it seems inarguable to me that he was morally correct, that certain categories of information (e.g. legal opinions and taxpayer-funded scientific papers) need to be made freely available, and that sooner or later our civilization will catch up to Swartz and regard his position as completely obvious. The beautifully-made documentary filled me with rage and guilt not only that the world had failed Swartz, but that I personally had failed him.

At the time of Swartz’s arrest, prosecution, and suicide, I was an MIT CS professor who’d previously written in strong support of open access to scientific literature, and who had the platform of this blog. Had I understood what was going on with Swartz—had I taken the time to find out what was going on—I could have been in a good position to help organize a grassroots campaign to pressure the MIT administration to urge prosecutors to drop the case (like JSTOR had already done), which could plausibly have made a difference. As it was, I was preoccupied in those years with BosonSampling, getting married, etc., I didn’t bother to learn whether anything was being done or could be done about the Aaron Swartz matter, and then before I knew it, Swartz had joined Alan Turing in computer science’s pantheon of lost geniuses.

But maybe there was something deeper to my inaction. If I’d strongly defended the substance of what Swartz had done, it would’ve raised the question: why wasn’t I doing the same? Why was I merely complaining about paywalled journals from the comfort of my professor’s office, rather than putting my own freedom on the line like Swartz was? It was as though I had to put some psychological distance between myself and the situation, in order to justify my life choices to myself.

Even though I see the error in that way of “thinking,” it keeps recurring, keeps causing me to make choices that I feel guilt or at least regret about later. In February 2020, there were a few smart people saying that a new viral pneumonia from Wuhan was about to upend life on earth, but the people around me certainly weren’t acting that way, and I wasn’t acting that way either … and so, “for the sake of internal consistency,” I didn’t spend much time thinking about it or investigating it. After all, if the fears of a global pandemic had a good chance of being true, I should be dropping everything else and panicking, shouldn’t I? But I wasn’t dropping everything else and panicking … so how could the fears be true?

Then I publicly repented, and resolved not to make such an error again. And now, 15 months later, I realize that I have made such an error again.

All throughout the pandemic, I’d ask my friends, privately, why the hypothesis that the virus had accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology wasn’t being taken far more seriously, given what seemed like a shockingly strong prima facie case. But I didn’t discuss the lab leak scenario on this blog, except once in passing. I could say I didn’t discuss it because I’m not a virologist and I had nothing new to contribute. But I worry that I also didn’t discuss it because it seemed incompatible with my self-conception as a cautious scientist who’s skeptical of lurid coverups and conspiracies—and because I’d already spent my “weirdness capital” on other issues, and didn’t relish the prospect of being sneered at on social media yet again. Instead I simply waited for discussion of the lab leak hypothesis to become “safe” and “respectable,” as today it finally has, thanks to writers who were more courageous than I was. I became, basically, another sheep in one of the conformist herds that we rightly despise when we read about them in history.

(For all that, it’s still plausible to me that the virus had a natural origin after all. What’s become clear is simply that, even if so, the failure to take the possibility of a lab escape more seriously back when the trail of evidence was fresher will stand as a major intellectual scandal of our time.)

Sometimes people are wracked with guilt, but over completely different things than the world wants them to be wracked with guilt over. This was one of the great lessons that I learned from reading Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Many of the Manhattan Project physicists felt lifelong guilt, not that they’d participated in building the bomb, but only that they hadn’t finished the bomb by 1943, when it could have ended the war in Europe and the Holocaust.

On a much smaller scale, I suppose some readers would still like me to feel guilt about comment 171, or some of the other stuff I wrote about nerds, dating, and feminism … or if not that, then maybe about my defense of a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, or of standardized tests and accelerated math programs, or maybe my vehement condemnation of Trump and his failed insurrection. Or any of the dozens of other times when I stood up and said something I actually believed, or when I recounted my experiences as accurately as I could. The truth is, though, I don’t.

Looking back—which, now that I’m 40, I confess is an increasingly large fraction of my time—the pattern seems consistent. I feel guilty, not for having stood up for what I strongly believed in, but for having failed to do so. This suggests that, if I want fewer regrets, then I should click “Publish” on more potentially controversial posts! I don’t know how to force myself to do that, but maybe this post itself is a step.

Note: To get myself into the spirit of writing this post, tonight I watched the 2019 movie Mr. Jones, about the true story of the coverup of Stalin’s 1932-3 mass famine by New York Times journalist Walter Duranty. Recommended!

In my last post, I wrote that despite all my problems with Cade Metz’s New York Times hit piece on Scott Alexander, I’d continue talking to journalists—even Metz himself, I added, assuming he’d still talk to me after my public disparagement of his work. Over the past few days, though, the many counterarguments in my comments section and elsewhere gradually caused me to change my mind. I now feel like to work with Metz again, even just on some quantum computing piece, would be to reward—and to be seen as rewarding—journalistic practices that are making the world worse, and that this consideration overrides even my extreme commitment to openness.

At the least, before I could talk to Metz again, I’d need a better understanding of how the hit piece happened. What was the role of the editors? How did the original hook—namely, the rationalist community’s early rightness about covid-19—disappear entirely from the article? How did the piece manage to evince so little curiosity about such an unusual subculture and such a widely-admired writer? How did it fail so completely to engage with the rationalists’ ideas, instead jumping immediately to “six degrees of Peter Thiel” and other reductive games? How did an angry SneerClubber, David Gerard, end up (according to his own boast) basically dictating the NYT piece’s content?

It’s always ripping-off-a-bandage painful to admit when trust in another person was wildly misplaced—for then who else can we not trust? But sometimes that’s the truth of it.

I continue to believe passionately in the centrality of good journalism to a free society. I’ll continue to talk to journalists often, about quantum computing or whatever else. I also recognize that the NYT is a large, heterogeneous institution (I myself published in it twice); it’s not hard to imagine that many of its own staff take issue with the SSC piece.

But let’s be clear about the stakes here. In the discussion of my last post, I described the NYT as “still the main vessel of consensus reality in human civilization” [alright, alright, American civilization!]. What’s really at issue, beyond the treatment of a single blogger, is whether the NYT can continue serving that central role in a world reshaped by social media, resurgent fascism, and entitled wokery.

Sure, we all know that the NYT has been disastrously wrong before: it ridiculed Goddard’s dream of spaceflight, denied the Holodomor, relegated the Holocaust to the back pages while it was happening, published the fabricated justifications for the Iraq War. But the NYT and a few other publications were still the blockchain of reality, the engine of the consensus of all that is, the last bulwark against the conspiracists and the anti-vaxxers and the empowered fabulists and the horned insurrectionists storming the Capitol, because there was no ability to coordinate around any serious alternative. I’m still skeptical that there’s a serious alternative, but I now look more positively than I did just a few days ago on attempts to create one.

To all those who called me naïve or a coward for having cooperated with the NYT: believe me, I’m well aware that I wasn’t born with much backbone. (I am, after all, that guy on the Internet who famously once planned on a life of celibate asceticism, or more likely suicide, rather than asking women out and thereby risking eternal condemnation as a misogynistic sexual harasser by the normal, the popular, the socially adept, the … humanities grads and the journalists.) But whenever I need a pick-me-up, I tell myself that rather than being ashamed about my lack of a backbone, I can take pride in having occasionally managed to stand even without one.

These next few months, every time I stop myself from touching my face by force of will,

Let me remind myself that the same willpower is available to diet, to exercise, to throw myself into a project, to keep calm amid screaming, to introduce myself to strangers, to decrease the fraction of my life spent getting upset that someone was mean to my ingroup on social media, or otherwise to better myself as a human specimen.

Yea, let all of these things be just as easy for me as it was not to touch my face.

Ah, but what if I forget, what if I do keep touching my face in the next few months?

In one plausible scenario, with at least ~0.1% probability and probably higher depending on my age, a cheap answer will be available to that question: namely, that I’ll no longer be around to ponder the implications.

1. This post has no technical content.  As the tag indicates, it’s entirely “Nerd Self-Help”—thoughts I’ve recently found extremely helpful to me, and that I’m hopeful some others might be able to apply to their own life situations.  If that doesn’t interest you, feel free to skip.

2. I’m using the numbered list format simply because I have a large number of interrelated things to say, and getting each one down precisely seems more important than fashioning them into some coherent narrative.

3. For someone who walks around every day wracked by neurosis, social anxiety, tics, and depression, I’m living an unbelievably happy and fulfilling life.  For this I’m profoundly grateful—to “the universe,” but much more so, to the family and friends and colleagues who’ve made it possible.

4. On bad days, I’ve cursed fate for having placed me in a world to which my social skills were so poorly adapted.  On good days, though, I’ve thanked fate for letting me thrive in such a world, despite my social skills being so maladapted to it.  My ability to thrive in this world owes everything to the gifts of modernity, to the stuff Steven Pinker talks about in Enlightenment Now: the decline of violence, the rule of law, the freedom from hunger, disease, and war, but most of all the rise of science.  So I have a personal reason to be grateful for modernity and to care deeply about its preservation—and to detest Trump and all the other would-be autocrats who’d gleefully take an ax to it.  Like hothouse plants, nerds can flourish only in artificially safe environments.  I don’t often enough express my gratitude for having been born into a world that contains such environments, so I’m taking the opportunity to do so today.

5. I got back a few days ago from a wonderful visit to Mexico City—thanks so much to Sergio Rajsbaum, Luis González, and all my other new friends there for helping to organize it.  I gave three talks at UNAM, one of the largest universities on earth.  I ate … well, the best Mexican food I ever tasted.  I saw amazing sights, including the National Museum of Anthropology, which has hall after hall full of Aztec and Maya artifacts of a grandeur one normally associates with ancient Egypt, Greece, or Rome.  Go there if you want a visceral sense for the scale of the tragedy wrought by the conquistadors.  (On the other hand, having seen the decorated ceremonial knives, the skulls of children whose hearts were ripped out while still beating, I do have to count the end of human sacrifice as a net positive.)

6. The trip was surreal: I discussed quantum computing and philosophy and Mexican history over enchiladas and tequila.  I signed copies of my book, lectured, met fans of this blog.  There was lots of good-natured laughter about the tale of my arrest, and stern reminders to be careful when ordering smoothies.  A few people I met shared their own stories of being harassed by US police over trivial mishaps (e.g., “put your hands on the car,” rifle aimed, over a parking violation), exacerbated of course by their being Mexicans.  One colleague opined that he preferred the Mexican system, wherein you and the officer just calmly, politely discussed how many pesos would make the problem go away.  But then, from time to time, I’d check my phone and find fresh comments accusing me of being a thief, a nutcase incapable of functioning in society, a racist who wants to be treated differently from blacks and Latinos (the actual view expressed in my post was precisely the opposite of that), or even a money-grubbing Jew hyperventilating about “anuddah Shoah.”

7. The real world has a lot to be said for it.  Maybe I should spend more time there.

8. Thanks so much to everyone who sent emails or left comments expressing sympathy about my arrest—or even who simply found the story crazy and amusing, like a Seinfeld episode.  Meanwhile, to those who berated me for being unable to function in society: does it bother you, does it present a puzzle for your theory, that rather than starving under a bridge, I’m enjoying a career doing what I love, traveling the world giving lectures, happily married with two kids?  Do I not, if nothing else, illustrate how functional a non-functional person can be?

9. It’s possible that my kids will grow up with none of the anxiety or depression or neuroticism or absentmindedness that I’ve had.  But if they do have those problems … well, I’m thankful that I can provide them at least one example of what it’s possible to do in life in spite of it!

10. On SneerClub, someone opined that not only was I an oblivious idiot at the smoothie counter, I must also be oblivious to how bad the incident makes me look—since otherwise, I would never have blogged about it.  I ask my detractors: can you imagine, for one second, being so drunk on the love of truth that you’d take the experiences that made you look the most pathetic and awkward, and share them with the world in every embarrassing detail—because “that which can be destroyed by the truth should be”?  This drunkenness on truth is scary, it’s destabilizing, it means that every day you run a new risk of looking foolish.  But as far as I can introspect, it’s also barely distinguishable from the impulse that leads to doing good science: asking the questions everyone else knows better than to ask, clarifying the obvious, confessing one’s own doofus mistakes.  So as a scientist, I’m grateful to have this massive advantage, for all its downsides.

11. Of the hundreds of reactions to my arrest, some blamed me, some the police, some both and some neither.  As I mentioned before, there was an extremely strong and surprising national split, with Americans siding with the police and non-Americans siding with me.  But there was also an even deeper split: namely, almost everyone who already liked me found the story funny or endearing or whatever, while almost everyone who already hated me found in it new reasons for their hate.  I’ve observed this to be a general phenomenon: within the range of choices I’d realistically consider, none of them seem to do anything to turn enemies into friends or friends into enemies.  If so, then that’s a profoundly liberating realization.  It means that I might as well just continue being myself, saying and doing what seem reasonable to me, without worrying about either winning over the SneerClubbers or losing the people who like this blog.  For neither of those is likely to happen–even if we ignore all the other reasons to eschew overreliance on external validation.

12. Every week or so I get emails from people wanting to share their spiritual theories with me, and to illustrate them with color diagrams.  Most such emails go straight to my trash folder.  This week, however, I received one that contained a little gem of insight:

I realize you are professionally reluctant to admit that Spirit actually exists. However, it is obvious to me from your blog that you are personally committed to what I might label “spiritual development.” You are continually pushing yourself and others to be more self-aware, reflect on our actions and assumptions, and choose to become our best selves.

I can only imagine how much pain and psychic energy it costs you to do that so publicly and vulnerably. But that is precisely why so many of us love you; and others hate you, because they are understandably terrified of paying that same price.

13. To those who’ve called me a terrible person, based on how they imagine I’d respond in hypothetical scenarios of their own construction, I make one request.  Before passing final judgment, at least exchange emails with me, or meet me, or otherwise give me a chance to differentiate myself from your internal bogeyman.  Ask me for grad school advice, or comments on your CS idea, or whatever—and with nothing in it for me, and swamped with similar requests, see how much time I spend trying to help you.  Or ask me to donate to your favorite charity, and see if I do it.  Or tell me about misconduct by a prominent member of my community, and see how I respond.  See if any of this is noticeably affected by your race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or anything else besides the honesty of your request.

14. None of the above are hypotheticals for me.  Once I was given firsthand reports, which I judged to be extremely credible, about a serial sexual harasser of women in the math and TCS communities.  The victims had already pursued formal complaints, but with an unsatisfactory resolution.  In response, I immediately offered to publish the perpetrator’s name on this blog along with the evidence and accusations, or help in any other way desired.  My offer was declined, but it still stands if the victims were to change their minds.

15. My mom once told me that, having been hippies concerned about overpopulation, she and my dad weren’t planning to have any kids.  When they finally decided to do so, it was in order to “spite Hitler.”  I felt incredibly proud to have that be the reason for my birth.  Every time I think about it, it fills me with a renewed urge to stand up for whatever seems most human and compassionate, regardless of how unpopular.

16. Going forward, if I ever (hypothetically) experience a relapse of the suicidal thoughts that characterized part of my life, I’m going to say to myself: no.  Not only will I remain alive, I’ll continue to enjoy my family and friends and research and teaching, and mentor students, and get involved in issues I care about, and otherwise make the most of life.  And if for no other reason, I’d do this in order that Arthur Chu could remain, as he put it, “unhappy about [my] continued existence”!  Admittedly, spiting Chu and his chorus of SneerClubbers is far from the only reason to continue living, but it’s a perfectly sufficient reason in itself.  And this will be an impenetrable shield against suicidal thoughts.  So thanks, Arthur!

17. Four years ago, I received hundreds of moving responses to comment 171.  But perhaps the most touching were from several female classmates who I’d had crushes on back in the depressed period I wrote about, and who said some variant of: “it’s a shame you never asked me, because I liked you and would’ve gladly said yes.”  One of these classmates, bless her heart, recently asked me to share this information, as an encouragement to young nerdy readers who might find themselves in the same situation I was in.  Four years ago, a few feminists lectured me that the crippling fear I’d suffered was good, a feature rather than a bug: if only every other predatory nerdbro would be paralyzed by the same fear!  (That is, when they weren’t also lecturing me that the fears were ridiculous and existed only in my head.)  But the women who wrote to me are also left-wing feminists.  So if you confess your feelings to someone, know that no one who despises that decision, who considers it ‘problematic’ and ‘entitled’ and ‘privileged’ and all the rest of the modern litany of just-die-already words, can pretend to speak for all feminists.  I love my wife and my children, and wouldn’t go back in time to change my life’s trajectory if I could.  But you, readers, armed with wisdom I lacked, can reach a happy place in your lives a hell of a lot faster than I did.

18. While this has been beneath the surface of a huge number of my posts, it seems worth bringing out explicitly.  On certain blogs and social media sites, I’m regularly described as a “leftist troll,” a “pathetic, mewling feminist,” or a “rabid establishment liberal.”  On others I’m called a “far-right Zionist” or an “anti-feminist men’s rights advocate.”  It’s enough to make even me confused.  But here’s how I choose to define my stance: my party is the Party of Psychological Complexity.  Our party platform consists of Shakespeare’s plays, the movie The Breakfast Club, the novels of Mark Twain and Philip Roth and Rebecca Goldstein, classic Simpsons and Futurama, and anything else that tries to grapple with human nature honestly.  For most of the past few centuries, the Party of Psychological Complexity has been in a coalition with the political left, because both were interested in advancing Enlightenment ideals, ending slavery and female subjugation and other evils, and broadening humankind’s circles of empathy.  But the PoPC and the political left already split once, over the question of Communism, and today they split again over the morality and the wisdom of social justice vigilantism.

19. Here in the PoPC, our emphasis on the staggering complexity of the individual conscience might seem hard to square with utilitarian ethics: with public health campaigns, Effective Altruism, doing the greatest good for the greatest number, etc.  But the two philosophies actually fit beautifully.  In the PoPC, our interest (you might say) is in the psychological prerequisites to utilitarianism: in the “safe spaces” for the weird and nerdy and convention-defying and literal-minded in human nature that need to get established, before discussion about the best ways to fight malaria or global warming or nuclear proliferation or plastic in the oceans can even begin.

20. On leftist forums like SneerClub, whenever I’m brought up, I’m considered a dangerous reactionary—basically Richard Spencer or Alex Jones except with more quantum query complexity.  Yet, while there are differences in emphasis, and while my not being in politics gives me more freedom to venture outside the Overton window, my views on most contemporary American issues are hard to distinguish from those of Barack Obama, who I consider to have been a superb president and a model of thoughtful leadership.  If you want to understand how racist demagogues managed to take over the US—well, there was a perfect storm of horribleness, with no one decisive factor.  But it surely didn’t help that the modern social-justice left so completely disdains coalition-building, so values the purity of the Elect above all else, that it cast even progressive Obama supporters like me into its lowest circle of Hell.

21. Open yourself up to the complicated and the true in human nature.  Don’t be like Donald Trump or Arthur Chu, two men who represent opposite poles of ideology, yet who have in common that they both purposefully killed what was complicated in themselves.  For those two, winning is all that matters—they’ve explicitly said so, and have organized their entire lives around that principle.  But winning is not all that matters.  When I stand before the Lord of Song, even though it all went wrong, the only word on my lips will be “hallelujah”–because while I have many faults, I did make some room in life for beauty and truth, even at the expense of winning.  Though everything temporal turns to dust, I experienced some moments of eternity.

22. I can already predict the tweets: “No, Scott Aaronson, your weird numbered ruminations won’t save you from being the privileged douchebag who you fundamentally are.”  How was that?  Let me try another: “Aaronson embarrasses himself yet again, proves he doesn’t get why nerd culture is totally f-cked up.”  Here in the Party of Psychological Complexity, we’re used to this stuff.  We don’t fare well in social media wars, and we’ll gladly lose rather than become what we detest.  And yet, over the long run—which might be the very long run—we do mean to win, much like heliocentrism and quantum mechanics ultimately triumphed over simpler, more soundbite-friendly rivals.  Complex ideas win not through 140-character flinged excrement but through conversations, long-form essays, discourse, verbal technologies able to transfer large interconnected bundles of thoughts and emotions from one mind to another one that’s ready for such things.

23. Try every hour of every day to extend your sympathetic imagination to those who are unlike you (those who are like you don’t need such a strenuous effort).  And carve this message of universal compassion onto your doorposts, and bind it to your wrists, and put it for a sign on your foreheads.  There is no ideology that relieves us of the need to think and to feel: that’s my ideology.

24. When people give feedback about this blog’s topics, they seem roughly evenly split between those who beg for more quantum computing and other technical posts that they can actually learn from, and those who beg for more nontechnical posts that they can actually understand!  The truth is that, from the very beginning, this has never been a quantum computing or theoretical computer science blog—or rather it has been, but only incidentally.  If you had to sum it up in one sentence, I suppose this blog has been about surviving and thriving as a quantum complexity theorist in a world that isn’t designed for quantum complexity theorists?

25. But I’ll tell you what: my next post will be a quantum computing one, and I’ll make it worth the wait.  What else could I do by way of thanks to the world, and (more to the point) my family, friends, and readers?

Sometimes a single word or phrase is enough to expand your mental toolkit across almost every subject.  “Averaging argument.”  “Motte and bailey.”  “Empirically indistinguishable.”  “Overfitting.”  Yesterday I learned another such phrase: “Summer of the Shark.”

This, apparently, was the summer of 2001, when lacking more exciting news, the media gave massive coverage to every single shark attack it could find, creating the widespread impression of an epidemic—albeit, one that everyone forgot about after 9/11.  In reality, depending on what you compare it to, the rate of shark attacks was either normal or unusually low in the summer of 2001.  As far as I can tell, the situation is that the absolute number of shark attacks has been increasing over the decades, but the increase is entirely attributable to human population growth (and to way more surfers and scuba divers).  The risk per person, always minuscule (cows apparently kill five times more people), appears to have been going down.  This might or might not be related to the fact that shark populations are precipitously declining all over the world, due mostly to overfishing and finning, but also the destruction of habitat.

There’s a tendency—I notice it in myself—to say, “fine, news outlets have overhyped this trend; that’s what they do.  But still, there must be something going on, since otherwise you wouldn’t see everyone talking about it.”

The point of the phrase “Summer of the Shark” is to remind yourself that a “trend” can be, and often is, entirely a product of people energetically looking for a certain thing, even while the actual rate of the thing is unremarkable, abnormally low, or declining.  Of course this has been a favorite theme of Steven Pinker, but I don’t know if even reading his recent books, Better Angels and Enlightenment Now, fully brought home the problem’s pervasiveness for me.  If a self-sustaining hype bubble can form even over something as relatively easy to measure as the number of shark attacks, imagine how common it must be with more nebulous social phenomena.

Without passing judgment—I’m unsure about many of them myself—how many of the following have you figured, based on the news or your Facebook or Twitter feeds, are probably some sort of epidemic?

• Crime by illegal immigrants
• Fraudulent voting by non-citizens
• SJWs silencing free speech on campus
• Unemployment in heartland America
• Outrageous treatment of customers by airlines
• Mass school shootings
• Sexism in Silicon Valley
• Racism at Starbucks

Now be honest: for how many of these do you have any real idea whether the problem is anomalously frequent relative to its historical rate, or to the analogous problems in other sectors of society?  How many seem to be epidemics that require special explanations (“the dysfunctional culture of X”), but only because millions of people started worrying about these particular problems and discussing them—in many cases, thankfully so?  How many seem to be epidemics, but only because people can now record outrageous instances with their smartphones, then make them viral on social media?

Needless to say, the discovery that a problem is no worse in domain X than it is in Y, or is better, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight hard to solve it in X—especially if X happens to be our business.  Set thy own house in order.  But it does mean that, if we see X but not Y attacked for its deeply entrenched, screwed-up culture, a culture that lets these things happen over and over, then we’re seeing a mistake at best, and the workings of prejudice at worst.

I’m not saying anything the slightest bit original here.  But my personal interest is less in the “Summer of the Shark” phenomenon itself than in its psychology.  Somehow, we need to figure out a trick to move this cognitive error from the periphery of consciousness to center stage.  I mustn’t treat it as just a 10% correction: something to acknowledge intellectually, before I go on to share a rage-inducing headline on Facebook anyway, once I’ve hit on a suitable reason why my initial feelings of anger were basically justified after all.  Sometimes it’s a 100% correction.  I’ve been guilty, I’m sure, of helping to spread SotS-type narratives.  And I’ve laughed when SotS narratives were uncritically wielded by others, for example in The Onion.  I should do better.

I can’t resist sharing one of history’s most famous Jewish jokes, with apologies to those who know it.  In the shtetl, a horrible rumor spreads: a Jewish man raped and murdered a beautiful little Christian girl in the forest.  Terrified, the Jews gather in the synagogue and debate what to do.  They know that the Cossacks won’t ask: “OK, but before we do anything rash, what’s the rate of Jewish perpetration of this sort of crime?  How does it compare to the Gentile rate, after normalizing by the populations’ sizes?  Also, what about Jewish victims of Gentile crimes?  Is the presence of Jews causally related to more of our children being murdered than would otherwise be?”  Instead, a mob will simply slaughter every Jew it can find.  But then, just when it seems all is lost, the rabbi runs into the synagogue and jubilantly declares: “wonderful news, everyone!  It turns out the murdered girl was Jewish!”

And now I should end this post, before it jumps the shark.

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Update: This post by Scott Alexander, which I’d somehow forgotten about, makes exactly the same point, but better and more memorably. Oh well, one could do worse than to serve as a Cliff Notes and link farm for Slate Star Codex.

Scott Alexander has a new post decrying how rarely experts encode their knowledge in the form of detailed guidelines with conditional statements and loops—or what one could also call flowcharts or expert systems—rather than just blanket recommendations.  He gives, as an illustration of what he’s looking for, an algorithm that a psychiatrist might use to figure out which antidepressants or other treatments will work for a specific patient—with the huge proviso that you shouldn’t try his algorithm at home, or (most importantly) sue him if it doesn’t work.

Compared to a psychiatrist, I have the huge advantage that if my professional advice fails, normally no one gets hurt or gets sued for malpractice or commits suicide or anything like that.  OK, but what do I actually know that can be encoded in if-thens?

Well, one of the commonest tasks in the day-to-day life of any theoretical computer scientist, or mathematician of the Erdös flavor, is to upper bound the probability that something bad will happen: for example, that your randomized algorithm or protocol will fail, or that your randomly constructed graph or code or whatever it is won’t have the properties needed for your proof.

So without further ado, here are my secrets revealed, my ten-step plan to probability-bounding and computer-science-theorizing success.

Step 1. “1” is definitely an upper bound on the probability of your bad event happening.  Check whether that upper bound is good enough.  (Sometimes, as when this is an inner step in a larger summation over probabilities, the answer will actually be yes.)

Step 2. Try using Markov’s inequality (a nonnegative random variable exceeds its mean by a factor of k at most a 1/k fraction of the time), combined with its close cousin in indispensable obviousness, the union bound (the probability that any of several bad events will happen, is at most the sum of the probabilities of each bad event individually).  About half the time, you can stop right here.

Step 3. See if the bad event you’re worried about involves a sum of independent random variables exceeding some threshold. If it does, hit that sucker with a Chernoff or Hoeffding bound.

Step 4. If your random variables aren’t independent, see if they at least form a martingale: a fancy word for a sum of terms, each of which has a mean of 0 conditioned on all the earlier terms, even though it might depend on the earlier terms in subtler ways.  If so, Azuma your problem into submission.

Step 5. If you don’t have a martingale, but you still feel like your random variables are only weakly correlated, try calculating the variance of whatever combination of variables you care about, and then using Chebyshev’s inequality: the probability that a random variable differs from its mean by at most k times the standard deviation (i.e., the square root of the variance) is at most 1/k².  If the variance doesn’t work, you can try calculating some higher moments too—just beware that, around the 6^th or 8^th moment, you and your notebook paper will likely both be exhausted.

Step 6. OK, umm … see if you can upper-bound the variation distance between your probability distribution and a different distribution for which it’s already known (or is easy to see) that it’s unlikely that anything bad happens. A good example of a tool you can use to upper-bound variation distance is Pinsker’s inequality.

Step 7. Now is the time when you start ransacking Google and Wikipedia for things like the Lovász Local Lemma, and concentration bounds for low-degree polynomials, and Hölder’s inequality, and Talagrand’s inequality, and other isoperimetric-type inequalities, and hypercontractive inequalities, and other stuff that you’ve heard your friends rave about, and have even seen successfully used at least twice, but there’s no way you’d remember off the top of your head under what conditions any of this stuff applies, or whether any of it is good enough for your application. (Just between you and me: you may have already visited Wikipedia to refresh your memory about the earlier items in this list, like the Chernoff bound.) “Try a hypercontractive inequality” is surely the analogue of the psychiatrist’s “try electroconvulsive therapy,” for a patient on whom all milder treatments have failed.

Step 8. So, these bad events … how bad are they, anyway? Any chance you can live with them?  (See also: Step 1.)

Step 9. You can’t live with them? Then back up in your proof search tree, and look for a whole different approach or algorithm, which would make the bad events less likely or even kill them off altogether.

Step 10. Consider the possibility that the statement you’re trying to prove is false—or if true, is far beyond any existing tools.  (This might be the analogue of the psychiatrist’s: consider the possibility that evil conspirators really are out to get your patient.)

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.

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.

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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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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.