Shtetl-Optimized

Last night, I was taken aback to discover that my name appears in the Epstein Files, in 26 different documents. This is despite the fact that I met Jeffrey Epstein a grand total of zero times, and had zero email or any other contact with him … which is more (less) than some of my colleagues can say.

The bulk of the correspondence involves Epstein wanting to arrange a meeting with me and Seth Lloyd back in 2010, via an intermediary named Charles Harper, about funding a research project on “Cryptography in Nature.”

Searching my inbox, it turns out that this Charles Harper did contact me in May 2010, and I then met him at S&S Deli in Cambridge (plausible, although I have zero recollections of this meeting—only of the deli). Harper then sent me a detailed followup email about his proposed Cryptography in Nature project, naming Jeffrey Epstein for the first time as the project’s funder, and adding: “perhaps you will know Jeffrey and his background and situation.”

For whatever reason, I forwarded this email to my parents, brother, and then-fiancee Dana. My brother then found and shared a news article about Epstein’s prostitution conviction, adding to a different article that I had found and shared. (At that time, like many others, I’d probably vaguely heard of Epstein, but he didn’t have 0.1% the infamy that he has now.) Then my mom wrote the following: “be careful not to get sucked up in the slime-machine going on here! Since you don’t care that much about money, they can’t buy you at least.”

It appears from emails that Charles Harper tried again later that summer to arrange a meeting between me and Epstein, but that I took my mom’s advice and largely blew him off, and no such meeting ever happened. Amazingly, I then forgot entirely that any of this had occurred until last night. By way of explanation, some business/finance dude trying to interest me in half-baked ideas involving quantum, AI, cryptography, etc., often dangling the prospect of funding for my students and postdocs, shows up in my life like every month. Most of their world-changing initiatives go nowhere for one reason or another. There really wasn’t much reason to think further about this, until Epstein had become history’s most notorious sex criminal, which (again) wouldn’t happen until years later, after I’d forgotten.

It gets better, though. In the Epstein Files, one also finds a November 2010 letter from Charles Harper to Epstein about organizing a conference on the same Cryptography in Nature topic, which includes the following idea about me:

Scott Aaronson was born on May 21st, 1981. He will be 30 in 2011. The conference could follow a theme of: “hurry to think together with Scott Aaronson while he is still in his 20s and not yet a pitiful over-the-hill geezer in his 30s.” This offers another nice opportunity for celebration.

I see no indication that any such conference ever happened; in any case, I didn’t get invited to one!

On my Facebook, some friends are joking that “it tracks that someone into teenage girls might think Scott Aaronson was a hot property in his nubile 20s, who would get old and boring in his 30s”—and that maybe Epstein was less sexist about such matters than everyone assumes. I replied that I wished I could say the proposition that I’d gradually get slower and more senile through the 2010s and 2020s was entirely false.

But the best comment was that I’ve been incredibly lucky to have such an astute family. If only Bill Gates and Larry Summers had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief.

The following guest post was written by a Shtetl-Optimized fan in Iran, who’s choosing to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. I’m in awe of the courage of this individual and the millions of other Iranians who’ve risked or, tragically, sacrificed their lives these past few weeks, to stand for something about as unequivocally good and against something about as unequivocally evil as has ever existed on earth. I’m enraged at the relative indifference of the world, and of the US in particular, to these brave Iranians’ plight. There’s still time for the US to fulfill its promise to the protesters and do the right thing—something that I’ll support even if it endangers my friends and family living in Israel. I check the news from Iran every day, and pray that my friends and colleagues there stay safe—and that they, and the world, will soon be free from the Ayatollahs, who now stand fully unmasked before the world as the murderous thugs they always were. –SA

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Guest Post from an Iranian

The protests began in Tehran on 28 December 2025, triggered by economic instability and high inflation, and spread to other provinces. People, tired of the regime and aware that every president is just a puppet with no real power, began targeting the source of authority by chanting directly against Khamenei. After government forces killed several protesters, Trump said on 3 January that if they shoot, then U.S. will come to rescue. Protests continued, and on 6 January, Reza Pahlavi called for demonstrations at 8 PM on January 8 and 9. At first, all the regime supporters mocked this and said nobody will come. On these days, they shared videos of empty streets on the news to claim that nobody had shown up. But actually, many people joined the protests. Right around 8 PM on January 8, the government shut down the internet. Only Iran’s internal network remained active, meaning local apps and websites that use Iranian servers work, but the rest of the world was completely cut off.

The regime fears the internet so much that it has officially announced that anyone using Starlink is considered a spy for foreign countries, especially Mossad, and will be punished. As a result, Starlink owners are extremely cautious and rarely let others know they have it.

I know many students who missed deadlines or interviews because of internet shutdown. Some students were forced to travel near Iran’s borders and use Afghanistan’s or Iraq’s internet just to check their email. I personally missed the deadlines for two universities. Just before the internet shutdown, a professor sent me a problem sheet that was part of the application process, and I could not even inform him about the situation. For the past four years since completing my undergraduate studies, my only dream has been to pursue a PhD. I come from a low-income family, and I did everything in my power to reach this stage. I tried to control every variable that might disrupt my four-year plan. Yet now it seems I have failed, and I face an uncertain future.

At the same time, U.S. sanctions have significantly limited Iranian opportunities to study at universities worldwide. With Trump’s travel ban on all Iranians, along with some European countries following U.S. sanctions by rejecting Iranian applicants solely based on nationality, our options have become limited (for example, see the “Evaluation criteria” section). The recent internet shutdown has worsened the situation and left us with even fewer opportunities. While the regime shuts down our internet and takes away our opportunities, the very people responsible for this suppression are ensuring their own children never face such obstacles (I will return to this at the end of the post).

On January 8, my sister and I participated. We were inside our car when Special Units and Basij thugs shot at civilians on the pedestrian path using a shotgun, exactly two meters away from us. I was so shocked that I could not even respond. My sister pushed my head under the car’s dashboard to prevent me from getting shot. I come from a very small town, and this was the level of suppression we witnessed there. Now imagine the scale of suppression in major cities like Tehran, and suddenly the number of protesters reported killed in the news begin to make sense.

We now see tweets on X that not only deny the killings but openly mock them. Is it really possible to deny the body bags in Kahrizak? If a government shuts down the internet across an entire country for three weeks to prevent information from leaking out, do you believe it when it claims the sky is blue? (Check NetBlocks.org and this on Mastodon.)

After January 8, many of the regime’s puppets, who are funded to spread its propaganda in Western media, began whitewashing events on U.S. and European TV, claiming that nobody was killed or that it was a terrorist attack and the government had to act. Some even claim that the protesters are violent rioters and the government has the right to shoot them with war ammunition. Iranians call these puppets “bloodwashers.”

These bloodwashers forget that since 1979, people have tried every possible way to express their opinions and demands, and all of it was ridiculed by the regime and its supporters. Every attempt was suppressed without even being heard. So how do you think things will turn out? Clearly, people become more aggressive in each wave of protests, a pattern you can see in every uprising since 2009. This is also accompanied by worsening poverty. Ordinary people suffer from hunger because some radicals refuse to talk with the U.S., while regime supporters enjoy unlimited access to money and privileges.

Out of the four presidential elections held after 2009, people elected three presidents who promised to pursue a deal with U.S, the so-called Reformist party. People were desperate for change because they knew their situation could only improve if the regime talks with U.S. Many called the voters naïve, arguing that presidents cannot truly make a difference and lack real power, often saying, “Khamenei would never allow that.” I believe many of the voters knew that deep down. They knew that each time a president speaks about negotiating with the U.S., Khamenei suddenly gathers all his supporters and states “No, I am not okay with talking with the U.S.”. Still, people felt they had no real alternative but elections. After the 2015 Nuclear deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), people thought they can finally live normal lives and have normal relations with other countries (See how people celebrated the deal on the night it was finalized). At the time, I was even planning to assemble a new PC and thought it might be better to wait and buy parts from Amazon! We didn’t yet know what the IRGC had planned for us over the next ten years. Now, all their actions and stubbornness have led them to this point where they have to surrender completely (the deal Trump is talking about, which essentially takes away everything that makes Islamic Republic the Islamic Republic), or force another war on our people, and then surrender disgracefully. People are now saying that “Come on, the U.S. you wanted to destroy so badly has come. Take all your supporters and go fight it. Or perhaps you are only brave against ordinary unarmed people” This was an inevitable outcome after October 7 attacks, that their time will come one day, but they still did not want to listen. I often see debates about whether U.S. involvement in other countries is good or whether it should isolate itself as it is not its people’s business. I believe decisions regarding Iran were made weeks ago, and we now have no choice but to wait and see what happens. I just hope that the situation turns out better for the people.

As I mentioned earlier, Islamic regime officials chant “death to the U.S. and the West,” yet they send their children to Western countries. These children use funds and opportunities that could have gone to far more deserving people, while living comfortably and anonymously in the very societies their parents want to destroy.

They flee the country their parents made and climb the social ladder of western societies, while ordinary students cannot even afford a simple TOEFL exam and survive on as little as five dollars a month.

When ordinary Iranian students apply for visas, especially for the U.S. and Canada, they are forced to provide every detail of their lives to prove they are not terrorists and that they will return to Iran. Sometimes, they may have to explain to the embassy officer the topics of their professors’ papers, the health condition of their father, and whether they own houses, which the last two indirectly indicate whether they will return or not. If they are lucky enough not to be rejected within ten minutes, they may enter a clearance process that takes at least a year. Only then might they receive a visa. But how is it that when it comes to the children of regime’s officials, they freely enter and live there without issue.

There are countless examples. Mohammad Reza Aref, a Stanford graduate and current Vice President who has repeatedly worn IRGC uniforms in public support, has sons who earned PhDs from EPFL and the University of Florida, and one publicly attributed this success to “good genes”. Ali Larijani, an IRGC officer, had a daughter working at Emory University until last week. Masoumeh Ebtekar, who climbed the wall of the U.S. Embassy during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, has a son, Eissa Hashemi, who is an adjunct faculty member at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology.

Many Iranians are now actively raising awareness through petitions and protests at these individuals’ workplaces. One example is the petition regarding Eissa Hashemi. Protests at Emory University have reportedly led to Fatemeh Larijani’s recent unemployment. (Larijani family hold critical roles in the regime, and in fact, many members of the family have studied or currently live in Western countries. There is even a saying that while people were forced to fight the U.S., the Larijanis were filling out university application forms.)

When these individuals occupy seats in your labs or use your tax-funded resources, it directly affects the integrity of your institutions and the opportunities available to those who actually share your values. You do not even need to spend time investigating these people yourself. Iranians will protest outside offices or send emails about your colleagues with this condition. All I ask is that the next time you receive multiple emails about a particular Iranian colleague, or hear about protests near your workplace, you spend just five minutes considering what is being said.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to read this. I know it is long, and I know it is heavy. I wrote it because silence and denial only help suppression survive, and because attention, however brief, matters.
I hope that better and freer days come.

• Here’s a 53-minute podcast that I recorded this afternoon with a high school student named Micah Zarin, and which ended up covering …[checks notes] … consciousness, free will, brain uploading, the Church-Turing Thesis, AI, quantum mechanics and its various interpretations, quantum gravity, quantum computing, and the discreteness or continuity of the laws of physics. I strongly recommend 2x speed as usual.

• QIP’2026, the world’s premier quantum computing conference, is happening right now in Riga, Latvia, locally organized by a team headed by the great Andris Ambainis, who I’ve known since 1999 and who’s played a bigger role in my career than almost anyone else. I’m extremely sorry not to be there, despite what I understand to be the bitter cold. Family and teaching obligations mean that I jet around the world so much less than I used to. But many of my students and colleagues are there, and I’ll plan a blog post on news from QIP next week.

• Greg Burnham of Epoch AI tells me that Epoch has released a list of AI-for-math challenge problems—i.e., open math problems that are below the level of P vs. NP and the Riemann Hypothesis but still of very serious research interest, and that they’re putting forward as worthy targets right now for trying to solve with AI assistance. A few examples that should be familiar to some Shtetl-Optimized readers: degree vs. sensitivity of Boolean functions, improving the constant in the exponent of the General Number Field Sieve, giving an algorithm to test whether a knot has unknotting number of 1, and extending Apéry’s proof of the irrationality of ζ(3) to other constants. Notably, for each problem, alongside a beautifully written description by a (human) expert, they also show you what the state-of-the-art models were able to do on that problem when they tried.

• Tonight, on the arXiv, I noticed a nice survey article entitled Computer Science Challenges in Quantum Computing: Early Fault-Tolerance and Beyond, by a distinguished list of authors including several who might be known to Shtetl-Optimized readers. I haven’t read the whole thing, but agreed with what I read.

• There’s been a major advance in understanding constant-depth quantum circuits, by my former PhD student Daniel Grier (now a professor at UCSD), along with his PhD student Jackson Morris and Kewen Wu of IAS. Namely, they show that any function computable in TC⁰ (constant-depth, polynomial-size classical circuits with threshold gates) is also computable in QAC⁰ (constant-depth quantum circuits with 1-qubit and generalized Toffoli gates), as long as you provide many copies of the input. Two examples of such TC⁰ functions, which we therefore now know to be in QAC⁰ given many copies of the input, are Parity and Majority. It’s been a central open problem of quantum complexity theory for a quarter-century to prove that Parity is not in QAC⁰, complementing the celebrated result from the 1980s that Parity is not in classical AC⁰ (a constant-depth circuit class that, for all we know, might be incomparable with QAC⁰). It’s known that showing Parity∉QAC⁰ is equivalent to showing that QAC⁰ can’t implement the “fanout” function, which makes many copies of an input bit. To say that we’ve gained a new understanding of why this problem is so hard would be an understatement.

Those of us who tried to stop Trump from ever coming to power—and who then tried to stop his return to power—were accused of hysterics, of Trump Derangement Syndrome, when we talked about authoritarianism and the death of liberal democracy. Yet masked government agents summarily executing protesters in the street, under the orders and protection of the president, is now the reality and even the defining image of the United States—or at least the defining image of Minnesota, and the model will soon be exported nationally if it isn’t stopped right now by coast-to-coast revulsion and defiance. Let all those who denied what was happening, or who justified it, including in the comments section of this blog, hang their heads in shame forever.

People will say: but Scott, just recently you wanted Trump to overthrow the gangster regime in Venezuela! You want him, even now, to overthrow the bloodthirsty murderers in Iran! That makes you practically a Trumper yourself! How can you now turn around and condemn him?

Difficult as this might be for many to understand, my position has always been that I’m consistently against all empowered thugs everywhere on earth. If I’m against Trump’s personal thug army executing (so far) two peaceful protesters, then certainly I should be against Ayatollah Khamenei’s thug army executing 20,000 protesters, and Putin’s thug army executing however many it has. I’m also aware that, for Trump and his henchmen like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, Khamenei and Putin and the like are models and inspirations. No one can doubt at this point that Miller and Noem would gladly execute ten thousand or ten million peacefully protesting Americans if they expected to get away with it.

When two thugs fight each other, I favor whichever outcome will lead to fewer of the world’s people under thug rule. Or if one thug can still be defeated in an election and the other thug can be defeated only in war, then I favor electoral defeat where it’s possible and military overthrow where it isn’t.

This is a stance, I’ve learned, that will lose you friends. People will say: “I get why you’re against their thugs, but how can you also be against our thugs?” I’m writing this post in the hope that, even if people hate me, at least they won’t be confused. I’m also writing, frankly, in the hope that a few days will go by with me having discharged my moral obligation not to be silent, so then maybe I can do some science.

Alas, the dream that I had last night was not the inspiring, MLK kind of dream, even though tomorrow happens to be the great man’s day.  No, I had the literal kind of dream, where everything seems real but then you wake up and remember only the last fragments.

In my case, those last fragments involved a gray-haired bespectacled woman, a fellow CS professor.  She and I were standing in a dimly lit university building.  And she was grabbing me by the shoulders, shaking me.

“Look, Scott,” she was saying, “we’re both computer scientists.  We were both around in the 90s.  You know as well as I do that, if someone claims to have built an AI, but it turns out they just loaded a bunch of known answers, written by humans, into a lookup table, and then they search the table when a question comes … that’s not AI.  It’s slop.  It’s garbage.”

“But…” I interjected.

“Oh of course,” she continued, “so you make the table bigger.  What do you have now?  More slop!  More garbage!  You load the entire Internet into the table.  Now you have an astronomical-sized piece of garbage!”

“I mean,” I said, “there’s an exponential blowup in the number of possible questions, which can only be handled by…”

“Of course,” she said impatiently, “I understand as well as anyone.  You train a neural net to predict a probability distribution over the next token.  In other words, you slice up and statistically recombine your giant lookup table to disguise what’s really going on.  Now what do you get?  You get the biggest piece of garbage the world has ever seen.  You get a hideous monster that’s destroying and zombifying our entire civilization … and that still understands nothing more than the original lookup table did.”

“I mean, you get a tool that hundreds of millions of people now use every day—to write code, to do literature searches…”

By this point, the professor was screaming at me, albeit with a pleading tone in her voice.  “But no one who you respect uses that garbage! Not a single one!  Go ahead and ask them: scientists, mathematicians, artists, creators…”

“I use it,” I replied quietly.  “Most of my friends use it too.”

The professor stared at me with a new, wordless horror.  And that’s when I woke up.

I think I was next going to say something about how I agreed that generative AI might be taking the world down a terrible, dangerous path, but how dismissing the scientific and philosophical immensity of what’s happened, by calling it “slop,” “garbage,” etc., is a bad way to talk about the danger. If so, I suppose I’ll never know how the professor would’ve replied to that. Though, if she was just an unintegrated part of my own consciousness—or a giant lookup table that I can query on demand!—perhaps I could summon her back.

Mostly, I remember being surprised to have had a dream that was this coherent and topical. Normally my dreams just involve wandering around lost in an airport that then transforms itself into my old high school, or something.

Scott Alexander has put up one of his greatest posts ever, a 10,000-word eulogy to Dilbert creator Scott Adams, of which I would’ve been happy to read 40,000 words more. In it, Alexander trains a microscope on Adams’ tragic flaws as a thinker and human being, but he adds:

In case it’s not obvious, I loved Scott Adams.

Partly this is because we’re too similar for me to hate him without hating myself.

And:

Adams was my teacher in a more literal way too. He published several annotated collections, books where he would present comics along with an explanation of exactly what he was doing in each place, why some things were funny and others weren’t, and how you could one day be as funny as him. Ten year old Scott devoured these … objectively my joke posts get the most likes and retweets of anything I write, and I owe much of my skill in the genre to cramming Adams’ advice into a malleable immature brain.

When I first heard the news that Scott Adams had succumbed to cancer, I posted something infinitely more trivial on my Facebook. I simply said:

Scott Adams (who reigned for decades as the #1 Scott A. of the Internet, with Alexander as #2 and me as at most #3) was a hateful asshole, a nihilist, and a crank. And yet, even when reading the obituaries that explain what an asshole, nihilist, and crank he was, I laugh whenever they quote him.

Inspired by Scott Alexander, I’d like now to try again, to say something more substantial. As Scott Alexander points out, Scott Adams’ most fundamental belief—the through-line that runs not only through Dilbert but through all his books and blog posts and podcasts—was that the world is ruled by idiots. The pointy-haired boss always wins, spouting about synergy and the true essence of leadership, and the nerdy Dilberts always lose. Trying to change minds by rational argument is a fools’ errand, as “master persuaders” and skilled hypnotists will forever run rings around you. He, Scott Adams, is cleverer than everyone else, among other things because he realizes all this—but even he is powerless to change it.

Or as Adams put it in The Dilbert Principle:

It’s useless to expect rational behavior from the people you work with, or anybody else for that matter. If you can come to peace with the fact that you’re surrounded by idiots, you’ll realize that resistance is futile, your tension will dissipate, and you can sit back and have a good laugh at the expense of others.

The thing is, if your life philosophy is that the world is ruled by idiots, and that confident charlatans will always beat earnest nerds, you’re … often going to be vindicated by events. Adams was famously vindicated back in 2015, when he predicted Trump’s victory in the 2016 election (since Trump, you see, was a “master persuader”), before any other mainstream commentator thought that Trump even had a serious chance of winning the Republican nomination.

But if you adopt this worldview, you’re also often going to be wrong—as countless of Adams’ other confident predictions were (see Scott Alexander’s post for examples), to say nothing of his scientific or moral views.

My first hint that the creator of Dilbert was not a reliable thinker, was when I learned of his smugly dismissive view of science. One of the earliest Shtetl-Optimized posts, way back in 2006, was entitled Scott A., disbeliever in Darwinism. At that time, Adams’ crypto-creationism struck me as just some bizarre, inexplicable deviation. I’m no longer confused about it: on the one hand, Scott Alexander’s eulogy shows just how much deeper the crankishness went, how Adams also gobbled medical misinformation, placed his own cockamamie ideas about gravity on par with general relativity, etc. etc. But Alexander succeeds in reconciling all this with Adams’ achievements: it’s all just consequences from the starting axiom that the world is ruled by morons, and that he, Scott Adams, is the only one clever enough to see through it all.

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Is my epistemology any different? Do I not also look out on the world, and see idiots and con-men and pointy-haired bosses in every direction? Well, not everywhere. At any rate, I see far fewer of them in the hard sciences.

This seems like a good time to say something that’s been a subtext of Shtetl-Optimized for 20 years, but that Scott Alexander has inspired me to make text.

My whole worldview starts from the observation that science works. Not perfectly, of course—working in academic science for nearly 30 years, I’ve had a close-up view of the flaws—but the motor runs. On a planet full of pointy-haired bosses and imposters and frauds, science nevertheless took us in a few centuries from wretchedness and superstition to walking on the moon and knowing the age of the universe and the code of life.

This is the point where people always say: that’s all well and good, but you can’t derive ought from is, and science, for all its undoubted successes, tells us nothing about what to value or how to live our lives.

To which I reply: that’s true in a narrow sense, but it dramatically understates how far you can get from the “science works” observation.

As one example, you can infer that the people worth listening to are the people who speak and write clearly, who carefully distinguish what they know from what they don’t, who sometimes change their minds when presented with opposing views and at any rate give counterarguments—i.e., who exemplify the values that make science work. The political systems worth following are the ones that test their ideas against experience, that have built-in error-correction mechanisms, that promote people based on ability rather than loyalty—the same things that make scientific institutions work, insofar as they do work. And of course, if the scientists who study X are nearly unanimous in saying that a certain policy toward X would be terrible, then we’d better have a damned good reason to pursue the policy anyway. This still leaves a wide range of moral and political views on the table, but it rules out virtually every kind of populism, authoritarianism, and fundamentalism.

Incidentally, this principle—that one’s whole moral and philosophical worldview should grow out of the seed of science working—is why, from an early age, I’ve reacted to every kind of postmodernism as I would to venomous snakes. Whenever someone tells me that science is just another narrative, a cultural construct, a facade for elite power-seeking, etc., to me they might as well be O’Brien from 1984, in the climactic scene where he tortures Winston Smith into agreeing that 2+2=5, and that the stars are just tiny dots a few miles away if the Party says they are. Once you can believe absurdities, you can justify atrocities.

Scott Adams’ life is interesting to me in that shows exactly how far it’s possible to get without internalizing this. Yes, you can notice that the pointy-haired boss is full of crap. You can make fun of the boss. If you’re unusually good at making fun of him, you might even become a rich, famous, celebrated cartoonist. But you’re never going to figure out any ways of doing things that are systematically better than the pointy-haired boss’s ways, or even recognize the ways that others have found. You’ll be in error far more often than in doubt. You might even die of prostate cancer earlier than necessary, because you listen to medical crackpots and rely on ivermectin, turning to radiation and other established treatments only after having lost crucial time.

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Scott Adams was hardly the first great artist to have tragic moral flaws, or to cause millions of his fans to ask whether they could separate the artist from the art. But I think he provides one of the cleanest examples where the greatness and the flaws sprang from the same source: namely, overgeneralization from the correct observation that “the world is full of idiots,” in a way that leaves basically no room even for Darwin or Einstein, and so inevitably curdles over time into crankishness, bitterness, and arrogance. May we laugh at Scott Adams’ cartoons and may we learn from his errors, both of which are now permanent parts of the world’s heritage.

This deserves to become one of the iconic images of human history, alongside the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square and so forth.

Here’s Sharifi Zarchi, a computer engineering professor at Sharif University in Tehran, posting on Twitter/X: “Ali Khamenei is not my leader.”

Do you understand the balls of steel this takes? If Professor Zarchi can do this—if hundreds of thousands of young Iranians can take to the streets even while the IRGC and the Basij fire live rounds at them—then I can certainly handle people yelling me on this blog!

I’m in awe of the Iranian people’s courage, and hope I’d have similar courage in their shoes.

I was also enraged this week at the failure of much of the rest of the world to help, to express solidarity, or even to pay much attention to the Iranian’s people plight (though maybe that’s finally changing this weekend).

I’ve actually been working on a CS project with a student in Tehran. Because of the Internet blackout, I haven’t heard from him in days. I pray that he’s safe. I pray that all my friends and colleagues in Iran, and their family members, stay safe and stay strong.

If any Iranian Shtetl-Optimized reader manages to get onto the Internet, and would like to share an update—anonymously if desired, of course—we’d all be obliged.

May the Iranian people be free from tyranny soon.

Update: I’m sick with fear for my many colleagues and friends in Iran and their families. I hope they’re still alive; because of the communications blackout, I have no idea. Perhaps 12,000 have already been machine-gunned in the streets while the unjust world, the hypocrites and cowards who marched against a tiny democracy for defending itself—they invent excuses or explicitly defend the murderous regime in Tehran. WTF is the US waiting for? Trump’s “red line” was crossed days ago. May we give the Ayatollah the martyrdom he preaches, and liberate his millions of captives.

The blog-commenters come at me one by one, a seemingly infinite supply of them, like masked henchmen in an action movie throwing karate chops at Jackie Chan.

“Seriously Scott, do better,” says each henchman when his turn comes, ignoring all the ones before him who said the same. “If you’d have supported American-imposed regime change in Venezuela, like just installing María Machado as the president, then surely you must also support Trump’s cockamamie plan to invade Greenland! For that matter, you logically must also support Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and China’s probable future invasion of Taiwan!”

“No,” I reply to each henchman, “you’re operating on a wildly mistaken model of me. For starters, I’ve just consistently honored the actual democratic choices of the Venezuelans, the Greenlanders, the Ukrainians, and the Taiwanese, regardless of coalitions and power. Those choices are, respectively, to be rid of Maduro, to stay part of Denmark, and to be left alone by Russia and China—in all four cases, as it happens, the choices most consistent with liberalism, common sense, and what nearly any 5-year-old would say was right and good.”

“My preference,” I continue, “is simply that the more pro-Enlightenment, pluralist, liberal-democratic side triumph, and that the more repressive, authoritarian side feel the sting of defeat—always, in every conflict, in every corner of the earth.  Sure, if authoritarians win an election fair and square, I might clench my teeth and watch them take power, for the sake of the long-term survival of the ideals those authoritarians seek to destroy. But if authoritarians lose an election and then arrogate power anyway, what’s there even to feel torn about? So, you can correctly predict my reaction to countless international events by predicting this. It’s like predicting what Tit-for-Tat will do on a given move in the Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma.”

“Even more broadly,” I say, “my rule is simply that I’m in favor of good things, and against bad things.  I’m in favor of truth, and against falsehood. And if anyone says to me: because you supported this country when it did good thing X, you must also support it when does evil thing Y? (Either as a reductio ad absurdum, or because the person actually wants evil thing Y?) Or if they say: because you agreed with this person when she said this true thing, you must also endorse this false thing she said? I reply: good over evil and truth over lies in every instance—if need be, down to the individual subatomic particles of morality and logic.”

The henchmen snarl, “so now it’s laid bare! Now everyone can see just how naive and simplistic Aaronson’s so-called ‘political philosophy’ really is!  Do us all a favor, Scott, and stick to quantum physics! Stick to computer science! Do you not know that philosophers and political scientists have filled libraries debating these weighty matters? Are you an act-utilitarian? A Kantian? A neocon or neoliberal? An America-First interventionist? Pick some package of values, then answer to us for all the commitments that come with that package!”

I say: “No, I don’t subcontract out my soul to any package of values that I can define via any succinct rule. Instead, given any moral dilemma, I simply query my internal Morality Oracle and follow whatever it tells me to do, unless of course my weakness prevents me. Some would simply call the ‘Morality Oracle’ my conscience. But others would hold that, to whatever extent people’s consciences have given similar answers across vast gulfs of time and space and culture, it’s because they tapped into an underlying logic that humans haven’t fully explained, but that they no more invented than the rules of arithmetic. The world’s prophets and sages have tried again and again over the millennia to articulate that logic, with varying admixtures of error and self-interest and culture-dependent cruft. But just like with math and science, the clearest available statements seem to me to have gotten clearer over time.”

The Jackie Chan henchman smirks at this. “So basically, you know the right answers to moral questions because of a magical, private Morality Oracle—like, you know, the burning bush, or Mount Sinai? And yet you dare to call yourself a scientific rationalist, a foe of obscurantism and myticism? Do you have any idea how pathetic this all sounds, as an attempted moral theory?”

“But I’m not pretending to articulate a moral theory,” I reply. “I’m merely describing what I do. I mean, I can gesture toward moral theories and ideas that capture more of my conscience’s judgments than others, like liberalism, the Enlightenment, the Golden Rule, or utilitarianism. But if a rule ever appears to disagree with the verdict of my conscience—if someone says, oh, you like utilitarianism, so you must value the lives of these trillion amoebas above this one human child’s, even torture and kill the child to save the amoebas—I will always go with my conscience and damn the rule.”

“So the meaning of goodness is just ‘whatever seems good to you’?” asks the henchman, between swings of his nunchuk. “Do you not see how tautological your criterion is, how worthless?”

“It might be tautological, but I find it far from worthless!” I offer. “If nothing else, my Oracle lets me assess the morality of people, philosophies, institutions, and movements, by simply asking to what extent their words and deeds seem guided by the same Oracle, or one that’s close enough! And if I find a cluster of millions of people whose consciences agree with mine and each others’ in 95% of cases, then I can point to that cluster, and say, here. This cluster’s collective moral judgment is close to what I mean by goodness. Which is probably the best we can do with countless questions of philosophy.”

“Just like, in the famous Wittgenstein riff, we define ‘game’ not by giving an if-and-only-if, but by starting with poker, basketball, Monopoly, and other paradigm-cases and then counting things as ‘games’ to whatever extent they’re similar—so too we can define ‘morality’ by starting with a cluster of Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, MLK, Vasily Arkhipov, Alan Turing, Katalin Karikó, those who hid Jews during the Holocaust, those who sit in Chinese or Russian or Iranian or Venezuelan torture-prisons for advocating democracy, etc, and then working outward from those paradigm-cases, and whenever in doubt, by seeking reflective equilibrium between that cluster and our own consciences. At any rate, that’s what I do, and it’s what I’ll continue doing even if half the world sneers at me for it, because I don’t know a better approach.”

Applications to the AI alignment problem are left as exercises for the reader.

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Announcement: I’m currently on my way to Seattle, to speak in the CS department at the University of Washington—a place that I love but haven’t visited, I don’t think, since 2011 (!). If you’re around, come say hi. Meanwhile, feel free to karate-chop this post all you want in the comment section, but I’ll probably be slow in replying!

I woke up yesterday morning happy and relieved that the Venezuelan people were finally free of their brutal dictator.

I ended the day angry and depressed that Trump, as it turns out, does not seek to turn over Venezuela to María Corina Machado and her inspiring democracy movement—the pro-Western, Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning, slam-dunk obvious, already electorally-confirmed choice of the Venezuelan people—but instead seeks to cut a deal with the remnants of Maduro’s regime to run Venezuela as a US-controlled petrostate.

I confess that I have trouble understanding people who don’t have either of these two reactions.

On one side of me, of course, are the sneering MAGA bullies who declare that might makes right, that the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must, and that the US should rule Venezuela for the same reason why Russia should rule Ukraine and China should rule Taiwan: namely, because the small countries have the misfortune of being in the large ones’ “spheres of influence.”

But on my other side are those who squeal that toppling a dictator, however odious, is against the rules, because right is whatever “international law” declares it to be—i.e., the “international law” that’s now been degraded by ideologues to the point of meaninglessness, the “international law” that typically sides with whichever terrorists and murderers have the floor of the UN General Assembly and that condemns persecuted minorities for defending themselves.

The trouble is, any given framework of law needs to do at least one of three things to impose its will on me:

1. Compel my obedience, by credibly threatening punishment if I defy it.
2. Win the assent of my conscience, by the force of its moral example.
3. Buy my consent through reciprocity: if this framework will defend my family from being murdered, I therefore ought to defend it.

But “international law,” as it exists today, fails spectacularly on all three of these counts. Ergo, as far as I’m concerned, it can take a long walk off a short pier.

Against these two attempted reductions of right to something that it isn’t, I simply say:

Right is right. Good is good. Evil is evil. Good is liberal democracy and the Enlightenment. Evil is authoritarianism and liars and bullies.

Good, in this case, is Maria Machado and the Venezuelans who went to prison, who took to the streets, who monitored every polling station to prove Edmundo González’s victory. Evil is those who oppose them.

But who gets to decide what’s good and what’s evil? Well, if you’re here asking me, then I decide.

But don’t the evildoers believe themselves to be good? Yes, but they’re wrong.

It’s crucial that I’m not appealing here to anything exotic or esoteric. I’m appealing only to the concepts of good and evil that I suspect every reader of this blog had as a child, that they got from fables and Disney movies and Saturday morning cartoons and the like, before some of them went to college and learned that those concepts were naïve and simplistic and only for stupid people.

Look: I regularly appear, to my amusement and chagrin, in Internet lists of the smartest people on earth, alongside Terry Tao and Garry Kasparov and Ed Witten. I did publish my first paper at 15, and finished my PhD in theoretical computer science at 22, and became an MIT professor soon afterward, yada yada.

And for whatever it’s worth, I’m telling you that I think the “naïve, simplistic” concepts of good and evil of post-WWII liberal democracy were fine all along, and not only for stupid people. In my humble opinion. Of course those concepts can be improved upon—indeed, criticism and improvement and self-correction are crucial parts of them—but they’re infinitely better than the realistic alternatives on offer from left and right, including kleptocracy, authoritarianism, and what we’re now calling “the warmth of collectivism.”

And according to these concepts, María Machado and the other Venezuelans who stand with her for democracy are good, if anything is good. Trump, despite all the evil in his heart and in his past, will do something profoundly good if he reverses himself and lets those Venezuelans have what they’ve fought for. He’ll do evil if he doesn’t.

Happy New Year, everyone. May goodness reign over the earth.

Merry Christmas, everyone! Ho³!

Here’s my beloved daughter baking chocolate chip cookies, which she’ll deliver tomorrow morning with our synagogue to firemen, EMTs, and others who need to work on Christmas Day. My role was limited to taste-testing.

While (I hope you’re sitting down for this) the Aaronson-Moshkovitzes are more of a latke/dreidel family, I grew up surrounded by Christmas and am a lifelong enjoyer of the decorations, the songs and movies (well, some of them), the message of universal goodwill, and even gingerbread and fruitcake.

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Therefore, as a Christmas gift to my readers, I hereby present what I now regard as one of the great serendipitous “discoveries” in my career, alongside students like Paul Christiano and Ewin Tang who later became superstars.

Ever since I was a pimply teen, I dreamed of becoming the prophet who’d finally bring the glories of theoretical computer science to the masses—who’d do for that systematically under-sung field what Martin Gardner did for math, Carl Sagan for astronomy, Richard Dawkins for evolutionary biology, Douglas Hofstadter for consciousness and Gödel. Now, with my life half over, I’ve done … well, some in that direction, but vastly less than I’d dreamed.

A month ago, I learned that maybe I can rest easier. For a young man named Aaron Gostein is doing the work I wish I’d done—and he’s doing it using tools I don’t have, and so brilliantly that I could barely improve a pixel.

Aaron recently graduated from Carnegie Mellon, majoring in CS. He’s now moved back to Austin, TX, where he grew up, and where of course I now live as well. (Before anyone confuses our names: mine is Scott Aaronson, even though I’ve gotten hundreds of emails over the years calling me “Aaron.”)

Anyway, here in Austin, Aaron is producing a YouTube channel called PurpleMind. In starting this channel, Aaron was directly inspired by Grant Sanderson’s 3Blue1Brown—a math YouTube channel that I’ve also praised to the skies on this blog—but Aaron has chosen to focus on theoretical computer science.

I first encountered Aaron a month ago, when he emailed asking to interview me about … which topic will it be this time, quantum computing and Bitcoin? quantum computing and AI? AI and watermarking? no, diagonalization as a unifying idea in mathematical logic. That got my attention.

So Aaron came to my office and we talked for 45 minutes. I didn’t expect much to come of it, but then Aaron quickly put out this video, in which I have a few unimportant cameos:

After I watched this, I brought Dana and the kids and even my parents to watch it too. The kids, whose attention spans normally leave much to be desired, were sufficiently engaged that they made me pause every 15 seconds to ask questions (“what would go wrong if you diagonalized a list of all whole numbers, where we know there are only ℵ₀ of them?” “aren’t there other strategies that would work just as well as going down the diagonal?”).

Seeing this, I sat the kids down to watch more PurpleMind. Here’s the video on the P versus NP problem:

Here’s one on the famous Karatsuba algorithm, which reduced the number of steps needed to multiply two n-digit numbers from ~n² to only ~n^1.585, and thereby helped inaugurate the entire field of algorithms:

Here’s one on RSA encryption:

Here’s one on how computers quickly generate the huge random prime numbers that RSA and other modern encryption methods need:

These are the only ones we’ve watched so far. Each one strikes me as close to perfection. There are many others (for example, on Diffie-Hellman encryption, the Bernstein-Vazirani quantum algorithm, and calculating pi) that I’m guessing will be equally superb.

In my view, what makes these videos so good is their concreteness, achieved without loss of correctness. When, for example, Aaron talks about Gödel mailing a letter to the dying von Neumann posing what we now know as P vs. NP, or any other historical event, he always shows you an animated reconstruction. When he talks about an algorithm, he always shows you his own Python code, and what happened when he ran the code, and then he invites you to experiment with it too.

I might even say that the results singlehandedly justify the existence of YouTube, as the ten righteous men would’ve saved Sodom—with every crystal-clear animation of a CS concept canceling out a thousand unboxing videos or screamingly-narrated Minecraft play-throughs in the eyes of God.

Strangely, the comments below Aaron’s YouTube videos attack him relentlessly for his use of AI to help generate the animations. To me, it seems clear that AI is the only thing that could let one person, with no production budget to speak of, create animations of this quality and quantity. If people want so badly for the artwork to be 100% human-generated, let them volunteer to create it themselves.

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Even as I admire the PurpleMind videos, or the 3Blue1Brown videos before them, a small part of me feels melancholic. From now until death, I expect that I’ll have only the same pedagogical tools that I acquired as a young’un: talking; waving my arms around; quizzing the audience; opening the floor to Q&A; cracking jokes; drawing crude diagrams on a blackboard or whiteboard until the chalk or the markers give out; typing English or LaTeX; the occasional PowerPoint graphic that might (if I’m feeling ambitious) fade in and out or fly across the screen.

Today there are vastly better tools, both human and AI, that make it feasible to create spectacular animations for each and every mathematical concept, as if transferring the imagery directly from mind to mind. In the hands of a master explainer like Grant Sanderson or Aaron Gostein, these tools are tractors to my ox-drawn plow. I’ll be unable to compete in the long term.

But then I reflect that at least I can help this new generation of math and CS popularizers, by continuing to feed them raw material. I can do cameos in their YouTube productions. Or if nothing else, I can bring their jewels to my community’s attention, as I’m doing right now.

Peace on Earth, and to all a good night.