Shtetl-Optimized

Imagine that every week for twenty years, people message you asking you to comment on the latest wolf sighting, and every week you have to tell them: I haven’t seen a wolf, I haven’t heard a wolf, I believe wolves exist but I don’t yet see evidence of them anywhere near our town.

Then one evening, you hear a howl in the distance, and sure enough, on a hill overlooking the town is the clear silhouette of a large wolf. So you point to it — and all the same people laugh and accuse you of “crying wolf.”

Now you know how it’s been for me with cryptographically relevant quantum computing.

I’ve been writing about QC on this blog for a while, and have done hundreds of public lectures and interviews and podcasts on the subject. By now, I can almost always predict where a non-expert’s QC question is going from its first few words, and have a well-rehearsed answer ready to go the moment they stop talking. Yet sometimes I feel like it’s all for naught.

Only today did it occur to me that I should write about something more basic. Not quantum computing itself, but the habits of mind that seem to prevent some listeners from hearing whatever I or other researchers have to tell them about QC. The stuff that we’re wasting our breath if we don’t get past.

Which habits of mind am I talking about?

1. The Tyranny of Black and White. Hundreds of times, I’ve answered someone’s request to explain QC, only to have them nod impatiently, then interrupt as soon as they can with: “So basically, the take-home message is that quantum is coming, and it’ll change everything?” Someone else might respond to exactly the same words from me with: “So basically, you’re saying it’s all hype and I shouldn’t take any of it seriously?” As in my wolf allegory, the same person might even jump from one reaction to the other. Seeing this, I’ve become a fervent believer in horseshoe theory, in QC no less than in politics. Which sort of makes sense: if you think QCs are “the magic machines of the future that will revolutionize everything,” and then you learn that they’re not, why wouldn’t you jump to the opposite extreme and conclude you’ve been lied to and it’s all a scam?
   
2. The Unidimensional Hype-Meter. “So … [long, thoughtful pause] … you’re actually telling me that some of what I hear about QC is real … but some of it is hype? Or—yuk yuk, I bet no one ever told you this one before—it’s a superposition of real and hype?” OK, that’s better. But it’s still trying to project everything down onto a 1-dimensional subspace that loses almost all the information!
   
3. Words As Seasoning. I often get the sense that a listener is treating all the words of explanation—about amplitudes and interference, Shor versus Grover, physical versus logical qubits, etc.—as seasoning, filler, an annoying tic, a stalling tactic to put off answering the only questions that matter: “is Quantum real or not real? If it’s real, when is it coming? Which companies will own the Quantum space?” In reality, explanations are the entire substance of what I can offer. For my experience has consistently been that, if someone has no interest in learning what QC is, which classes of problems it helps for, etc., then even if I answer their simplistic questions like “which QC companies are good or bad?,” they won’t believe my answers anyway. Or they’ll believe my answers only until the next person comes along and tells them the opposite.
   
4. Black-Boxing. Sometimes these days, I’ll survey the spectacular recent progress in fault-tolerance, 2-qubit gate fidelities, programmable hundred-qubit systems, etc., only to be answered with a sneer: “What’s the biggest number that Shor’s algorithm has factored? Still 15 after all these years? Haha, apparently the emperor has no clothes!” I’ve commented that this is sort of like dismissing the Manhattan Project as hopelessly stalled in 1944, on the ground that so far it hasn’t produced even a tiny nuclear explosion. Or the Apollo program in 1967, on the ground that so far it hasn’t gotten any humans even 10% of the way to the moon. Or GPT in 2020, on the ground that so far it can’t even do elementary-school math. Yes, sometimes emperors are naked—but you can’t tell until you actually look at the emperor! Engage with the specifics of quantum error correction. If there’s a reason why you think it can’t work beyond a certain scale, say so. But don’t fixate on one external benchmark and ignore everything happening under the hood, if the experts are telling you that under the hood is where all the action now is, and your preferred benchmark is only relevant later.
   
5. Questions with Confused Premises. “When is Q-Day?” I confess that this question threw me for a loop the first few times I heard it, because I had no idea what “Q-Day” was. Apparently, it’s the single day when quantum computing becomes powerful enough to break all of cryptography? Or: “What differentiates quantum from binary?” “How will daily life be different once we all have quantum computers in our homes?” Try to minimize the number of presuppositions.
   
6. Anchoring on Specific Marketing Claims. “What do you make of D-Wave’s latest quantum annealing announcement?” “What about IonQ’s claim to recognize handwriting with a QC?” “What about Microsoft’s claim to have built a topological qubit?” These questions can be fine as part of a larger conversation. Again and again, though, someone who doesn’t know the basics will lead with them—with whichever specific, contentious thing they most recently read. Then the entire conversation gets stuck at a deep node within the concept tree, and it can’t progress until we backtrack about five levels.

Anyway—sorry for yet another post of venting and ranting. Maybe this will help:

The wise child asks, “what are the main classes of problems that are currently known to admit superpolynomial quantum speedups?” To this child, you can talk about quantum simulation and finding hidden structures in abelian and occasionally nonabelian groups, as well as Forrelation, glued trees, HHL, and DQI—explaining how the central challenge has been to find end-to-end speedups for non-oracular tasks.

The wicked child asks, “so can I buy a quantum computer right now to help me pick stocks and search for oil and turbocharge LLMs, or is this entire thing basically a fraud?” To this child you answer: “the quantum computing people who seek you as their audience are frauds.”

The simple child asks, “what is quantum computing?” You answer: “it’s a strange new way of harnessing nature to do computation, one that dramatically speeds up certain tasks, but doesn’t really help with others.”

And to the child who doesn’t know how to ask—well, to that child you don’t need to bring up quantum computing at all. That child is probably already fascinated to learn classical stuff.

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Sorry to interrupt your regular programming about the AI apocalypse, etc., and return to the traditional beat of this blog’s very earliest years … but I’ve now gotten multiple messages asking me to comment on something called the “JVG (Jesse–Victor–Gharabaghi) algorithm” (yes, the authors named it after themselves). This is presented as a massive improvement over Shor’s factoring algorithm, which could (according to popular articles) allow RSA-2048 to be broken using only 5,000 physical qubits.

On inspection, the paper’s big new idea is that, in the key step of Shor’s algorithm where you compute x^r mod N in a superposition over all r’s, you instead precompute the x^r mod N’s on a classical computer and then load them all into the quantum state.

Alright kids, why does this not work? Shall we call on someone in the back of the class—like, any undergrad quantum computing class in the world? Yes class, that’s right! There are exponentially many r’s. Computing them all takes exponential time, and loading them into the quantum computer also takes exponential time. We’re out of the n²-time frying pan but into the 2ⁿ-time fire. This can only look like it wins on tiny numbers; on large numbers it’s hopeless.

If you want to see people explaining the same point more politely and at greater length, try this from Hacker News or this from Postquantum.com.

Even for those who know nothing about quantum algorithms, is there anything that could’ve raised suspicion here?

1. The paper didn’t appear on the arXiv, but someplace called “Preprints.org.” Come to think of it, I should add this to my famous Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong! It’s not that there isn’t tons of crap on the arXiv as well, but so far I’ve seen pretty much only crap on preprint repositories other than arXiv, ECCC, and IACR.
2. Judging from a Google search, the claim seems to have gotten endlessly amplified on clickbait link-farming news sites, but ignored by reputable science news outlets—yes, even the usual quantum hypesters weren’t touching this one!

Often, when something is this bad, the merciful answer is to let it die in obscurity. In this case, I feel like there was a sufficient level of intellectual hooliganism, just total lack of concern for what’s true, that those involved deserve to have this Shtetl-Optimized post as a tiny bit of egg on their faces forever.

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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.

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Near the end of my last post, I made a little offhand remark:

[G]iven the current staggering rate of hardware progress, I now think it’s a live possibility that we’ll have a fault-tolerant quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm before the next US presidential election. And I say that not only because of the possibility of the next US presidential election getting cancelled, or preempted by runaway superintelligence!

As I later clarified, I’ll consider this “live possibility” to be fulfilled even if a fault-tolerant Shor’s algorithm is “merely” used to factor 15 into 3×5—a milestone that seems a few steps, but only a few steps, away from what Google, Quantinuum, QuEra, and others have already demonstrated over the past year. After that milestone, I then expect “smooth sailing” to more and more logical qubits and gates and the factorization of larger and larger integers, however fast or slow that ramp-up proceeds (which of course I don’t know).

In any case, the main reason I made my remark was just to tee up the wisecrack about whether I’m not sure if there’ll be a 2028 US presidential election.

My remark, alas, then went viral on Twitter, with people posting countless takes like this:

A quantum expert skeptic who the bears quote all the time – Scott Aaronson – recently got very excited about a number of quantum advances. He now thinks there’s a possibility of running Shor before the next US president election – a timeline that lines up ONLY with $IONQ‘s roadmap, and NOBODY else’s! This represent a MAJOR capitulation of previously predicted timelines by any skeptics.

Shall we enumerate the layers of ugh here?

1. I’ve been saying for several years now that anyone paranoid about cybersecurity should probably already be looking to migrate to quantum-resistant cryptography, because one can’t rule out the possibility that hardware progress will be fast. I didn’t “capitulate”: I mildly updated what I said before, in light of exciting recent advances.
   
2. A “live possibility” is short not only of a “certainty,” but of a “probability.” It’s basically just an “I’m not confident this won’t happen.”
   
3. Worst is the obsessive focus on IonQ, a company that I never mentioned (except in the context of its recently-acquired subsidiary, Oxford Ionics), but which now has a $17 billion valuation. I should explain that, at least since it decided to do an IPO, IonQ has generally been regarded within the research community as … err … a bit like the early D-Wave, intellectual-respectability-wise. They’ll eagerly sell retail investors on the use of quantum computers to recognize handwriting and suchlike, despite (I would say) virtually no basis to believe in a quantum scaling advantage for such tasks. Or they’ll aggressively market current devices to governments who don’t understand what they’re for, but just want to say they have a quantum computer and not get left behind. Or they’ll testify to Congress that quantum, unlike AI, “doesn’t hallucinate” and indeed is “deterministic.” It pains me to write this, as IonQ was founded by (and indeed, still employs) scientists who I deeply admire and respect.
   
4. Perhaps none of this would matter (or would matter only to pointy-headed theorists like me) if IonQ were the world leader in quantum computing hardware, or even trapped-ion hardware. But by all accounts, IonQ’s hardware and demonstrations have lagged well behind those of its direct competitor, Quantinuum. It seems to me that, to whatever extent IonQ gets vastly more attention, it’s mostly just because it chose to IPO early, and also because it’s prioritized marketing to the degree it has.

Over the past few days, I’ve explained the above to various people, only to have them look back at me with glazed, uncomprehending eyes and say, “so then, which quantum stock should I buy? or should I short quantum?”

It would seem rude for me to press quarters into these people’s hands, explaining that they must make gain from whatever they learn. So instead I reply: “You do realize, don’t you, that I’m, like, a professor at a state university, who flies coach and lives in a nice but unremarkable house? If I had any skill at timing the market, picking winners, etc., don’t you think I’d live in a mansion with an infinity pool, and fly my Cessna to whichever conferences I deigned to attend?”

It’s like this: if you think quantum computers able to break 2048-bit cryptography within 3-5 years are a near-certainty, then I’d say your confidence is unwarranted. If you think such quantum computers, once built, will also quickly revolutionize optimization and machine learning and finance and countless other domains beyond quantum simulation and cryptanalysis—then I’d say that more likely than not, an unscrupulous person has lied to you about our current understanding of quantum algorithms.

On the other hand, if you think Bitcoin, and SSL, and all the other protocols based on Shor-breakable cryptography, are almost certainly safe for the next 5 years … then I submit that your confidence is also unwarranted. Your confidence might then be like most physicists’ confidence in 1938 that nuclear weapons were decades away, or like my own confidence in 2015 that an AI able to pass a reasonable Turing Test was decades away. It might merely be the confidence that “this still looks like the work of decades—unless someone were to gather together all the scientific building blocks that have now been demonstrated, and scale them up like a stark raving madman.” The trouble is that sometimes people, y’know, do that.

Beyond that, the question of “how many years?” doesn’t even interest me very much, except insofar as I can mine from it the things I value in life, like scientific understanding, humor, and irony.

There are, famously, many intellectual Communists who are ruthless capitalists in their day-to-day lives. I somehow wound up the opposite. Intellectually, I see capitalism as a golden goose, a miraculous engine that’s lifted the human species out of its disease-ridden hovels and into air-conditioned high-rises, whereas Communism led instead to misery and gulags and piles of skulls every single time it was tried.

And yet, when I actually see the workings of capitalism up close, I often want to retch. In case after case, it seems, our system rewards bold, confident, risk-taking ignoramuses and liars, those who can shamelessly hype a technology (or conversely, declare it flatly impossible)—with such voices drowning out the cautious experts who not only strive to tell the truth, but also made all the actual discoveries that the technology rests on. My ideal economic system is, basically, whichever one can keep the people who can clearly explain the capabilities and limits and risks and benefits of X in charge of X for as long as possible.

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Today, I got email after email asking me to comment on a new paper from HSBC—yes, the bank—together with IBM. The paper claims to use a quantum computer to get a 34% advantage in predictions of financial trading data. (See also blog posts here and here, or numerous popular articles that you can easily find and I won’t link.) What have we got? Let’s read the abstract:

The estimation of fill probabilities for trade orders represents a key ingredient in the optimization of algorithmic trading strategies. It is bound by the complex dynamics of financial markets with inherent uncertainties, and the limitations of models aiming to learn from multivariate financial time series that often exhibit stochastic properties with hidden temporal patterns. In this paper, we focus on algorithmic responses to trade inquiries in the corporate bond market and investigate fill probability estimation errors of common machine learning models when given real production-scale intraday trade event data, transformed by a quantum algorithm running on IBM Heron processors, as well as on noiseless quantum simulators for comparison. We introduce a framework to embed these quantum-generated data transforms as a decoupled offline component that can be selectively queried by models in lowlatency institutional trade optimization settings. A trade execution backtesting method is employed to evaluate the fill prediction performance of these models in relation to their input data. We observe a relative gain of up to ∼ 34% in out-of-sample test scores for those models with access to quantum hardware-transformed data over those using the original trading data or transforms by noiseless quantum simulation. These empirical results suggest that the inherent noise in current quantum hardware contributes to this effect and motivates further studies. Our work demonstrates the emerging potential of quantum computing as a complementary explorative tool in quantitative finance and encourages applied industry research towards practical applications in trading.

As they say, there are more red flags here than in a People’s Liberation Army parade. To critique this paper is not quite “shooting fish in a barrel,” because the fish are already dead before we’ve reached the end of the abstract.

They see a quantum advantage for the task in question, but only because of the noise in their quantum hardware? When they simulate the noiseless quantum computation classically, the advantage disappears? WTF? This strikes me as all but an admission that the “advantage” is just a strange artifact of the particular methods that they decided to compare—that it has nothing really to do with quantum mechanics in general, or with quantum computational speedup in particular.

Indeed, the possibility of selection bias rears its head. How many times did someone do some totally unprincipled, stab-in-the-dark comparison of a specific quantum learning method against a specific classical method, and get predictions from the quantum method that were worse than whatever they got classically … so then they didn’t publish a paper about it?

If it seems like I’m being harsh, it’s because to my mind, the entire concept of this sort of study is fatally flawed from the beginning, optimized for generating headlines rather than knowledge.  The first task, I would’ve thought, is to show the reality of quantum computational advantage in the system or algorithm under investigation, even just for a useless benchmark problem. Only after one has done that, has one earned the right to look for a practical benefit in algorithmic trading or predicting financial time-series data or whatever, coming from that same advantage. If you skip the first step, then whatever “benefits” you get from your quantum computer are overwhelmingly likely to be cargo cult benefits.

And yet none of it matters. The paper can, more or less, openly admit all this right in the abstract, and yet it will still predictably generate lots of credulous articles in the business and financial news about HSBC using quantum computers to improve bond trading!—which, one assumes, was the point of the exercise from the beginning. Qombies roam the earth: undead narratives of “quantum advantage for important business problems” detached from any serious underlying truth-claim. And even here at one of the top 50 quantum computing blogs on the planet, there’s nothing I can do about it other than scream into the void.

Update (Sep. 26): Someone let me know that Martin Shkreli, the “pharma bro,” will be hosting a conference call for investors to push back on quantum computing hype. He announced on X that he’s offering quantum computing experts $2k each to speak in his call. On the off chance that Shkreli reads this blog: I’d be willing to do it for $50k. And if Shkreli were to complain about my jacking up the price… 😄

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In my last post, I wrote about all the hate mail I’ve received these past few days. I even shared a Der-Stürmer-like image of a bloodthirsty, hook-nosed Orthodox Jew that some troll emailed me, after he’d repeatedly promised to send me a “diagram” that would improve my understanding of the Middle East. (Incredibly, commenters on Peter Woit’s blog then blamed me for this antisemitic image, mistakenly imagining that I’d created it myself, and then used their false assumption as further proof of my mental illness.)

Thanks to everyone who wrote to ask whether I’m holding up OK. The answer is: better than you’d expect! The first time you get attacked by dozens of Internet randos, it does feel like your life is over. But the sixth or seventh time? After you’ve experienced, firsthand, how illusory these people’s power over you actually is—how they can’t even dent your scientific career, can’t separate you from any of the friends who matter most to you (let alone your family), can’t really do anything to you beyond whatever they induce you to do to yourself? Then the deadly wolves appear more like poodles yapping from behind a fence. Try it and see!

Today I want to focus on a different kind of message that’s been filling my inbox. Namely, people telling me to stay strong, to keep up my courage, that everything I wrote strikes them as just commonsense morality.

It won’t surprise anyone that many of these people are Jews. But almost as many are not. I was touched to hear from several of my non-Jewish scientific colleagues—ones I’d had no idea were in my corner—that they are in my corner.

Then there was the American Gentile who emailed me a story about how, seeing an Orthodox family after October 7, he felt an urge to run up and tell them that, if worst ever came to worst, they could hide in his basement (“and I own guns,” he added). Amusingly, he added that his wife successfully dissuaded him from actually making such an offer, pointing out that it might freak out the recipients.

I replied that, here in America, I don’t expect that I’ll ever need to hide in anyone’s basement. But, I added, the only reason I don’t expect it is that there are so many Americans who, regardless of any religious or ideological differences, would hide their Jewish neighbors in their basements if necessary.

I also—despite neither I nor this guy exactly believing in God—decided to write a blessing for him, which came out as follows:

May your seed multiply a thousandfold, for like King Cyrus of Persia, you are a righteous man among the Gentiles.  But also, if you’re ever in Austin, be sure to hit me up for tacos and beer.

I’m even grateful, in a way, to SneerClub, and to Woit and his minions. I’m grateful to them for so dramatically confirming that I’m not delusional: some portion of the world really is out to get me. I probably overestimated their power, but not their malevolence.

I’ve learned, for example, that there are no words, however balanced or qualified, with which I can express the concept that Israel needs to defeat Hamas for the sake of both Israeli and Palestinian children, which won’t lead to Woit calling me a “genocide apologist who wants to see all the children in Gaza killed.” Nor are there any words with which to express my solidarity with the Jewish Columbia students who, according to an official university investigation, were last year systematically excluded from campus social life, intimidated, and even assaulted, and which won’t earn me names from Woit like “a fanatic allied with America’s fascist dictator.” Even my months-long silence about these topics got me labeled as “complicit with fascism and genocide.”

Realizing this is oddly liberating. When your back is to the wall in that way, either you can surrender, or else you can defend yourself. Your enemy has already done you the “favor” of eliminating any third options. Which, again, is just Zionism in a nutshell. It’s the lesson not only of 3,000 years of Jewish history, but also of superhero comics and of much of the world’s literature and cinema. It takes a huge amount of ideological indoctrination before such things stop being obvious.

Reading the SneerClubbers’ armchair diagnoses of my severe mental illness, paranoia, persecution complex, grandiosity, etc. etc. I had the following thought, paraphrasing Shaw:

Yes, they’re absolutely right that psychologically well-adjusted people generally do figure out how to adapt themselves to the reigning morality of their social environment—as indicated by the Asch conformity test, the Milgram electric-shock experiment, and the other classics of social psychology.

It takes someone psychologically troubled, in one way or another, to persist in trying to adapt the reigning morality of their social environment to themselves.

If so, however, this suggests that all the moral progress of humanity depends on psychologically troubled people—a realization for which I’m deeply grateful.

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Hardly for the first time in my life, this weekend I got floridly denounced every five minutes—on SneerClub, on the blog of Peter Woit, and in my own inbox. The charge this time was that I’m a genocidal Zionist who wants to kill all Palestinian children purely because of his mental illness and raging persecution complex.

Yes, that’s right, I’m the genocidal one—me, whose lifelong dream is that, just like Germany and Japan rose from their necessary devastation in WWII to become pillars of our global civilization, so too the children in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran will one day grow up in free and prosperous societies at peace with the West and with Israel. Meanwhile, those who demand an actual genocide of the Jews, another one—those who pray to Allah for it, who attempt it over and over, who preach it to schoolchildren, who celebrate their progress toward it in the streets—they’re all as innocent as lambs.

Yesterday, in The Free Press, came the report of a British writer who traveled to southern Lebanon, and met an otherwise ordinary young man there … who turned out to be excited for Muslims and Christians to join forces to slaughter all the Yahood, and who fully expected that the writer would share his admiration for Hitler, the greatest Yahood-killer ever.

This is what the global far left has now allied itself with. This is what I’m right now being condemned for standing against, with commenter after commenter urging me to seek therapy.

To me, this raises a broader question: how exactly do you keep your sanity, when you live on a planet filled with brain-eaten zombies?

I’m still struggling with that question, but the best I’ve come up with is what I think of as the Weinberg Principle, after my much-missed friend and colleague here at UT Austin. Namely, I believe that it’s better to have one Steven Weinberg on your side while the rest of humanity is against you, than the opposite. Many other individuals (including much less famous ones) would also work here in place of Steve, but I’ll go with him because I think most of my readers would agree to three statements:

1. Steve’s mind was more in sync with the way the universe really works, than nearly anyone else’s in history. He was to being free from illusions what Usain Bolt is to running or Magnus Carlsen is to chess.
2. Steve’s toenail clippings constituted a greater contribution to particle physics than would the life’s work of a hundred billion Peter Woits.
3. Steve’s commitment to Israel’s armed self-defense, and to Zionism more generally, made mine look weak and vacillating in comparison. No one need wonder what he would’ve said about Israel’s current war of survival against the Iranian-led terror axis.

Maybe it’s possible to wake the zombies up. Yoram Arnon, for example, wrote the following eloquent answer on Quora, in response to the question “Why are so many against freeing Palestine?”:

When Westerners think about freedom they think about freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of movement, freedom of religion, freedom to form political parties, etc.

When Palestinians say “Free Palestine” they mean freedom from Jews, and from Israel’s existence. They’re advocating for the abolition of Israel, replacing it with an Arab country.

Israel is the only country in the Middle East that is free, in the Western sense of the word. If Israel were to disappear, Palestinians would fall under an autocratic regime, just like every other Arab country, with none of the above freedoms. And, of course, Israelis would suffer a terrible fate at their hands.

Pro Palestinians are either unable to see this, or want exactly that, but thankfully many in the West do see this – the same “many” that are against “freeing Palestine”.

Palestinians need to accept Israel’s right to exist, and choose to coexist peacefully alongside it, for them to have the peace and freedom the West wants for them.

Maybe reading words like these—or the words of Coleman Hughes, or Douglas Murray, or Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, or Yassine Meskhout, or John Aziz, or Haviv Rettig Gur, or Sam Harris, or the quantum computing pioneer David Deutsch—can boot a few of the zombies’ brains back up. But even then, I fear that these reboots will be isolated successes. For every one who comes back online, a thousand will still shamble along in lockstep, chanting “brainsssssss! genocide! intifada!”

I’m acutely aware of how sheer numbers can create the illusion of argumentative strength. I know many people who were sympathetic to Israel immediately after October 7, but then gradually read the room, saw which side their bread was buttered on, etc. etc. and became increasingly hostile. My reaction, of course, has been exactly the opposite. The bigger the zombie army I see marching against me, the less inclined I feel to become a zombie myself—and the clearer to me becomes the original case for the Zionist project.

So to the pro-Zionist students—Jewish of course, but also Christian, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, and everyone else—who feel isolated and scared to speak right up now, and who also often email me, here’s what I say. Yes, the zombies vastly outnumber us, but on the other hand, they’re zombies. Some of the zombies know longer words than others, but so far, not one has turned out to have a worldview terribly different from that of the image at the top of this post.

I’ll keep the comments closed, for much the same reasons I did in my last post.  Namely, while there are many people of all opinions and backgrounds with whom one can productively discuss these things, there are many more with whom one can’t. Furthermore, experience has shown that the latter can disguise themselves as the former for days on end, and thereby execute a denial-of-service attack on any worthwhile and open public discussion.

Addendum: The troll who sent the antisemitic image now says that he regrets and apologizes for it, and that he’s going to read books on Jewish history to understand his error. I’ll believe that when he actually sends me detailed book reports or other evidence, but just wanted to update.

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Suppose a man has already murdered most of your family, including several of your children, for no other reason than that he believes your kind doesn’t deserve to exist on earth. The murderer was never seriously punished for this, because most of your hometown actually shared his feelings about your family. They watched the murders with attitudes ranging from ineffectual squeamishness to indifference to unconcealed glee.

Now the man has kidnapped your last surviving child, a 9-year-old girl, and has tied her screaming to train tracks. You can pull a lever to divert the train and save your daughter. But there’s a catch, as there always is in these moral dilemmas: namely, the murderer has also tied his own five innocent children to the tracks, in such a way that, if you divert the train, then it will kill his children. What’s more, the murderer has invited the entire town to watch you, pointing and screaming “SHAME!!” as you agonize over your decision. He’s persuaded the town that, if you pull the lever, then having killed five of his children to save only one of yours, you’re a far worse murderer than he ever was. You’re so evil, in fact, that he’s effectively cleansed of all guilt for having murdered most of your family first, and the town is cleansed of all guilt for having cheered that. Nothing you say can possibly convince the town otherwise.

The question is, what do you do?

Zionism, to define it in one sentence, is the proposition that, in the situation described, you have not merely a right but a moral obligation to pull the lever—and that you can do so with your middle finger raised high to the hateful mob. Zionism is the belief that, while you had nothing against the murderer’s children, while you would’ve wanted them to grow up in peace and happiness, and while their anguished screams will weigh on your conscience forever, as your children’s screams never weighed on the murderer’s conscience, or on the crowd’s—even so, the responsibility for those children’s deaths rests with their father for engineering this whole diabolical situation, not with you. Zionism is the idea that the correct question here is the broader one: “which choice will bring more righteousness into the world, which choice will better embody the principle that no one’s children are to be murdered going forward?” rather than the narrowly utilitarian question, “which choice will lead to fewer children getting killed right this minute?” Zionism is the conviction that, if most of the world fervently believes otherwise, than most of the world is mistaken—as the world has been mistaken again and again about the biggest ethical questions all through the millennia.

Zionism, so defined, is the deepest moral belief that I have. It’s deeper than any of my beliefs about “politics” in the ordinary sense. Ironically, it’s even deeper than my day-to-day beliefs about the actual State of Israel and its neighbors. I might, for example, despise Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers, might consider them incompetent and venal, might sympathize with the protesters who’ve filled the streets of Tel Aviv to demand their removal. Even so, when the murderer ties my child to the train tracks and the world cheers the murderer on, not only will I pull the lever myself, I’ll want Benjamin Netanyahu to pull the lever if he gets to it first.

Crucially, everything worthwhile in my life came when, and only when, I chose to be “Zionist” in this abstract sense: that is, steadfast in my convictions even in the face of a jeering mob. As an example, I was able to enter college three years early, which set the stage for all the math and science I later did, only because I finally said “enough” to an incompetent school system where I was bullied and prevented from learning, and to teachers and administrators whose sympathies lay with the bullies. I’ve had my successes in quantum computing theory only because I persisted in what at the time was a fairly bizarre obsession, rather than working on topics that almost everyone around me considered safer, more remunerative, and more sensible.

And as the world learned a decade ago, I was able to date, get married, and have a family, only because I finally rejected what I took to be the socially obligatory attitude for male STEM nerds like me—namely, that my heterosexuality was inherently gross, creepy, and problematic, and that I had a moral obligation never to express romantic interest to women. Yes, I overestimated the number of people who ever believed that, but the fact that it was clearly a nonzero number had been deterrent enough for me. Crucially, I never achieved what I saw for years as my only hope in life, to seek out those who believed my heterosexuality was evil and argue them out of their belief. Instead I simply … well, I raised a middle finger to the Andrea Dworkins and Arthur Chus and Amanda Marcottes of the world. I went Deep Zionist on them. I asked women out, and some of those women (not having gotten the memo that I was “problematic,” gross, and worthless) said yes, and one of them became my wife and the mother of my children.

Today, because of the post-October-7 public stands I’ve taken in favor of Israel’s continued existence, I deal with emails and social media posts day after day calling me a genocidal baby-killing monster. I’ve lost perhaps a dozen friends (while retaining hundreds more friends, and gaining some new ones). The haters’ thought appears to be that, if they can just raise the social cost high enough, I’ll finally renounce my Zionist commitments and they can notch another win. In this, they oddly mirror Hamas, Hezbollah, and the IRGC, who think that, if they can just kill and maim enough Israelis, the hated “settler-colonialist rats” will all scurry back to Poland or wherever else they came from (best not to think too hard about where they did come from, what was done to them in those places, how the Palestinian Arabs of the time felt about what was done to them, or how the survivors ended up making a last stand in their ancestral home of Israel—even afterward, repeatedly holding out olive branches that were met time after time with grenades).

Infamously, Israel’s enemies have failed to understand for a century that, the more they rape and murder, the more Zionist the hated Zionists will become, because unlike the French in Algeria or whatever, most of the Zionists have no other land to go back to: this is it for them. In the same way, my own haters don’t understand that, the more they despise me for being myself, the more myself I’ll be, because I have no other self to turn into.

I’m not opening the comments on this post, because there’s nothing here to debate. I’m simply telling the world my moral axioms. If I wrote these words, then turned to pleading with commenters who hated me because of them, then I wouldn’t really have meant the words, would I?

To my hundreds of dear friends and colleagues who’ve stood by me the past two years, to the Zionists and even just sympathetic neutrals who’ve sent me countless messages of support, but who are too afraid (and usually, too junior in their careers) to speak up in public themselves: know that I’ll use the protections afforded by my privileged position in life to continue speaking on your behalf. Know that I’m infinitely grateful, that you give me strength, and that if I can give you a nanoparticle of strength back to you, then my entire life wasn’t in vain. And if I go silent on this stuff from time to time, for the sake of my mental health, or to spend time on quantum computing research or my kids or the other things that bring me joy—never take that to mean that I’ve capitulated to the haters.

To the obsessive libelers, the Peter Woits and other snarling nobodies, the self-hating Jews, and those who’d cheer to see Israel “decolonized” and my friends and family there murdered, I say—well, I don’t say anything; that’s the point! This is no longer a debate; it’s a war, and I’ll simply stand my ground as long as I’m able. Someday I might forgive the Gentiles among you if you ever see the light, if you ever realize how your unreflective, social-media-driven “anti-fascism” led you to endorse a program that leads to the same end as the original Nazi one. The Jews among you I’ll never forgive, because you did know better, and still chose your own comfort over the physical survival of your people.

It might as well be my own hand on the madman’s lever—and yet, while I grieve for all innocents, my soul is at peace, insofar as it’s ever been at peace about anything.

Update (Aug. 29): This post was born of two years of frustration. It was born of trying, fifty or a hundred times since October 7, to find common ground with the anti-Zionists who emailed me, messaged me, etc.—“hey, obviously neither of us wants any children killed or starved, we both have many bones to pick with the current Israeli government, but surely we at least agree on the necessity of defeating Hamas, right? right??“—only to discover, again and again, that the anti-Zionists had no interest in such common ground. With the runaway success of the global PR campaign against Israel—i.e., of Sinwar’s strategy—and with the rise of figures like Mamdani (and his right-wing counterparts) all over the Western world, anti-Zionists smell blood in the water today. And so, no matter how reasonable they presented themselves at first, eventually they’d come out with “why can’t the Jews just go back to Germany and Poland?” or “the Holocaust was just one more genocide among many; it doesn’t deserve any special response,” or “why can’t we dismantle Israel and have a secular state, with a Jewish minority and a majority that’s sworn to kill all Jews as soon as possible?” And then I realize, with a gasp, that we Jews really are mostly on our own in a cruel and terrifying world—just like we’ve been throughout history.

To say that this experience radicalized me would be an understatement. Indeed, my experience has been that even most Israelis, who generally have far fewer illusions than we diaspora Jews, don’t understand the vastness of the chasm that’s formed. They imagine that they can have a debate with outsiders similar to the debates playing out within Israel—one that presupposes basic factual knowledge and the parameters of the problem (e.g., clearly we can’t put 7 million Jews under the mercy of Hamas). The rationale for Zionism itself feels so obvious to them as to be cringe. Except that, to the rest of the world, it isn’t.

We’re not completely on our own though. There remain decent people of every background, who understand the stakes and feel the weight of history—and I regularly hear from them. And whatever your criticisms of Israel’s current tactics, so long as you accept the almost comically overwhelming historical case for the necessity of Jewish self-defense, this post wasn’t aimed at you, and you and I probably could discuss these matters. It’s just that the anti-Zionists scream so loudly, suck up so much oxygen, that we definitely can’t discuss them in public. Maybe in person sometime, face to face.

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Last week I visited Harvard and MIT, and as advertised in my last post, gave the Yip Lecture at Harvard on the subject “How Much Math Is Knowable?” The visit was hosted by Harvard’s wonderful Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications (CMSA), directed by my former UT Austin colleague Dan Freed. Thanks so much to everyone at CMSA for the visit.

And good news! You can now watch my lecture on YouTube here:

I’m told it was one of my better performances. As always, I strongly recommend watching at 2x speed.

I opened the lecture by saying that, while obviously it would always be an honor to give the Yip Lecture at Harvard, it’s especially an honor right now, as the rest of American academia looks to Harvard to defend the value of our entire enterprise. I urged Harvard to “fight fiercely,” in the words of the Tom Lehrer song.

I wasn’t just fishing for applause; I meant it. It’s crucial for people to understand that, in its total war against universities, MAGA has now lost, not merely the anti-Israel leftists, but also most conservatives, classical liberals, Zionists, etc. with any intellectual scruples whatsoever. To my mind, this opens up the possibility for a broad, nonpartisan response, highlighting everything universities (yes, even Harvard 😂) do for our civilization that’s worth defending.

For three days in my old hometown of Cambridge, MA, I met back-to-back with friends and colleagues old and new. Almost to a person, they were terrified about whether they’ll be able to keep doing science as their funding gets decimated, but especially terrified for anyone who they cared about on visas and green cards. International scholars can now be handcuffed, deported, and even placed in indefinite confinement for pretty much any reason—including long-ago speeding tickets—or no reason at all. The resulting fear has paralyzed, in a matter of months, an American scientific juggernaut that took a century to build.

A few of my colleagues personally knew Rümeysa Öztürk, the Turkish student at Tufts who currently sits in prison for coauthoring an editorial for her student newspaper advocating the boycott of Israel. I of course disagree with what Öztürk wrote … and that is completely irrelevant to my moral demand that she go free. Even supposing the government had much more on her than this one editorial, still the proper response would seem to be a deportation notice—“either contest our evidence in court, or else get on the next flight back to Turkey”—rather than grabbing Öztürk off the street and sending her to indefinite detention in Louisiana. It’s impossible to imagine any university worth attending where the students live in constant fear of imprisonment for the civil expression of opinions.

To help calibrate where things stand right now, here’s the individual you might expect to be most on board with a crackdown on antisemitism at Harvard:

Jason Rubenstein, the executive director of Harvard Hillel, said that the school is in the midst of a long — and long-overdue — reckoning with antisemitism, and that [President] Garber has taken important steps to address the problem. Methodical federal civil rights oversight could play a constructive role in that reform, he said. “But the government’s current, fast-paced assault against Harvard – shuttering apolitical, life-saving research; targeting the university’s tax-exempt status; and threatening all student visas … is neither deliberate nor methodical, and its disregard for the necessities of negotiation and due process threatens the bulwarks of institutional independence and the rule of law that undergird our shared freedoms.”

Meanwhile, as the storm clouds over American academia continue to darken, I’ll just continue to write what I think about everything, because what else can I do?

Last night, alas, I lost yet another left-wing academic friend, the fourth or fifth I’ve lost since October 7. For while I was ready to take a ferocious public stand against the current US government, for the survival and independence of our universities, and for free speech and due process for foreign students, this friend regarded all that as insufficient. He demanded that I also clear the tentifada movement of any charge of antisemitism. For, as he patiently explained to me (while worrying that I wouldn’t grasp the point), while the protesters may have technically violated university rules, disrupted education, created a hostile environment in the sense of Title VI antidiscrimination law in ways that would be obvious were we discussing any other targeted minority, etc. etc., still, the only thing that matters morally is that the protesters represent “the powerless,” whereas Zionist Jews like me represent “the powerful.” So, I told this former friend to go fuck himself. Too harsh? Maybe if he hadn’t been Jewish himself, I could’ve forgiven him for letting the world’s oldest conspiracy theory colonize his brain.

For me, the deep significance of in-person visits, including my recent trip to Harvard, is that they reassure me of the preponderance of sanity within my little world—and thereby of my own sanity. Online, every single day I feel isolated and embattled: pressed in on one side by MAGA forces who claim to care about antisemitism, but then turn out to want the destruction of science, universities, free speech, international exchange, due process of law, and everything else that’s made the modern world less than fully horrible; and on the other side, by leftists who say they stand with me for science and academic freedom and civil rights and everything else that’s good, but then add that the struggle needs to continue until the downfall of the scheming, moneyed Zionists and the liberation of Palestine from river to sea.

When I travel to universities to give talks, though, I meet one sane, reasonable human being after another. Almost to a person, they acknowledge the reality of antisemitism, ideological monoculture, bureaucracy, spiraling costs, and many other problems at universities—and they care about universities enough to want to fix those problems, rather than gleefully nuking the universities from orbit as MAGA is doing. Mostly, though, people just want me to sign Quantum Computing Since Democritus, or tell me how much they like this blog, or ask questions about quantum algorithms or the Busy Beaver function. Which is fine too, and which you can do in the comments.

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The United States is now a country that disappears people.

Visa holders, green card holders, and even occasionally citizens mistaken for non-citizens: Trump’s goons can now seize them off the sidewalk at any time, handcuff them, detain them indefinitely in a cell in Louisiana with minimal access to lawyers, or even fly them to an overcrowded prison in El Salvador to be tortured.

It’s important to add: from what I know, some of the people being detained and deported are genuinely horrible. Some worked for organizations linked to Hamas, and cheered the murder of Jews. Some trafficked fentanyl. Some were violent gang members.

There are proper avenues to deport such people, in normal pre-Trumpian US law. For example, you can void someone’s visa by convincing a judge that they lied about not supporting terrorist organizations in their visa application.

But already other disappeared people seem to have been entirely innocent. Some apparently did nothing worse than write lefty op-eds or social media posts. Others had innocuous tattoos that were mistaken for gang insignia.

Millennia ago, civilization evolved mechanisms like courts and judges and laws and evidence and testimony, to help separate the guilty from the innocent. These are known problems with known solutions. No new ideas are needed.

One reader advised me not to blog about this issue unless I had something original to say: how could I possibly add to the New York Times’ and CNN’s daily coverage of every norm-shattering wrinkle? But other readers were livid at me for not blogging, even interpreting silence or delay as support for fascism.

For those readers, but more importantly for my kids and posterity, let me say: no one who follows this blog could ever accuse me of reflexive bleeding-heart wokery, much less of undue sympathy for “globalize the intifada” agitators. So with whatever credibility that grants me: Shtetl-Optimized unequivocally condemns the “grabbing random foreign students off the street” method of immigration enforcement. If there are resident aliens who merit deportation, prove it to a friggin’ judge (I’ll personally feel more confident that the law is being applied sanely if the judge wasn’t appointed by Trump). Prove that you got the right person, and that they did what you said, and that that violated the agreed-upon conditions of their residency according to some consistently-applied standard. And let the person contest the charges, with advice of counsel.

I don’t want to believe the most hyperbolic claims of my colleagues, that the US is now a full Soviet-style police state, or inevitably on its way to one. I beg any conservatives reading this post, particularly those with influence over events: help me not to believe this.

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