Shtetl-Optimized

As the world marked the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, I have to confess … no, no, not that I was in on the plot.  I wasn’t even born then, silly.  I have to confess that, in between struggling to make a paper deadline, attending a workshop in Princeton, celebrating Thanksgivukkah, teaching Lily how to pat her head and clap her hands, and not blogging, I also started dipping, for the first time in my life, into a tiny fraction of the vast literature about the JFK assassination.  The trigger (so to speak) for me was this article by David Talbot, the founder of Salon.com.  I figured, if the founder of Salon is a JFK conspiracy buff—if, for crying out loud, my skeptical heroes Bertrand Russell and Carl Sagan were both JFK conspiracy buffs—then maybe it’s at least worth familiarizing myself with the basic facts and arguments.

So, what happened when I did?  Were the scales peeled from my eyes?

In a sense, yes, they were.  Given how much has been written about this subject, and how many intelligent people take seriously the possibility of a conspiracy, I was shocked by how compelling I found the evidence to be that there were exactly three shots, all fired by Lee Harvey Oswald with a Carcano rifle from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, just as the Warren Commission said in 1964.  And as for Oswald’s motives, I think I understand them as well and as poorly as I understand the motives of the people who send me ramblings every week about P vs. NP and the secrets of the universe.

Before I started reading, if someone forced me to guess, maybe I would’ve assigned a ~10% probability to some sort of conspiracy.  Now, though, I’d place the JFK conspiracy hypothesis firmly in Moon-landings-were-faked, Twin-Towers-collapsed-from-the-inside territory.  Or to put it differently, “Oswald as lone, crazed assassin” has been added to my large class of “sanity-complete” propositions: propositions defined by the property that if I doubt any one of them, then there’s scarcely any part of the historical record that I shouldn’t doubt.  (And while one can’t exclude the possibility that Oswald confided in someone else before the act—his wife or a friend, for example—and that other person kept it a secret for 50 years, what’s known about Oswald strongly suggests that he didn’t.)

So, what convinced me?  In this post, I’ll give twenty reasons for believing that Oswald acted alone.  Notably, my reasons will have less to do with the minutiae of bullet angles and autopsy reports, than with general principles for deciding what’s true and what isn’t.  Of course, part of the reason for this focus is that the minutiae are debated in unbelievable detail elsewhere, and I have nothing further to contribute to those debates.  But another reason is that I’m skeptical that anyone actually comes to believe the JFK conspiracy hypothesis because they don’t see how the second bullet came in at the appropriate angle to pass through JFK’s neck and shoulder and then hit Governor Connally.  Clear up some technical point (or ten or fifty of them)—as has been done over and over—and the believers will simply claim that the data you used was altered by the CIA, or they’ll switch to other “anomalies” without batting an eye.  Instead, people start with certain general beliefs about how the world works, “who’s really in charge,” what sorts of explanations to look for, etc., and then use their general beliefs to decide which claims to accept about JFK’s head wounds or the foliage in Dealey Plaza—not vice versa.  That being so, one might as well just discuss the general beliefs from the outset.  So without further ado, here are my twenty reasons:

1. Conspiracy theorizing represents a known bug in the human nervous system.  Given that, I think our prior should be overwhelmingly against anything that even looks like a conspiracy theory.  (This is not to say conspiracies never happen.  Of course they do: Watergate, the Tobacco Institute, and the Nazi Final Solution were three well-known examples.  But the difference between conspiracy theorists’ fantasies and actual known conspiracies is this: in a conspiracy theory, some powerful organization’s public face hides a dark and terrible secret; its true mission is the opposite of its stated one.  By contrast, in every real conspiracy I can think of, the facade was already 90% as terrible as the reality!  And the “dark secret” was that the organization was doing precisely what you’d expect it to do, if its members genuinely held the beliefs that they claimed to hold.)

2. The shooting of Oswald by Jack Ruby created the perfect conditions for conspiracy theorizing to fester.  Conditioned on that happening, it would be astonishing if a conspiracy industry hadn’t arisen, with its hundreds of books and labyrinthine arguments, even under the assumption that Oswald and Ruby both really acted alone.

3. Other high-profile assassinations to which we might compare this one—for example, those of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, RFK, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Yitzchak Rabin…—appear to have been the work of “lone nuts,” or at most “conspiracies” of small numbers of lowlifes.  So why not this one?

4. Oswald seems to have perfectly fit the profile of a psychopathic killer (see, for example, Case Closed by Gerald Posner).  From very early in his life, Oswald exhibited grandiosity, resentment, lack of remorse, doctrinaire ideological fixations, and obsession with how he’d be remembered by history.

5. A half-century of investigation has failed to link any individual besides Oswald to the crime.  Conspiracy theorists love to throw around large, complicated entities like the CIA or the Mafia as potential “conspirators”—but in the rare cases when they’ve tried to go further, and implicate an actual human being other than Oswald or Ruby (or distant power figures like LBJ), the results have been pathetic and tragic.

6. Oswald had previously tried to assassinate General Walker—a fact that was confirmed by his widow Marina Oswald, but that, incredibly, is barely even discussed in the reams of conspiracy literature.

7. There’s clear evidence that Oswald murdered Officer Tippit an hour after shooting JFK—a fact that seems perfectly consistent with the state of mind of someone who’d just murdered the President, but that, again, seems to get remarkably little discussion in the conspiracy literature.

8. Besides being a violent nut, Oswald was also a known pathological liar.  He lied on his employment applications, he lied about having established a thriving New Orleans branch of Fair Play for Cuba, he lied and lied and lied.  Because of this tendency—as well as his persecution complex—Oswald’s loud protestations after his arrest that he was just a “patsy” count for almost nothing.

9. According to police accounts, Oswald acted snide and proud of himself after being taken into custody: for example, when asked whether he had killed the President, he replied “you find out for yourself.”  He certainly didn’t act like an innocent “patsy” arrested on such a grave charge would plausibly act.

10. Almost all JFK conspiracy theories must be false, simply because they’re mutually inconsistent.  Once you realize that, and start judging the competing conspiracy theories by the standards you’d have to judge them by if at most one could be true, enlightenment may dawn as you find there’s nothing in the way of just rejecting all of them.  (Of course, some people have gone through an analogous process with religions.)

11. The case for Oswald as lone assassin seems to become stronger, the more you focus on the physical evidence and stuff that happened right around the time and place of the event.  To an astonishing degree, the case for a conspiracy seems to rely on verbal testimony years or decades afterward—often by people who are known confabulators, who were nowhere near Dealey Plaza at the time, who have financial or revenge reasons to invent stories, and who “remembered” seeing Oswald and Ruby with CIA agents, etc. only under drugs or hypnosis.  This is precisely the pattern we would expect if conspiracy theorizing reflected the reality of the human nervous system rather than the reality of the assassination.

12. If the conspiracy is so powerful, why didn’t it do something more impressive than just assassinate JFK? Why didn’t it rig the election to prevent JFK from becoming President in the first place?  (In math, very often the way you discover a bug in your argument is by realizing that the argument gives you more than you originally intended—vastly, implausibly more.  Yet every pro-conspiracy argument I’ve read seems to suffer from the same problem.  For example, after successfully killing JFK, did the conspiracy simply disband?  Or did it go on to mastermind other assassinations?  If it didn’t, why not?  Isn’t pulling the puppet-strings of the world sort of an ongoing proposition?  What, if any, are the limits to this conspiracy’s power?)

13. Pretty much all the conspiracy writers I encountered exude total, 100% confidence, not only in the existence of additional shooters, but in the guilt of their favored villains (they might profess ignorance, but then in the very next sentence they’d talk about how JFK’s murder was “a triumph for the national security establishment”).  For me, their confidence had the effect of weakening my own confidence in their intellectual honesty, and in any aspects of their arguments that I had to take on faith.  The conspiracy camp would of course reply that the “Oswald acted alone” camp also exudes too much confidence in its position.  But the two cases are not symmetric: for one thing, because there are so many different conspiracy theories, but only one Oswald.  If I were a conspiracy believer I’d be racked with doubts, if nothing else then about whether my conspiracy was the right one.

14. Every conspiracy theory I’ve encountered seems to require “uncontrolled growth” in size and complexity: that is, the numbers of additional shooters, alterations of medical records, murders of inconvenient witnesses, coverups, coverups of the coverups, etc. that need to be postulated all seem to multiply without bound.  To some conspiracy believers, this uncontrolled growth might actually be a feature: the more nefarious and far-reaching the conspiracy’s tentacles, the better.  It should go without saying that I regard it as a bug.

15. JFK was not a liberal Messiah.  He moved slowly on civil rights for fear of a conservative backlash, invested heavily in building nukes, signed off on the botched plans to kill Fidel Castro, and helped lay the groundwork for the US’s later involvement in Vietnam.  Yes, it’s possible that he would’ve made wiser decisions about Vietnam than LBJ ended up making; that’s part of what makes his assassination (like RFK’s later assassination) a tragedy.  But many conspiracy theorists’ view of JFK as an implacable enemy of the military-industrial complex is preposterous.

16. By the same token, LBJ was not exactly a right-wing conspirator’s dream candidate.  He was, if anything, more aggressive on poverty and civil rights than JFK was.  And even if he did end up being better for certain military contractors, that’s not something that would’ve been easy to predict in 1963, when the US’s involvement in Vietnam had barely started.

17. Lots of politically-powerful figures have gone on the record as believers in a conspiracy, including John Kerry, numerous members of Congress, and even frequently-accused conspirator LBJ himself.  Some people would say that this lends credibility to the conspiracy cause.  To me, however, it indicates just the opposite: that there’s no secret cabal running the world, and that those in power are just as prone to bugs in the human nervous system as anyone else is.

18. As far as I can tell, the conspiracy theorists are absolutely correct that JFK’s security in Dallas was unbelievably poor; that the Warren Commission was as interested in reassuring the nation and preventing a war with the USSR or Cuba as it was in reaching the truth (the fact that it did reach the truth is almost incidental); and that agencies like the CIA and FBI kept records related to the assassination classified for way longer than there was any legitimate reason to (though note that most records finally were declassified in the 1990s, and they provided zero evidence for any conspiracy).  As you might guess, I ascribe all of these things to bureaucratic incompetence rather than to conspiratorial ultra-competence.  But once again, these government screwups help us understand how so many intelligent people could come to believe in a conspiracy even in the total absence of one.

19. In the context of the time, the belief that JFK was killed by a conspiracy filled a particular need: namely, the need to believe that the confusing, turbulent events of the 1960s had an understandable guiding motive behind them, and that a great man like JFK could only be brought down by an equally-great evil, rather than by a chronically-unemployed loser who happened to see on a map that JFK’s motorcade would be passing by his workplace.  Ironically, I think that Roger Ebert got it exactly right when he praised Oliver Stone’s JFK movie for its “emotional truth.”  In much the same way, one could say that Birth of a Nation was “emotionally true” for Southern racists, or that Ben Stein’s Expelled was “emotionally true” for creationists.  Again, I’d say that the “emotional truth” of the conspiracy hypothesis is further evidence for its factual falsehood: for it explains how so many people could come to believe in a conspiracy even if the evidence for one were dirt-poor.

20. At its core, every conspiracy argument seems to be built out of “holes”: “the details that don’t add up in the official account,” “the questions that haven’t been answered,” etc.  What I’ve never found is a truly coherent alternative scenario: just one “hole” after another.  This pattern is the single most important red flag for me, because it suggests that the JFK conspiracy theorists view themselves as basically defense attorneys: people who only need to sow enough doubts, rather than establish the reality of what happened.  Crucially, creationism, 9/11 trutherism, and every other elaborate-yet-totally-wrong intellectual edifice I’ve ever encountered has operated on precisely the same “defense attorney principle”: “if we can just raise enough doubts about the other side’s case, we win!”  But that’s a terrible approach to knowledge, once you’ve seen firsthand how a skilled arguer can raise unlimited doubts even about the nonexistence of a monster under your bed.  Such arguers are hoping, of course, that you’ll find their monster hypothesis so much more fun, exciting, and ironically comforting than the “random sounds in the night hypothesis,” that it won’t even occur to you to demand they show you their monster.

Further reading: this article in Slate.

Follow

Update (Oct. 3): OK, a sixth announcement.  I just posted a question on CS Theory StackExchange, entitled Overarching reasons why problems are in P or BPP.  If you have suggested additions or improvements to my rough list of “overarching reasons,” please post them over there — thanks!

1. I’m in Oxford right now, for a Clay Institute workshop on New Insights into Computational Intractability.  The workshop is concurrent with three others, including one on Number Theory and Physics that includes an amplituhedron-related talk by Andrew Hodges.  (Speaking of which, see here for a small but non-parodic observation about expressing amplitudes as volumes of polytopes.)

2. I was hoping to stay in the UK one more week, to attend the Newton Institute’s special semester on Mathematical Challenges in Quantum Information over in Cambridge.  But alas I had to cancel, since my diaper-changing services are needed in the other Cambridge.  So, if anyone in Cambridge (or anywhere else in the United Kingdom) really wants to talk to me, come to Oxford this week!

3. Back in June, Jens Eisert and three others posted a preprint claiming that the output of a BosonSampling device would be “indistinguishable from the uniform distribution” in various senses.  Ever since then, people have emailing me, leaving comments on this blog, and cornering me at conferences to ask whether Alex Arkhipov and I had any response to these claims.  OK, so just this weekend, we posted our own 41-page preprint, entitled “BosonSampling Is Far From Uniform.”  I hope it suffices by way of reply!  (Incidentally, this is also the paper I hinted at in a previous post: the one where π²/6 and the Euler-Mascheroni constant make cameo appearances.)  To clarify, if we just wanted to answer the claims of the Eisert group, then I think a couple paragraphs would suffice for that (see, for example, these PowerPoint slides).  In our new paper, however, Alex and I take the opportunity to go further: we study lots of interesting questions about the statistical properties of Haar-random BosonSampling distributions, and about how one might test efficiently whether a claimed BosonSampling device worked, even with hundreds or thousands of photons.

4. Also on the arXiv last night, there was a phenomenal survey about the quantum PCP conjecture by Dorit Aharonov, Itai Arad, and my former postdoc Thomas Vidick (soon to be a professor at Caltech).  I recommend reading it in the strongest possible terms, if you’d like to see how far people have come with this problem (but also, how far they still have to go) since my “Quantum PCP Manifesto” seven years ago.

5. Christos Papadimitriou asked me to publicize that the deadline for early registration and hotel reservations for the upcoming FOCS in Berkeley is fast approaching!  Indeed, it’s October 4 (three days from now).  See here for details, and here for information about student travel support.  (The links were down when I just tried them, but hopefully the server will be back up soon.)

Follow

Update (Sept. 9): Reading more about these things, and talking to friends who are experts in applied cryptography, has caused me to do the unthinkable, and change my mind somewhat.  I now feel that, while the views expressed in this post were OK as far as they went, they failed to do justice to the … complexity (har, har) of what’s at stake.  Most importantly, I didn’t clearly explain that there’s an enormous continuum between, on the one hand, a full break of RSA or Diffie-Hellman (which still seems extremely unlikely to me), and on the other, “pure side-channel attacks” involving no new cryptanalytic ideas.  Along that continuum, there are many plausible places where the NSA might be.  For example, imagine that they had a combination of side-channel attacks, novel algorithmic advances, and sheer computing power that enabled them to factor, let’s say, ten 2048-bit RSA keys every year.  In such a case, it would still make perfect sense that they’d want to insert backdoors into software, sneak vulnerabilities into the standards, and do whatever else it took to minimize their need to resort to such expensive attacks.  But the possibility of number-theoretic advances well beyond what the open world knows certainly wouldn’t be ruled out.  Also, as Schneier has emphasized, the fact that NSA has been aggressively pushing elliptic-curve cryptography in recent years invites the obvious speculation that they know something about ECC that the rest of us don’t.

And that brings me to a final irony in this story.  When a simpleminded complexity theorist like me hears his crypto friends going on and on about the latest clever attack that still requires exponential time, but that puts some of the keys in current use just within reach of gigantic computing clusters, his first instinct is to pound the table and shout: “well then, so why not just increase all your key sizes by a factor of ten?  Sweet Jesus, the asymptotics are on your side!  if you saw a killer attack dog on a leash, would you position yourself just outside what you guesstimated to be the leash’s radius?  why not walk a mile away, if you can?”  The crypto experts invariably reply that it’s a lot more complicated than I realize, because standards, and efficiency, and smartphones … and before long I give up and admit that I’m way out of my depth.

So it’s amusing that one obvious response to the recent NSA revelations—a response that sufficiently-paranoid people, organizations, and governments might well actually take, in practice—precisely matches the naïve complexity-theorist intuition.  Just increase the damn key sizes by a factor of ten (or whatever).

Another Update (Sept. 20): In my original posting, I should also have linked to Matthew Green’s excellent post.  My bad.

Last week, I got an email from a journalist with the following inquiry.  The recent Snowden revelations, which made public for the first time the US government’s “black budget,” contained the following enigmatic line from the Director of National Intelligence: “We are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet traffic.”  So, the journalist wanted to know, what could these “groundbreaking” capabilities be?  And in particular, was it possible that the NSA was buying quantum computers from D-Wave, and using them to run Shor’s algorithm to break the RSA cryptosystem?

I replied that, yes, that’s “possible,” but only in the same sense that it’s “possible” that the NSA is using the Easter Bunny for the same purpose.  (For one thing, D-Wave themselves have said repeatedly that they have no interest in Shor’s algorithm or factoring.  Admittedly, I guess that’s what D-Wave would say, were they making deals with NSA on the sly!  But it’s also what the Easter Bunny would say.)  More generally, I said that if the open scientific world’s understanding is anywhere close to correct, then quantum computing might someday become a practical threat to cryptographic security, but it isn’t one yet.

That, of course, raised the extremely interesting question of what “groundbreaking capabilities” the Director of National Intelligence was referring to.  I said my personal guess was that, with ~99% probability, he meant various implementation vulnerabilities and side-channel attacks—the sort of thing that we know has compromised deployed cryptosystems many times in the past, but where it’s very easy to believe that the NSA is ahead of the open world.  With ~1% probability, I guessed, the NSA made some sort of big improvement in classical algorithms for factoring, discrete log, or other number-theoretic problems.  (I would’ve guessed even less than 1% probability for the latter, before the recent breakthrough by Joux solving discrete log in fields of small characteristic in quasipolynomial time.)

Then, on Thursday, a big New York Times article appeared, based on 50,000 or so documents that Snowden leaked to the Guardian and that still aren’t public.  (See also an important Guardian piece by security expert Bruce Schneier, and accompanying Q&A.)  While a lot remains vague, there might be more public information right now about current NSA cryptanalytic capabilities than there’s ever been.

So, how did my uninformed, armchair guesses fare?  It’s only halfway into the NYT article that we start getting some hints:

The files show that the agency is still stymied by some encryption, as Mr. Snowden suggested in a question-and-answer session on The Guardian’s Web site in June.

“Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on,” he said, though cautioning that the N.S.A. often bypasses the encryption altogether by targeting the computers at one end or the other and grabbing text before it is encrypted or after it is decrypted…

Because strong encryption can be so effective, classified N.S.A. documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with Internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware…

Simultaneously, the N.S.A. has been deliberately weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers. One goal in the agency’s 2013 budget request was to “influence policies, standards and specifications for commercial public key technologies,” the most common encryption method.

Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members.

Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”

So, in pointing to implementation vulnerabilities as the most likely possibility for an NSA “breakthrough,” I might have actually erred a bit too far on the side of technological interestingness.  It seems that a large part of what the NSA has been doing has simply been strong-arming Internet companies and standards bodies into giving it backdoors.  To put it bluntly: sure, if it wants to, the NSA can probably read your email.  But that isn’t mathematical cryptography’s fault—any more than it would be mathematical crypto’s fault if goons broke into your house and carted away your laptop.  On the contrary, properly-implemented, backdoor-less strong crypto is something that apparently scares the NSA enough that they go to some lengths to keep it from being widely used.

I should add that, regardless of how NSA collects all the private information it does—by “beating crypto in a fair fight” (!) or, more likely, by exploiting backdoors that it itself installed—the mere fact that it collects so much is of course unsettling enough from a civil-liberties perspective.  So I’m glad that the Snowden revelations have sparked a public debate in the US about how much surveillance we as a society want (i.e., “the balance between preventing 9/11 and preventing Orwell”), what safeguards are in place to prevent abuses, and whether those safeguards actually work.  Such a public debate is essential if we’re serious about calling ourselves a democracy.

At the same time, to me, perhaps the most shocking feature of the Snowden revelations is just how unshocking they’ve been.  So far, I haven’t seen anything that shows the extent of NSA’s surveillance to be greater than what I would’ve considered plausible a priori.  Indeed, the following could serve as a one-sentence summary of what we’ve learned from Snowden:

Yes, the NSA is, in fact, doing the questionable things that anyone not living in a cave had long assumed they were doing—that assumption being so ingrained in nerd culture that countless jokes are based around it.

(Come to think of it, people living in caves might have been even more certain that the NSA was doing those things.  Maybe that’s why they moved to caves.)

So, rather than dwelling on civil liberties, national security, yadda yadda yadda, let me move on to discuss the implications of the Snowden revelations for something that really matters: a 6-year-old storm in theoretical computer science’s academic teacup.  As many readers of this blog might know, Neal Koblitz—a respected mathematician and pioneer of elliptic curve cryptography, who (from numerous allusions in his writings) appears to have some connections at the NSA (on reflection, this is unfair to Koblitz; he does report conversations with NSA people in his writings, but has never had any financial connection with NSA)—published a series of scathing articles, in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society and elsewhere, attacking the theoretical computer science approach to cryptography.  Koblitz’s criticisms were varied and entertainingly-expressed: the computer scientists are too sloppy, deadline-driven, self-promoting, and corporate-influenced; overly trusting of so-called “security proofs” (a term they shouldn’t even use, given how many errors and exaggerated claims they make); absurdly overreliant on asymptotic analysis; “bodacious” in introducing dubious new hardness assumptions that they then declare to be “standard”; and woefully out of touch with cryptographic realities.  Koblitz seemed to suggest that, rather than demanding the security reductions so beloved by theoretical computer scientists, people would do better to rest the security of their cryptosystems on two alternative pillars: first, standards set by organizations like the NSA with actual real-world experience; and second, the judgments of mathematicians with … taste and experience, who can just see what’s likely to be vulnerable and what isn’t.

Back in 2007, my mathematician friend Greg Kuperberg pointed out the irony to me: here we had a mathematician, lambasting computer scientists for trying to do for cryptography what mathematics itself has sought to do for everything since Euclid!  That is, when you see an unruly mess of insights, related to each other in some tangled way, systematize and organize it.  Turn the tangle into a hierarchical tree (or dag).  Isolate the minimal assumptions (one-way functions?  decisional Diffie-Hellman?) on which each conclusion can be based, and spell out all the logical steps needed to get from here to there—even if the steps seem obvious or boring.  Any time anyone has tried to do that, it’s been easy for the natives of the unruly wilderness to laugh at the systematizing newcomers: the latter often know the terrain less well, and take ten times as long to reach conclusions that are ten times less interesting.  And yet, in case after case, the clarity and rigor of the systematizing approach has eventually won out.  So it seems weird for a mathematician, of all people, to bet against the systematizing approach when applied to cryptography.

The reason I’m dredging up this old dispute now, is that I think the recent NSA revelations might put it in a slightly new light.  In his article—whose main purpose is to offer practical advice on how to safeguard one’s communications against eavesdropping by NSA or others—Bruce Schneier offers the following tip:

Prefer conventional discrete-log-based systems over elliptic-curve systems; the latter have constants that the NSA influences when they can.

Here Schneier is pointing out a specific issue with ECC, which would be solved if we could “merely” ensure that NSA or other interested parties weren’t providing input into which elliptic curves to use.  But I think there’s also a broader issue: that, in cryptography, it’s unwise to trust any standard because of the prestige, real-world experience, mathematical good taste, or whatever else of the people or organizations proposing it.  What was long a plausible conjecture—that the NSA covertly influences cryptographic standards to give itself backdoors, and that otherwise-inexplicable vulnerabilities in deployed cryptosystems are sometimes there because the NSA wanted them there—now looks close to an established fact.  In cryptography, then, it’s not just for idle academic reasons that you’d like a publicly-available trail of research papers and source code, open to criticism and improvement by anyone, that takes you all the way from the presumed hardness of an underlying mathematical problem to the security of your system under whichever class of attacks is relevant to you.

Schneier’s final piece of advice is this: “Trust the math.  Encryption is your friend.”

“Trust the math.”  On that note, here’s a slightly-embarrassing confession.  When I’m watching a suspense movie (or a TV show like Homeland), and I reach one of those nail-biting scenes where the protagonist discovers that everything she ever believed is a lie, I sometimes mentally recite the proof of the Karp-Lipton Theorem.  It always calms me down.  Even if the entire universe turned out to be a cruel illusion, it would still be the case that NP ⊂ P/poly would collapse the polynomial hierarchy, and I can tell you exactly why.  It would likewise be the case that you couldn’t break the GGM pseudorandom function without also breaking the underlying pseudorandom generator on which it’s based.  Math could be defined as that which can still be trusted, even when you can’t trust anything else.

Follow

Today I experiment with “tweeting”: writing <=140-character announcements, but posting them to my blog.  Like sending lolcat videos by mail

Last week at QCrypt in Waterloo: http://2013.qcrypt.net This week at CQIQC in Toronto: http://tinyurl.com/kfexzv6 Back with Lily in between

While we debate D-Wave, ID Quantique et al. quietly sold ~100 quantum crypto devices. Alas, market will remain small unless RSA compromised

One speaker explained how a photon detector works by showing this YouTube video: http://tinyurl.com/k8x4btx Couldn’t have done better

Luca Trevisan asks me to spread the word about a conference for LGBTs in technology: www.outforundergrad.org/technology

Steven Pinker stands up for the Enlightenment in The New Republic: “Science Is Not Your Enemy” http://tinyurl.com/l26ppaf

Think Pinker was exaggerating?  Read Leon Wieseltier’s defiantly doofusy Brandeis commencement speech: http://tinyurl.com/jwhj8ub

Black-hole firewalls make the New York Times, a week before the firewall workshop at KITP (I’ll be there): http://tinyurl.com/kju9crj

You probably already saw the Schrodinger cat Google doodle: http://tinyurl.com/k8et44p For me, the ket was much cooler than the cat

While working on BosonSampling yesterday, (1/6)pi^2 and Euler-Mascheroni constant made unexpected unappearances.  What I live for

Follow

Update (Sept. 3): When I said that “about 5000 steps” are needed for the evolutionary approach to color an 8×8 chessboard, I was counting as a step any examination of two random adjacent squares—regardless of whether or not you end up having to change one of the colors.  If you count only the changes, then the expected number goes down to about 1000 (which, of course, only makes the point about the power of the evolutionary approach “stronger”).  Thanks very much to Raymond Cuenen for bringing this clarification to my attention.

Last week I appeared on an episode of Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, a show on the Science Channel.  (See also here for a post on Morgan Freeman’s Facebook page.)  The episode is called “Did God Create Evolution?”  The first person interviewed is the Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe.  But not to worry!  After him, they have a parade of scientists who not only agree that Chuck Darwin basically had it right in 1859, but want to argue for that conclusion using ROBOTS!  and MATH!

So, uh, that’s where I come in.  My segment features me (or rather my animated doppelgänger, “SuperScott”) trying to color a chessboard two colors, so that no two neighboring squares are colored the same, using three different approaches: (1) an “intelligent design” approach (which computer scientists would call nondeterminism), (2) a brute-force, exhaustive enumeration approach, and (3) an “evolutionary local search” approach.

[Spoiler alert: SuperScott discovers that the local search approach, while not as efficient as intelligent design, is nevertheless much more efficient than brute-force search.  And thus, he concludes, the arguments of the ID folks to the effect of “I can’t see a cleverer way to do it, therefore it must be either brute-force search or else miraculous nondeterminism” are invalid.]

Since my appearance together with Morgan Freeman on cable TV raises a large number of questions, I’ve decided to field a few of them in the following FAQ.

Q: How can I watch?

Amazon Instant Video has the episode here for $1.99.  (No doubt you can also find it on various filesharing sites, but let it be known that I’d never condone such nefarious activity.)  My segment is roughly from 10:40 until 17:40.

Q: Given that you’re not a biologist, and that your research has basically nothing to do with evolution, why did they ask to interview you?

Apparently they wanted a mathematician or computer scientist who also had some experience spouting about Big Ideas.  So they first asked Greg Chaitin, but Chaitin couldn’t do it and suggested me instead.

Q: Given how little relevant expertise you have, why did you agree to be interviewed?

To be honest, I was extremely conflicted.  I kept saying, “Why don’t you interview a biologist?  Or at least a computational biologist, or someone who studies genetic algorithms?”  They replied that they did have more bio-oriented people on the show, but they also wanted me to provide a “mathematical” perspective.  So, I consulted with friends like Sean Carroll, who’s appeared on Through the Wormhole numerous times.  And after reflection, I decided that I do have a way to explain a central conceptual point about algorithms, complexity, and the amount of time needed for natural selection—a point that, while hardly “novel,” is something that many laypeople might not have seen before and that might interest them.  Also, as an additional argument in favor of appearing, MORGAN FREEMAN!

So I agreed to do it, but only under two conditions:

(1) At least one person with a biology background would also appear on the show, to refute the arguments of intelligent design.
(2) I would talk only about stuff that I actually understood, like the ability of local search algorithms to avoid the need for brute-force search.

I’ll let you judge for yourself to what extent these conditions were fulfilled.

Q: Did you get to meet Morgan Freeman?

Alas, no.  But at least I got to hear him refer repeatedly to “SuperScott” on TV.

Q: What was the shooting like?

Extremely interesting.  I know more now about TV production than I did before!

It was a continuing negotiation: they kept wanting to say that I was “on a quest to mathematically prove evolution” (or something like that), and I kept telling them they weren’t allowed to say that, or anything else that would give the misleading impression that what I was saying was either original or directly related to my research.  I also had a long discussion about the P vs. NP problem, which got cut for lack of time (now P and NP are only shown on the whiteboard).  On the other hand, the crew was extremely accommodating: they really wanted to do a good job and to get things right.

The most amusing tidbit: I knew that local search would take O(n⁴) time to 2-color an nxn chessboard (2-coloring being a special case of 2SAT, to which Schöning’s algorithm applies), but I didn’t know the constant.  So I wrote a program to get the specific number of steps when n=8 (it’s about 5000).  I then repeatedly modified and reran the program during the taping, as we slightly changed what we were talking about.  It was the first coding I’d done in a while.

Q: How much of the segment was your idea, and how much was theirs?

The chessboard was my idea, but the “SuperScott” bit was theirs.  Luddite that I am, I was just going to get down on hands and knees and move apples and oranges around on the chessboard myself.

Also, they wanted me to speak in front of a church in Boston, to make a point about how many people believe that God created the universe.  I nixed that idea and said, why not just do the whole shoot in the Stata Center?  I mean, MIT spent $300 million just to make the building where I work as “visually arresting” as possible—at the expense of navigability, leakage-resilience, and all sorts of other criteria—so why not take advantage of it?  Plus, that way I’ll be able to crack a joke about how Stata actually looks like it was created by that favorite creationist strawman, a tornado passing through a junkyard.

Needless to say, all the stuff with me drawing complexity class inclusion diagrams on the whiteboard, reading my and Alex Arkhipov’s linear-optics paper, walking around outside with an umbrella, lifting the umbrella to face the camera dramatically—that was all just the crew telling me what to do.  (Well, OK, they didn’t tell me what to write on the whiteboard or view on my computer, just that it should be something sciencey.  And the umbrella thing wasn’t planned: it really just happened to be raining that day.)

Q: Don’t you realize that not a word of what you said was new—indeed, that all you did was to translate the logic of natural selection, which Darwin understood in 1859, into algorithms and complexity language?

Yes, of course, and I’m sorry if the show gave anyone the impression otherwise.  I repeatedly begged them not to claim newness or originality for anything I was saying.  On the other hand, one shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming that what’s obvious to nerds who read science blogs is obvious to everyone else: I know for a fact that it isn’t.

Q: Don’t you understand that you can’t “prove” mathematically that evolution by natural selection is really what happened in Nature?

Of course!  You can’t even prove mathematically that bears crap in the woods (unless crapping in the woods were taken as part of the definition of bears).  To the writers’ credit, they did have Morgan Freeman explain that I wasn’t claiming to have “proved” evolution.  Personally, I wish Freeman had gone even further—to say that, at present, we don’t even have mathematical theories that would explain from first principles why 4 billion years is a “reasonable” amount of time for natural selection to have gotten from the primordial soup to humans and other complex life, whereas (say) 40 million years is not a reasonable amount.  One could imagine such theories, but we don’t really have any.  What we do have is (a) the observed fact that evolution did happen in 4 billion years, and (b) the theory of natural selection, which explains in great detail why one’s initial intuition—that such evolution can’t possibly have happened by “blind, chance natural processes” alone—is devoid of force.

Q: Watching yourself presented in such a goony way—scribbling Complicated Math Stuff on a whiteboard, turning dramatically toward the camera, etc. etc.—didn’t you feel silly?

Some of it is silly, no two ways about it!  On the other hand, I feel satisfied that I got across at least one correct and important scientific point to hundreds of thousands of people.  And that, one might argue, is sufficiently worthwhile that it should outweigh any embarrassment about how goofy I look.

Follow

1. As many of you probably know, this week my EECS colleague Hal Abelson released his 180-page report on MIT’s involvement in the Aaron Swartz case.  I read the whole thing, and I recommend it if you have any interest in the case.  My take is that, far from being the “whitewash” that some people described it as, the report (if you delve into it) clearly and eloquently explains how MIT failed to live up to its own standards, even as it formally followed the rules.  The central insight here is that the world expects MIT to behave, not like some other organization would behave if someone hid a laptop in its supply closet to download the whole JSTOR database, insulted and then tried to flee from its security officers when questioned, etc. etc., but rather with perspective and imagination—worrying less about the security of its facilities than about the future of the world.  People expect MIT, of all places, to realize that the sorts of people who pull these sorts of shenanigans in their twenties sometimes become Steve Jobs or Richard Feynman (or for that matter, MIT professor Robert Morris) later in their lives, and therefore to speak up in their defense.  In retrospect, I wish Swartz’s arrest had sparked a debate about the wider issues among MIT’s students, faculty, and staff.  I think it’s likely that such a debate would have led to pressure on the administration to issue a statement in Swartz’s support.  As it was (and as I pointed out in this interview), most people at MIT, even if they’d read about the arrest, weren’t even aware of the issue’s continued existence, let alone of MIT’s continued role in it, until after Swartz had already committed suicide.  For the MIT community—which includes some prominent supporters of open access—to have played such a passive role is one of the many tragedies that’s obvious with hindsight.

2. Shafi Goldwasser has asked me to announce that the fifth Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS) conference will be held in Princeton, a town technically in New Jersey, on January 12-14, 2014.  Here’s the conference website; if you want to submit a paper, the deadline is coming up soon, on Thursday, August 22.

3. As the summer winds to a close, I’m proud to announce my main goals for the upcoming academic year.  Those goals are the following:

(a) Take care of Lily.

(b) Finish writing up old papers.

It feels liberating to have no higher aspirations for an entire year—and for the aspirations I have to seem so modest and so achievable.  On the other hand, it will be all the more embarrassing if I fail to achieve even these goals.

Follow

A reader calling him- or herself “A Merry Clown” left a comment on my previous post which was so wise, I decided it had to be promoted to a post of its own.

Scientific discourse is the art of juggling decorum, truth and humor. A high-wire feat, attempted under imposing shadows cast by giants and above the distraction of merry dancing clowns.

The “appropriate” tone for scientific discourse seems to be:
(a) Cordial. Always credit others for their hard work and good intentions (allow or at least pretend that others are basically well-intentioned, except in rare situations where there is proof of egregious misconduct).
(b) Biting, merciless and hard-nosed on the substantive issues. The truth deserves no less.

Perhaps the harsher (b) is, the gentler and more thorough (a) should be. After-all, human beings are what they are.

Certainly, provided one adequately treads through the niceties in (a), there’s no reason to worry about hurting anyone’s feelings in (b). Anyone who makes scientific claims in a professional or public arena should be prepared to put on their big boy pants or their big girl pants and have their claims face the brutal gauntlet of scientific scrutiny. All attempts should be made to avoid even the appearance that any part of (b) contains personal barbs or insults (unless these barbs happen to be to be hilarious.)

Outside of science the rule is: whoever flings the horseshit the hardest wins.

Essentially, what Shtetl-Optimized readers got to see this past week was me falling off the high wire (with tenure the safety net below? ).  I failed at a purely human level—though admittedly, while attempting a particularly difficult tightrope walk, and while heavily distracted by the taunts of both giants and clowns.  I’ve already apologized to Cathy McGeoch for insulting her, but I reiterate my apology now, and I extend the apology to any colleagues at MIT who might have been offended by anything I said.  I’ll strive, in future posts, to live up to a higher standard of cordiality, composure, and self-control.

At the scientific level—i.e., at level (b)—I stand by everything I wrote in the previous post and the comments therein.

Follow

Update (5/7): Enough!  Thanks, everyone, for asking so many imaginative questions, and please accept my apologies if yours remains unaddressed.  (It’s nothing personal: they simply came fast and furious, way faster than I could handle in an online fashion—so I gave up on chronological order and simply wrote answers in whatever order they popped into my head.)  At this point, I’m no longer accepting any new questions.  I’ll try to answer all the remaining questions by tomorrow night.

By popular request, for the next 36 hours—so, from now until ~11PM on Tuesday—I’ll have a long-overdue edition of “Ask Me Anything.”  (For the previous editions, see here, here, here, and here.)  Today’s edition is partly to celebrate my new, tenured “freedom to do whatever the hell I want” (as well as the publication after 7 years of Quantum Computing Since Democritus), but is mostly just to have an excuse to get out of changing diapers (“I’d love to, honey, but the world is demanding answers!”).  Here are the ground rules:

1. One question per person, total.
2. Please check to see whether your question was already asked in one of the previous editions—if it was, then I’ll probably just refer you there.
3. No questions with complicated backstories, or that require me to watch a video, read a paper, etc. and comment on it.
4. No questions about D-Wave.  (As it happens, Matthias Troyer will be giving a talk at MIT this Wednesday about his group’s experiments on the D-Wave machine, and I’m planning a blog post about it—so just hold your horses for a few more days!)
5. If your question is offensive, patronizing, nosy, or annoying, I reserve the right to give a flippant non-answer or even delete the question.
6. Keep in mind that, in past editions, the best questions have almost always been the most goofball ones (“What’s up with those painting elephants?”).

That’s it: ask away!

Update (5/12): I’ve finally answered all ~90 questions, a mere 4 days after the official end of the “Ask Me Anything” session!  Thanks so much to everyone for all the great questions.  For your reading convenience, here’s a guide to my answers (personal favorites are in bold):

• The probability that we live in the Matrix (see followups here, here, here, here)
• Glauber dynamics
• My behavior as Waterloo lunch organizer
• The saddest thing
• Quantum cellular automata
• P!=NP vs. P!=PSPACE
• My knowledge of general relativity
• Advantages of Dirac ket notation
• The evolution of my career goals
• Open problems related to BosonSampling
• Book-signing for Quantum Computing Since Democritus
• In an infinite universe, must all possible earthlike planets exist?
• Was 9/11 an inside job?
• The fine-structure constant and quantum computing
• Accessible open problems in complexity theory
• Tightening Razborov’s monotone lower bound for CLIQUE
• In what sense is the quadratic Grover speedup “provable”?
• Fisher information
• “Associate Professor Without Tenure”
• Is the whole universe “just” a vector in Hilbert space?
• How to initialize a qubit
• My knowledge of my tenure case
• How I’d build a quantum computer in 20-30 years
• Could God solve the halting problem?
• “Who’s yer daddy?”
• How long I’d want to live
• Could the difficulty of building a QC grow exponentially with number of qubits?
• Why does quantum computing require physically different hardware?
• The double-slit experiment and “lazy evaluation”
• Bioengineered flying horses vs. flying robot horses: which will be first?
• The last program I wrote
• How much I sleep
• Recent TCS advances with practical applications in the near future
• What I’d ask Terry Tao
• How many digits will the largest known prime have in 10 or 100 years?
• Whether I believe in free will
• The nature of time
• My progress in learning Hebrew
• Social science breakthroughs that could bring about world peace
• Superquadratic advantage of the quantum adiabatic algorithm over classical search?
• Is a classical world also a quantum world?
• The name of the blog
• John Sidles’ prognostiquestion
• Books and films for Lily to grow up with
• Does QM generate “true” randomness?
• Fictitious proofs of P!=NP
• The secret of happiness
• What I did in college
• The blowup in reducing theorem-proving to 3SAT
• Whether CUP objected to the free QCSD lecture notes
• The top 5 not-yet-written books that I’d most like to read
• Does the continuum “exist” in physical reality? (see followup here)
• Could Nature itself be inconsistent?
• Zen koan about a mouse eating cat food
• “Maybe, it’s the equality sign?”
• Classical computer is to QC as QC is to what?
• Why are CS theorists obsessed with polynomial time?
• My favorite complexity theorist
• A bad approach to factoring large integers
• Am I a Bayesian?
• How to build an intelligent machine
• Will automated theorem provers become as standard as Mathematica/Maple?
• My initiation into theoretical computer science
• How to get an 8-year-old excited about programming
• “Am I insane?”
• Levin universal search
• Brain emulation by 2023?  A $10,000 bet
• How being in “communist Berkeley” in my formative years shaped my worldview (see followup here)
• Israel vs. Apartheid South Africa
• Will useful QC precede its public announcement, or vice versa?
• My work habits
• US immigration policy
• My favorite Israeli foods
• If I guess randomly, how likely am I to get this question right?
• Busy Beaver numbers: is BB(n+1) provably much larger than BB(n)? (see followups here and here)
• Computational complexity and biological/social evolution
• P vs. NP vs. Shannon capacity of cycles problem
• Video games based on my research interests
• Bayesian reasoning when there are copies of yourself
• Pr[ PH=PSPACE | PH collapses ]
• My favorite interpretation of QM
• What I’d do if I proved P=NP
• QM and consciousness
• QM and free will
• Cultures of Clarkson, Cornell, Berkeley, IAS, Waterloo, MIT
• How I decide what’s ethical
• American vs. Chilean universities

Follow

Last month, I blogged about Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) passing an amendment blocking the National Science Foundation from funding most political science research.  I wrote:

This sort of political interference with the peer-review process, of course, sets a chilling precedent for all academic research, regardless of discipline.  (What’s next, an amendment banning computer science research, unless it has applications to scheduling baseball games or slicing apple pies?)

In the comments section of that post, I was pilloried by critics, who ridiculed my delusional fears about an anti-science witch hunt.  Obviously, they said, Congressional Republicans only wanted to slash dubious social science research: not computer science or the other hard sciences that people reading this blog really care about, and that everyone agrees are worthy.  Well, today I write to inform you that I was right, and my critics were wrong.  For the benefit of readers who might have missed it the first time, let me repeat that:

I was right, and my critics were wrong.

In this case, like in countless others, my “paranoid fears” about what could happen turned out to be preternaturally well-attuned to what would happen.

According to an article in Science, Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the new chair of the ironically-named House Science Committee, held two hearings in which he “floated the idea of having every NSF grant application [in every field] include a statement of how the research, if funded, ‘would directly benefit the American people.’ ”  Connoisseurs of NSF proposals will know that every proposal already includes a “Broader Impacts” section, and that that section often borders on comic farce.  (“We expect further progress on the μ-approximate shortest vector problem to enthrall middle-school students and other members of the local community, especially if they happen to belong to underrepresented groups.”)  Now progress on the μ-approximate shortest vector problem also has to directly—directly—“benefit the American people.”  It’s not enough for such research to benefit science—arguably the least bad, least wasteful enterprise our sorry species has ever managed—and for science, in turn, to be a principal engine of the country’s economic and military strength, something that generally can’t be privatized because of a tragedy-of-the-commons problem, and something that economists say has repaid public investments many, many times over.  No, the benefit now needs to be “direct.”

The truth is, I find myself strangely indifferent to whether Smith gets his way or not.  On the negative side, sure, a pessimist might worry that this could spell the beginning of the end for American science.  But on the positive side, I would have been proven so massively right that, even as I held up my “Will Prove Quantum Complexity Theorems For Food” sign on a street corner or whatever, I’d have something to crow about until the end of my life.

Follow

Furthermore, the last of those things actually happened.  What won’t I do to promote Quantum Computing Since Democritus?  Enjoy!

Update: I submitted the following response to the comments over on Lubos’s blog.  Since it has some bits of general interest, I thought I’d crosspost it here while it awaits Lubos’s moderation.

Since Lubos “officially invited” me to respond to the comments here, let me now do so.

1. On “loopholes” in quantum mechanics: I completely agree with Lubos’s observation that the actual contents of my book are “conservative” about the truth of QM. Indeed, I predict that, when Lubos reads his free copy, he’ll agree with (or at least, have no objections to) the vast majority of what’s in the book. On the other hand, because I was guest-blogging about “the story of me and Lubos,” I found it interesting to highlight one area of disagreement regarding QM, rather than the larger areas of agreement.

2. On Gene Day’s patronizing accusation that I don’t “get the basics of QM or even comprehend the role of mathematics in physics”: his misreading of what I wrote is so off-base that I don’t know whether a response is even necessary.  Briefly, though: of course two formulations of QM are mathematically equivalent if they’re mathematically equivalent!  I wasn’t asking why we don’t use different mathematical structures (quaternions, the 3-norm, etc.) to describe the same physical world.  I was asking why the physical world itself shouldn’t have been different, in such a way that those other mathematical structures would have described it.  In other words: if you were God, and you tried to invent a theory that was like QM but based on those other structures, would the result necessarily be less “nice” than QM?  Would you have to give up various desirable properties of QM?  Yes?  Can you prove it?  The ball’s in your court, Mr. Day — or else you can just read my book! 🙂

3. On Lord Nelson’s accusation that I’m a “poseur”: on reflection, someone who only knew me from blog stunts like this one could easily be forgiven for getting that impression! 🙂 So it might be worth pointing out for the record that I also have a “day job” outside the blogosphere, whose results you can see here if you care.

4. On my political views: I wish to clarify for Tom Vonk that I despise not only “Communists,” but the ideology of Communism itself. One of the formative experiences of my life occurred when I was an 8-year-old at Wingate Kirkland summer camp, and all the campers had to relinquish whatever candy they’d brought into a communal “bunk trunk.” The theory was that all the campers, rich and poor alike, would then share the candy equally during occasional “bunk parties.” What actually happened was that the counselors stole the candy. So, during a meeting of the entire camp, I got up and gave a speech denouncing the bunk trunk as Communism. The next day, the camp director (who had apparently been a fellow-traveler in the 1950s) sat with me at lunchtime, and told me about a very evil man named Joe McCarthy who I was in danger of becoming like. But the truth was that I’d never even heard of McCarthy at that point — I just wanted to eat candy.  And I’d give exactly the same speech today.

Like (I suppose) several billion of the world’s people, I believe in a dynamic market-based capitalist society, and also in strong environmental and other regulations to safeguard that society’s continued existence. And I don’t merely believe in that as a cynical compromise, since I can’t get the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that I want in my heart of hearts. Were I emperor of the world, progressive capitalism is precisely what I would institute. In return, perhaps, for paying a “candy tax” to keep the bunk functioning smoothly, campers could keep their remaining candy and eat or trade it to their heart’s delight.

5. On climate change: I’m not a professional climatologist, but neither is Lubos, and nor (correct me if I’m wrong) is anyone else commenting here. Accordingly, I refuse to get drawn into a debate about ice cores and tree rings and hockey sticks, since my experience is that such debates tend to be profoundly unilluminating when not conducted by experts. My position is an incredibly simple one: just like with the link between smoking and cancer, or the lack of a link between vaccines and autism, or any other issue where I lack the expertise to evaluate the evidence myself, I’ll go with what certainly looks like an overwhelming consensus among the scientists who’ve studied the matter carefully. Period. If the climate skeptics want to win me over, then the way for them to do so is straightforward: they should ignore me, and try instead to win over the academic climatology community, majorities of chemists and physicists, Nobel laureates, the IPCC, National Academies of Science, etc. with superior research and arguments.

To this, the skeptics might respond: but of course we can’t win over the mainstream scientific community, since they’re all in the grip of an evil left-wing conspiracy or delusion!  Now, that response is precisely where “the buck stops” for me, and further discussion becomes useless.  If I’m asked which of the following two groups is more likely to be in the grip of a delusion — (a) Senate Republicans, Freeman Dyson, and a certain excitable string-theory blogger, or (b) virtually every single expert in the relevant fields, and virtually every other chemist and physicist who I’ve ever respected or heard of — well then, it comes down to a judgment call, but I’m 100% comfortable with my judgment.

Follow