Shtetl-Optimized

This morning Xavier Waintal, coauthor of the new arXiv preprint “””refuting””” Grover’s algorithm, which I dismantled here yesterday, emailed me a two-paragraph response. He remarked that the “classy” thing for me to do would be to post the response on my blog, but: “I would totally understand if you did not want to be contradicted in your own zone of influence.”

Here is Waintal’s response, exactly as sent to me:

The elephant in the (quantum computing) room: opening the Pandora box of the quantum oracle

One of the problem we face in the field of quantum computing is a vast diversity of cultures between, say, complexity theorists on one hand and physicists on the other hand. The former define mathematical objects and consider any mathematical problem as legitimate. The hypothesis are never questioned, by definition. Physicists on the other hand spend their life questioning the hypothesis, wondering if they do apply to the real world. This dichotomy is particularly acute in the context of the emblematic Grover search algorithm, one of the cornerstone of quantum computing. Grover’s algorithm uses the concept of “oracle”, a black box function that one can call, but of which one is forbidden to see the source code. There are well known complexity theorems that show that in this context a quantum computer can solve the “search problem” faster than a classical computer.

But because we closed our eyes and decided not to look at the source code does not mean it does not exist. In https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.11317.pdf, Miles Stoudenmire and I deconstruct the concept of oracle and show that as soon as we give the same input to both quantum and classical computers (the quantum circuit used to program the oracle on the actual quantum hardware) then the *generic* quantum advantage disappears. The charge of the proof is reversed: one must prove certain properties of the quantum circuit in order to possibly have a theoretical quantum advantage. More importantly – for the physicist that I am – our classical algorithm is very fast and we show that we can solve large instances of any search problem. This means that even for problems where *asymptotically* quantum computers are faster than classical ones, the crossing point where they become so is for astronomically large computing time, in the tens of millions of years. Who is willing to wait that long for the answer to a single question, even if the answer is 42?

The above explicitly confirms something that I realized immediately on reading the preprint, and that fully explains the tone of my response. Namely, Stoudenmire and Waintal’s beef isn’t merely with Grover’s algorithm, or even with the black-box model; it’s with the entire field of complexity theory. If they were right that complexity theorists never “questioned hypotheses” or wondered what did or didn’t apply to the real world, then complexity theory shouldn’t exist in CS departments at all—at most it should exist in pure math departments.

But a converse claim is also true. Namely, suppose it turned out that complexity theorists had already fully understood, for decades, all the elementary points Stoudenmire and Waintal were making about oracles versus explicit circuits. Suppose complexity theorists hadn’t actually been confused, at all, about under what sorts of circumstances the square-root speedup of Grover’s algorithm was (1) provable, (2) plausible but unproven, or (3) nonexistent. Suppose they’d also been intimately familiar with the phenomenon of asymptotically faster algorithms that get swamped in practice by unfavorable constants, and with the overhead of quantum error-correction. Suppose, indeed, that complexity theorists hadn’t merely understood all this stuff, but expressed it clearly and accurately where Stoudenmire and Waintal’s presentation was garbled and mixed with absurdities (e.g., the Grover problem “being classically solvable with a linear number of queries,” the Grover speedup not being “generic,” their being able to “solve large instances of any search problem” … does that include, for example, CircuitSAT? do they still not get the point about CircuitSAT?). Then Stoudenmire and Waintal’s whole objection would collapse.

Anyway, we don’t have to suppose! In the SciRate discussion of the preprint, a commenter named Bibek Pokharel helpfully digs up some undergraduate lecture notes from 2017 that are perfectly clear about what Stoudenmire and Waintal treat as revelations (though one could even go 20+ years earlier). The notes are focused here on Simon’s algorithm, but the discussion generalizes to any quantum black-box algorithm, including Grover’s:

The difficulty in claiming that we’re getting a quantum speedup [via Simon’s algorithm] is that, once we pin down the details of how we’re computing [the oracle function] f—so, for example, the actual matrix A [such that f(x)=Ax]—we then need to compare against classical algorithms that know those details as well. And as soon as we reveal the innards of the black box, the odds of an efficient classical solution become much higher! So for example, if we knew the matrix A, then we could solve Simon’s problem in classical polynomial time just by calculating A‘s nullspace. More generally, it’s not clear whether anyone to this day has found a straightforward “application” of Simon’s algorithm, in the sense of a class of efficiently computable functions f that satisfy the Simon promise, and for which any classical algorithm plausibly needs exponential time to solve Simon’s problem, even if the algorithm is given the code for f.

In the same lecture notes, one can find the following discussion of Grover’s algorithm, and how its unconditional square-root speedup becomes conditional (albeit, still extremely plausible in many cases) as soon as the black box is instantiated by an explicit circuit:

For an NP-complete problem like CircuitSAT, we can be pretty confident that the Grover speedup is real, because no one has found any classical algorithm that’s even slightly better than brute force. On the other hand, for more “structured” NP-complete problems, we do know exponential-time algorithms that are faster than brute force. For example, 3SAT is solvable classically in about O(1.3ⁿ) time. So then, the question becomes a subtle one of whether Grover’s algorithm can be combined with the best classical tricks that we know to achieve a polynomial speedup even compared to a classical algorithm that uses the same tricks. For many NP-complete problems the answer seems to be yes, but it need not be yes for all of them.

The notes in question were written by some random complexity theorist named Scot Aronsen (sp?). But if you don’t want to take it from that guy, then take it from (for example) the Google quantum chemist Ryan Babbush, again on the SciRate page:

It is well understood that applying Grover’s algorithm to 3-SAT in the standard way would not give a quadratic speedup over the best classical algorithm for 3-SAT in the worst case (and especially not on average). But there are problems for which Grover is expected to give a quadratic speedup over any classical algorithm in the worst case. For example, the problem “Circuit SAT” starts by me handing you a specification of a poly-size classical circuit with AND/OR/NOT gates, so it’s all explicit. Then you need to solve SAT on this circuit. Classically we strongly believe it will take time 2^n (this is even the basis of many conjectures in complexity theory, like the exponential time hypothesis), and quantumly we know it can be done with 2^{n/2}*poly(n) quantum gates using Grover and the explicitly given classical circuit. So while I think there are some very nice insights in this paper, the statement in the title “Grover’s Algorithm Offers No Quantum Advantage” seems untrue in a general theoretical sense. Of course, this is putting aside issues with the overheads of error-correction for quadratic speedups (a well understood practical matter that is resolved by going to large problem sizes that wouldn’t be available to the first fault-tolerant quantum computers). What am I missing?

More generally, over the past few days, as far as I can tell, every actual expert in quantum algorithms who’s looked at Stoudenmire and Waintal’s preprint—every one, whether complexity theorist or physicist or chemist—has reached essentially the same conclusions about it that I did. The one big difference is that many of the experts, who are undoubtedly better people than I am, extended a level of charity to Stoudenmire and Waintal (“well, this of course seems untrue, but here’s what it could have meant”) that Stoudenmire and Waintal themselves very conspicuously failed to extend to complexity theory.

Unrelated Update: Huge congratulations to Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe, for winning UT Austin’s third Turing Award after Dijkstra and Emerson!

And also to mathematician Luis Caffarelli, for winning UT Austin’s third Abel Prize!

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I was really, really hoping that I’d be able to avoid blogging about this new arXiv preprint, by E. M. Stoudenmire and Xavier Waintal:

Grover’s Algorithm Offers No Quantum Advantage

Grover’s algorithm is one of the primary algorithms offered as evidence that quantum computers can provide an advantage over classical computers. It involves an “oracle” (external quantum subroutine) which must be specified for a given application and whose internal structure is not part of the formal scaling of the quantum speedup guaranteed by the algorithm. Grover’s algorithm also requires exponentially many steps to succeed, raising the question of its implementation on near-term, non-error-corrected hardware and indeed even on error-corrected quantum computers. In this work, we construct a quantum inspired algorithm, executable on a classical computer, that performs Grover’s task in a linear number of call to the oracle – an exponentially smaller number than Grover’s algorithm – and demonstrate this algorithm explicitly for boolean satisfiability problems (3-SAT). Our finding implies that there is no a priori theoretical quantum speedup associated with Grover’s algorithm. We critically examine the possibility of a practical speedup, a possibility that depends on the nature of the quantum circuit associated with the oracle. We argue that the unfavorable scaling of the success probability of Grover’s algorithm, which in the presence of noise decays as the exponential of the exponential of the number of qubits, makes a practical speedup unrealistic even under extremely optimistic assumptions on both hardware quality and availability.

Alas, inquiries from journalists soon made it clear that silence on my part wasn’t an option.

So, desperately seeking an escape, this morning I asked GPT-4 to read the preprint and comment on it just like I would. Sadly, it turns out the technology isn’t quite ready to replace me at this blogging task. I suppose I should feel good: in every such instance, either I’m vindicated in all my recent screaming here about generative AI—what the naysayers call “glorified autocomplete”—being on the brink of remaking civilization, or else I still, for another few months at least, have a role to play on the Internet.

So, on to the preprint, as reviewed by the human Scott Aaronson. Yeah, it’s basically a tissue of confusions, a mishmash of the well-known and the mistaken. As they say, both novel and correct, but not in the same places.

The paper’s most eye-popping claim is that the Grover search problem—namely, finding an n-bit string x such that f(x)=1, given oracle access to a Boolean function f:{0,1}ⁿ→{0,1}—is solvable classically, using a number of calls that’s only linear in n, or in many cases only constant (!!). Since this claim contradicts a well-known, easily provable lower bound—namely, that Ω(2ⁿ) oracle calls are needed for classical brute-force searching—the authors must be using words in nonstandard ways, leaving only the question of how.

It turns out that, for their “quantum-inspired classical algorithm,” the authors assume you’re given, not merely an oracle for f, but the actual circuit to compute f. They then use that circuit in a non-oracular way to extract the marked item. In which case, I’d prefer to say that they’ve actually solved the Grover problem with zero queries—simply because they’ve entirely left the black-box setting where Grover’s algorithm is normally formulated!

What could possibly justify such a move? Well, the authors argue that sometimes one can use the actual circuit to do better classically than Grover’s algorithm would do quantumly, and therefore, they’ve shown that the Grover speedup is not “generic,” as the quantum algorithms people always say it is.

But this is pure wordplay around the meaning of “generic.” When we say that Grover’s algorithm achieves a “generic” square-root speedup, what we mean is that it solves the generic black-box search problem in O(2^n/2) queries, whereas any classical algorithm for that generic problem requires Ω(2ⁿ) queries. We don’t mean that for every f, Grover achieves a quadratic speedup for searching that f, compared to the best classical algorithm that could be tailored to that f. Of course we don’t; that would be trivially false!

Remarkably, later in the paper, the authors seem to realize that they haven’t delivered the knockout blow against Grover’s algorithm that they’d hoped for, because they then turn around and argue that, well, even for those f’s where Grover does provide a quadratic speedup over the best (or best-known) classical algorithm, noise and decoherence could negate the advantage in practice, and solving that problem would require a fault-tolerant quantum computer, but fault-tolerance could require an enormous overhead, pushing a practical Grover speedup far into the future.

The response here boils down to “no duh.” Yes, if Grover’s algorithm can yield any practical advantage in the medium term, it will either be because we’ve discovered much cheaper ways to do quantum fault-tolerance, or else because we’ve discovered “NISQy” ways to exploit the Grover speedup, which avoid the need for full fault-tolerance—for example, via quantum annealing. The prospects are actually better for a medium-term advantage from Shor’s factoring algorithm, because of its exponential speedup. Hopefully everyone in quantum computing theory has realized all this for a long time.

Anyway, as you can see, by this point we’ve already conceded the principle of Grover’s algorithm, and are just haggling over the practicalities! Which brings us back to the authors’ original claim to have a principled argument against the Grover speedup, which (as I said) rests on a confusion over words.

Some people dread the day when GPT will replace them. In my case, for this task, I can’t wait.

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Thanks to students Yuxuan Zhang (UT) and Alex Meiburg (UCSB) for discussions of the Stoudenmire-Waintal preprint that informed this post. Of course, I take sole blame for anything anyone dislikes about the post!

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For a much more technical response—one that explains how this preprint’s detailed attempt to simulate Grover classically fails, rather than merely proving that it must fail—check out this comment by Alex Meiburg.

Coming out of blog-hiatus for some important stuff, today, tomorrow, and the rest of the week.

Something distressing happened to me yesterday for the first time, but I fear not the last. We (UT Austin) admitted a PhD student from China who I know to be excellent, and who wanted to work with me. That student, alas, has had to decline our offer of admission, because he’s been denied a US visa under Section 212(A)(3)(a)(i), which “prohibits the issuance of a visa to anyone who seeks to enter the United States to violate or evade any law prohibiting the export from the United States of goods, technology, or sensitive information.” Quantum computing, you see, is now a “prohibited technology.”

This visa denial is actually one that the American embassy in Beijing only just now got around to issuing, from when the student applied for a US visa a year and a half ago, to come visit me for a semester as an undergrad. For context, the last time I had an undergrad from China visit me for a semester, back in 2016, the undergrad’s name was Lijie Chen. Lijie just finished his PhD at MIT under Ryan Williams and is now one of the superstars of theoretical computer science. Anyway, in Fall 2021 I got an inquiry from a Chinese student who bowled me over the same way Lijie had, so I invited him to spend a semester with my group in Austin. This time, alas, the student never heard back when he applied for a visa, and was therefore unable to come. He ended up doing an excellent research project with me anyway, working remotely from China, checking in by Zoom, and even participating in our research group meetings (which were on Zoom anyway because of the pandemic).

Anyway, for reasons too complicated to explain, this previous denial means that the student would almost certainly be denied for a new visa to come to the US to do a PhD in quantum computing. (Unless some immigration lawyer reading this can suggest a way out!) The student is not sure what he’s going to do next, but it might involve staying in China, or applying in Europe, or applying in the US again after a year but without mentioning the word “quantum.”

It should go without saying, to anyone reading this, that the student wants to do basic research in quantum complexity theory that’s extraordinarily unlikely to have any direct military or economic importance … just like my own research! And it should also go without saying that, if the US really wanted to strike a blow against authoritarianism in Beijing, then it could hardly do better than to hand out visas to every Chinese STEM student and researcher who wanted to come here. Yes, some would return to China with their new skills, but a great many would choose to stay in the US … if we let them.

And I’ve pointed all this out to a Republican Congressman, and to people in the military and intelligence agencies, when they asked me “what else the US can do to win the quantum computing race against China?” And I’ll continue to say it to anyone who asks. The Congressman, incidentally, even said that he privately agreed with me, but that the issue was politically difficult. I wonder: is there anyone in power in the US, in either party, who doesn’t privately agree that opening the gates to China’s STEM talent would be a win/win proposition for the US … including for the US’s national security? If so, who are these people? Is this just a naked-emperor situation, where everyone in Congress fears to raise the issue because they fear backlash from someone else, but the someone else is actually thinking the same way?

And to any American who says, “yeah, but China totally deserves it, because of that spy balloon, and their threats against Taiwan, and all the spying they do with TikTok”—I mean, like, imagine if someone tried to get back at the US government for the Iraq War or for CIA psyops or whatever else by punishing you, by curtailing your academic dreams. It would make exactly as much sense.

Just days after we celebrated my wife’s 40th birthday, she came down with COVID, meaning she’s been isolating and I’ve been spending almost all my time dealing with our kids.

But if experience has taught me anything, it’s that the quantum hype train never slows down. In the past 24 hours, at least four people have emailed to ask me about a new paper entitled “Factoring integers with sublinear resources on a superconducting quantum processor.” Even the security expert Bruce Schneier, while skeptical, took the paper surprisingly seriously.

The paper claims … well, it’s hard to pin down what it claims, but it’s certainly given many people the impression that there’s been a decisive advance on how to factor huge integers, and thereby break the RSA cryptosystem, using a near-term quantum computer. Not by using Shor’s Algorithm, mind you, but by using the deceptively similarly named Schnorr’s Algorithm. The latter is a classical algorithm based on lattices, which the authors then “enhance” using the heuristic quantum optimization method called QAOA.

For those who don’t care to read further, here is my 3-word review:

No. Just No.

And here’s my slightly longer review:

Schnorr ≠ Shor. Yes, even when Schnorr’s algorithm is dubiously “enhanced” using QAOA—a quantum algorithm that, incredibly, for all the hundreds of papers written about it, has not yet been convincingly argued to yield any speedup for any problem whatsoever (besides, as it were, the problem of reproducing its own pattern of errors) (one possible recent exception from Sami Boulebnane and Ashley Montanaro).

In the new paper, the authors spend page after page saying-without-saying that it might soon become possible to break RSA-2048, using a NISQ (i.e., non-fault-tolerant) quantum computer. They do so via two time-tested strategems:

1. the detailed exploration of irrelevancies (mostly, optimization of the number of qubits, while ignoring the number of gates), and
2. complete silence about the one crucial point.

Then, finally, they come clean about the one crucial point in a single sentence of the Conclusion section:

It should be pointed out that the quantum speedup of the algorithm is unclear due to the ambiguous convergence of QAOA.

“Unclear” is an understatement here. It seems to me that a miracle would be required for the approach here to yield any benefit at all, compared to just running the classical Schnorr’s algorithm on your laptop. And if the latter were able to break RSA, it would’ve already done so.

All told, this is one of the most actively misleading quantum computing papers I’ve seen in 25 years, and I’ve seen … many. Having said that, this actually isn’t the first time I’ve encountered the strange idea that the exponential quantum speedup for factoring integers, which we know about from Shor’s algorithm, should somehow “rub off” onto quantum optimization heuristics that embody none of the actual insights of Shor’s algorithm, as if by sympathetic magic. Since this idea needs a name, I’d hereby like to propose Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring.

And with that, I feel I’ve adequately discharged my duties here to sanity and truth. If I’m slow to answer comments, it’ll be because I’m dealing with two screaming kids.

There is a fundamental difference between form and meaning. Form is the physical structure of something, while meaning is the interpretation or concept that is attached to that form. For example, the form of a chair is its physical structure – four legs, a seat, and a back. The meaning of a chair is that it is something you can sit on.

This distinction is important when considering whether or not an AI system can be trained to learn semantic meaning. AI systems are capable of learning and understanding the form of data, but they are not able to attach meaning to that data. In other words, AI systems can learn to identify patterns, but they cannot understand the concepts behind those patterns.

For example, an AI system might be able to learn that a certain type of data is typically associated with the concept of “chair.” However, the AI system would not be able to understand what a chair is or why it is used. In this way, we can see that an AI system trained on form can never learn semantic meaning.

–GPT3, when I gave it the prompt “Write an essay proving that an AI system trained on form can never learn semantic meaning”

Scott’s foreword

One week ago, E. O. Wilson—the legendary naturalist and conservationist, and man who was universally acknowledged to know more about ants than anyone else in human history—passed away at age 92. A mere three days later, Scientific American—or more precisely, the zombie clickbait rag that now flaunts that name—published a shameful hit-piece, smearing Wilson for his “racist ideas” without, incredibly, so much as a single quote from Wilson, or any other attempt to substantiate its libel (see also this response by Jerry Coyne). SciAm‘s Pravda-like attack included the following extraordinary sentence, which I thought worthy of Alan Sokal’s Social Text hoax:

The so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.

There are intellectually honest people who don’t know what the normal distribution is. There are no intellectually honest people who, not knowing what it is, figure that it must be something racist.

On Twitter, Laura Helmuth, the editor-in-chief now running SciAm into the ground, described her magazine’s calumny against Wilson as “insightful” (the replies, including from Richard Dawkins, are fun to read). I suppose it was as “insightful” as SciAm‘s disgraceful attack last year on Eric Lander, President Biden’s ultra-competent science advisor and a leader in the war on COVID, for … being a white male, which appears to have been E. O. Wilson’s crime as well. (Think I must be misrepresenting the “critique” of Lander? Read it!)

Anyway, in response to Scientific American‘s libel of Wilson, I wrote on my Facebook that I’ll no longer agree to write for or be interviewed by them (you can read my old stuff free of charge here or here), unless and until there’s a complete change of editorial direction. I encourage all other scientists to commit likewise, thereby making it common knowledge that the entity that now calls itself “Scientific American” bears the same relation to the legendary home of Martin Gardner as does a corpse to a living being. Fortunately, there are high-quality online venues (e.g., Quanta) that partly fill the role that Scientific American abdicated.

After reading my Facebook post, my friend Ashutosh Jogalekar was inspired to post an essay of his own. Ashutosh used to write regularly for Scientific American, until he was fired seven years ago over a column in which he advocated acknowledging Richard Feynman’s flaws, including his arrogance and casual sexism, but also understanding those flaws within the context of Feynman’s whole life, including the tragic death of his first wife Arlene. (Yes, that was really it! Read the piece!) Below, I’m sharing Ashutosh’s moving essay about E. O. Wilson with Ashutosh’s very generous permission. —Scott Aaronson

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Guest Post by Ashutosh Jogalekar

As some know, I was “fired” from Scientific American in 2014 for three “controversial” posts (among 200 that I had written for the magazine). When I parted from the magazine I chalked up my departure to an unfortunate misunderstanding more than anything else. I still respected some of the writers at the publication, and while I wore my separation as a badge of honor and in retrospect realized its liberating utility in enabling me to greatly expand my topical range, I occasionally still felt bad and wished things had gone differently.

No more. Now the magazine has done me a great favor by allowing me to wipe the slate of my conscience clean. What happened seven years ago was not just a misunderstanding but clearly one of many first warning signs of a calamitous slide into a decidedly unscientific, irrational and ideology-ridden universe of woke extremism. Its logical culmination two days ago was an absolutely shameless, confused, fact-free and purely ideological hit job on someone who wasn’t just a great childhood hero of mine but a leading light of science, literary achievement, humanism and biodiversity. While Ed (E. O.) Wilson’s memory was barely getting cemented only days after his death, the magazine published an op-ed calling him a racist, a hit job endorsed and cited by the editor-in-chief as “insightful”. One of the first things I did after reading the piece was buy a few Wilson books that weren’t part of my collection.

Ed Wilson was one of the gentlest, most eloquent, most brilliant and most determined advocates for both human and natural preservation you could find. Under Southern charm lay hidden unyielding doggedness and immense stamina combined with a missionary zeal to communicate the wonders of science to both his fellow biologists and the general public. His autobiography, “Naturalist”, is perhaps the finest, most literary statement of the scientific life I have read; it was one of a half dozen books that completely transported me when I read it in college. In book after book of wide-ranging intellectual treats threading through a stunning diversity of disciplines, he sent out clarion calls for saving the planet, for enabling dialogue between the natural and the social sciences, for understanding each other better. In the face of unprecedented challenges to our fragile environment and continued barriers to interdisciplinary communication, this is work that likely will make him go down in history as one of the most important human beings who ever lived, easily of the same caliber and achievement as John Muir or Thoreau. Even in terms of achievement strictly defined by accolades – the National Medal of Science, the Crafoord Prize which recognizes fields excluded by the Nobel Prize, and not just one but two Pulitzer Prizes – few scientists from any field in the 20th century can hold a candle to Ed Wilson. My friend Richard Rhodes who knew Wilson for decades as a close and much-admired friend said that there wasn’t a racist bone in his body; Dick should know since he just came out with a first-rate biography of Wilson weeks before his passing.

The writer who wrote that train wreck is a professor of nursing at UCSF named Monica McLemore. That itself is a frightening fact and should tell everyone how much ignorance has spread itself in our highest institutions. She not only maligned and completely misrepresented Wilson but did not say a word about his decades-long, heroic effort to preserve the planet and our relationship with it; it was clear that she had little acquaintance with Wilson’s words since she did not cite any. It’s also worth noting the gaping moral blindness in her article which completely misses the most moral thing Wilson did – spend decades advocating for saving our planet and averting a catastrophe of extinction, climate change and divisiveness – and instead focuses completely on his non-existent immorality. This is a pattern that is consistently found among those urging “social justice” or “equity” or whatever else: somehow they seem to spend all their time talking about fictional, imagined immorality while missing the real, flesh-and-bones morality that is often the basis of someone’s entire life’s work.

In the end, the simple fact is that McLemore didn’t care about any of this. She didn’t care because she had a political agenda and the facts did not matter to her, even facts as basic as the definition of the normal distribution in statistics. For her, Wilson was some obscure white male scientist who was venerated, and that was reason enough for a supposed “takedown”. And the editor of Scientific American supported and lauded this ignorant, ideology-driven tirade.

Ironically, Wilson would have found this ideological hit job all too familiar. After he wrote his famous book Sociobiology in the 1970s, a volume in which, in a single chapter about human beings, he had the temerity to suggest that maybe, just maybe, human beings operate with the same mix of genes that other creatures do, the book was met by a disgraceful, below-the-belt, ideological response from Wilson’s far left colleagues Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould who hysterically compared his arguments to thinking that was well on its way down the slippery slope to that dark world where lay the Nazi gas chambers. The gas chamber analogy is about the only thing that’s missing from the recent hit job, but the depressing thing is that we are fighting the same battles in 2021 that Wilson fought forty years before, although turbocharged this time by armies of faithful zombies on social media. The sad thing is that Wilson is no longer around to defend himself, although I am not sure he would have bothered with a piece as shoddy as this one.

The complete intellectual destruction of a once-great science magazine is now clear as day. No more should Scientific American be regarded as a vehicle for sober scientific views and liberal causes but as a political magazine with clearly stated ideological biases and an aversion to facts, an instrument of a blinkered woke political worldview that brooks no dissent. Scott Aaronson has taken a principled stand and said that after this proverbial last straw on the camel’s back, he will no longer write for the magazine or do interviews for them. I applaud Scott’s decision, and with his expertise it’s a decision that actually matters. As far as I am concerned, I now mix smoldering fury at the article with immense relief: the last seven years have clearly shown that leaving Scientific American in 2014 was akin to leaving the Soviet Union in the 1930s just before Stalin appointed Lysenko head biologist. I could not have asked for a happier expulsion and now feel completely vindicated and free of any modicum of regret I might have felt.

To my few friends and colleagues who still write for the magazine and whose opinions I continue to respect, I really wish to ask: Why? Is writing for a magazine which has sacrificed facts and the liberal voice of real science at the altar of political ideology and make believe still worth it? What would it take for you to say no more? As Oscar Wilde would say, one mistake like this is a mistake, two seems more like carelessness; in the roster of the last few years, this is “mistake” 100+, signaling that it’s now officially approved policy. Do you think that being an insider will allow you to salvage the reputation of the magazine? If you think that way, you are no different from the one or two moderate Republicans who think they can still salvage the once-great party of Lincoln and Eisenhower. Both the GOP and Scientific American are beyond redemption from where I stand. Get out, start your own magazine or join another, one which actually respects liberal, diverse voices and scientific facts; let us applaud you for it. You deserve better, the world deserves better. And Ed Wilson’s memory sure as hell deserves better.

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Update (from Scott): See here for the Hacker News thread about this post. I was amused by the conjunction of two themes: (1) people who were uncomfortable with my and Ashutosh’s expression of strong emotions, and (2) people who actually clicked through to the SciAm hit-piece, and then reported back to the others that the strong emotions were completely, 100% justified in this case.

I’m about to leave for a family vacation—our first such since before the pandemic, one planned and paid for literally the day before the news of Omicron broke. On the negative side, staring at the case-count graphs that are just now going vertical, I estimate a ~25% chance that at least one of us will get Omicron on this trip. On the positive side, I estimate a ~60% chance that in the next 6 months, at least one of us would’ve gotten Omicron or some other variant even without this trip—so maybe it’s just as well if we get it now, when we’re vaxxed to the maxx and ready and school and university are out.

If, however, I do end this trip dead in an ICU, I wouldn’t want to do so without having clearly set out my values for posterity. So with that in mind: in the comments of my previous post, someone asked me why I identify as a liberal or a progressive, if I passionately support educational practices like tracking, ability grouping, acceleration, and (especially) encouraging kids to learn advanced math whenever they’re ready for it. (Indeed, that might be my single stablest political view, having been held, for recognizably similar reasons, since I was about 5.)

Incidentally, that previous post was guest-written by my colleagues Edith Cohen and Boaz Barak, and linked to an open letter that now has almost 1500 signatories. Our goal was, and is, to fight the imminent dumbing-down of precollege math education in the United States, spearheaded by the so-called “California Mathematics Framework.” In our joint efforts, we’ve been careful with every word—making sure to maintain the assent of our entire list of signatories, to attract broad support, to stay narrowly focused on the issue at hand, and to bend over backwards to concede much as we could. Perhaps because of those cautions, we—amazingly—got some actual traction, reaching people in government (such as Rep. Ro Khanna, D – Silicon Valley) and technology leaders, and forcing the “no one’s allowed to take Algebra in 8th grade” faction to respond to us.

This was disorienting to me. On this blog, I’m used just to howling into the wind, having some agree, some disagree, some take to Twitter to denounce me, but in any case, having no effect of any kind on the real world.

So let me return to howling into the wind. And return to the question of what I “am” in ideology-space, which doesn’t have an obvious answer.

It’s like, what do you call someone who’s absolutely terrified about global warming, and who thinks the best response would’ve been (and actually, still is) a historic surge in nuclear energy, possibly with geoengineering to tide us over?

… who wants to end world hunger … and do it using GMO crops?

… who wants to smash systems of entrenched privilege in college admissions … and believes that the SAT and other standardized tests are the best tools ever invented for that purpose?

… who feels a personal distaste for free markets, for the triviality of what they so often elevate and the depth of what they let languish, but tolerates them because they’ve done more than anything else to lift up the world’s poor?

… who’s happiest when telling the truth for the cause of social justice … but who, if told to lie for the cause of social justice, will probably choose silence or even, if pushed hard enough, truth?

… who wants to legalize marijuana and psychedelics, and also legalize all the promising treatments currently languishing in FDA approval hell?

… who feels little attraction to the truth-claims of the world’s ancient religions, except insofar as they sometimes serve as prophylactics against newer and now even more virulent religions?

… who thinks the covid response of the CDC, FDA, and other authorities was a historic disgrace—not because it infringed on the personal liberties of antivaxxers or anything like that, but on the contrary, because it was weak, timid, bureaucratic, and slow, where it should’ve been like that of a general at war?

… who thinks the Nazi Holocaust was even worse than the mainstream holds it to be, because in addition to the staggering, one-lifetime-isn’t-enough-to-internalize-it human tragedy, the Holocaust also sent up into smoke whatever cultural process had just produced Einstein, von Neumann, Bohr, Szilard, Born, Meitner, Wigner, Haber, Pauli, Cantor, Hausdorff, Ulam, Tarski, Erdös, and Noether, and with it, one of the wellsprings of our technological civilization?

… who supports free speech, to the point of proudly tolerating views that really, actually disgust them at their workplace, university, or online forum?

… who believes in patriotism, the police, the rule of law, to the extent that they don’t understand why all the enablers of the January 6 insurrection, up to and including Trump, aren’t currently facing trial for treason against the United States?

… who’s (of course) disgusted to the core by Trump and everything he represents, but who’s also disgusted by the elite virtue-signalling hypocrisy that made the rise of a Trump-like backlash figure predictable?

… who not only supports abortion rights, but also looks forward to a near future when parents, if they choose, are free to use embryo selection to make their children happier, smarter, healthier, and free of life-crippling diseases (unless the “bioethicists” destroy that future, as a previous generation of Deep Thinkers destroyed our nuclear future)?

… who, when reading about the 1960s Sexual Revolution, instinctively sides with free-loving hippies and against the scolds … even if today’s scolds are themselves former hippies, or intellectual descendants thereof, who now clothe their denunciations of other people’s gross, creepy sexual desires in the garb of feminism and social justice?

What, finally, do you call someone whose image of an ideal world might include a young Black woman wearing a hijab, an old Orthodox man with black hat and sidecurls, a broad-shouldered white guy from the backwoods of Alabama, and a trans woman with purple hair, face tattoos and a nose ring … all of them standing in front of a blackboard and arguing about what would happen if Alice and Bob jumped into opposite ends of a wormhole?

Do you call such a person “liberal,” “progressive,” “center-left,” “centrist,” “Pinkerite,” “technocratic,” “neoliberal,” “libertarian-ish,” “classical liberal”? Why not simply call them “correct”? 🙂

Here’s yesterday’s clickbait offering from Scientific American, the once-legendary home of Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column:

Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

The sad thing is, I see few signs that this essay was meant as a Sokal-style parody, although in many ways it’s written as one. The essay actually develops a 100% cogent, reasoned argument: namely, that the ideology of the Star Wars films doesn’t easily fit with the new ideology of militant egalitarianism at the expense of all other human values, including irony, humor, joy, and the nurturing of unusual talents. The authors are merely oblivious to the conclusion that most people would draw from their argument: namely, so much the worse for the militant egalitarianism then!

I predict that this proposal—to send the acronym “JEDI” the way of “mankind,” “blacklist,” and, err, “quantum supremacy”—will meet with opposition even from the wokeists themselves, a huge fraction of whom (in my experience) have soft spots for the Star Wars franchise. Recall for example that in 2014, Laurie Penny used Star Wars metaphors in her interesting response to my comment-171, telling male nerds like me that we need to learn to accept that “[we’re] not the Rebel Alliance, [we’re] actually part of the Empire and have been all along.” Admittedly, I’ve never felt like part of an Empire, although I’ll confess to some labored breathing lately when ascending flights of stairs.

As for me, I spent much of my life opposed in principle to Star Wars—I hated how the most successful “science fiction” franchise of all time became that way precisely by ditching any pretense of science and fully embracing mystical woo—but sure, when the chips are down, I’m crazy and radical enough to take the side of Luke Skywalker, even if a team of woke theorists is earnestly, unironically explaining to me that lightsabers are phallocentric and that Vader ranks higher on the intersectional oppression axis because of his breathing problem.

Meantime, of course, the US continues to careen toward its worst Constitutional crisis since the Civil War, as Trump prepares to run again in 2024, and as this time around, the Republicans are systematically purging state governments of their last Brad Raffenspergers, of anyone who might stand in the way of them simply setting aside the vote totals and declaring Trump the winner regardless of the actual outcome. It’s good to know that my fellow progressives have their eyes on the ball—so that when that happens, at least universities will no longer be using offensive acronyms like “JEDI”!

Update: Come to think of it, let’s circle back to the thing about kids under 13 getting banned from taking the SAT, as a ridiculous unintended consequence of some federal regulation. I wonder whether this is a campaign this blog could spearhead that would have an actual chance of making a positive difference in the world (!!), rather than just giving me space to express myself, to vent my impotent rage at the tragic failures of our civilization and the blankfaces who sleep soundly despite knowing that they caused those failures.  What if, like, a whole bunch of us wrote to the College Board, or whatever federal agency enforces the regulation that the College Board is worried about, and we asked them whether a solution might be found in which parents gave permission on the web form for their under-13s to take the SAT, given how memorable this opportunity was for many of us, how it was a nerd rite of passage, and how surely none of us have any wish to deny that opportunity to the next generation, so let’s work together to solve this?

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I’m depressed that, all over the world, the values of the Enlightenment are humiliated and in retreat, while the values of the Taliban are triumphant. The literal Taliban of course, but also a thousand mini-Talibans of every flavor, united in their ideological certainty.

I’m depressed that now and for the future, the image of the United States before the world—deservedly so—is one of desperate Afghans plunging to their deaths from the last airplanes out of Kabul. I’m depressed that, while this historic calamity was set in motion by Donald Trump, the president who bears direct, immediate moral responsibility for it is the one I voted for. And knowing what I know now, I’d still have voted for him—but with an ashen face.

I’m depressed that, on social media, the same people who seven years ago floridly denounced me, because, while explaining how as a young person I overcame the urge to suicide and finally achieved some semblance of a normal life, I made a passing reference to a vanished culture of arranged marriages, to which I seemed better-adapted than to the world of today—these very same people are the ones sagely resigned to millions of Afghan women and girls actually forced into unwanted marriages, tortured, and raped, who explain that there’s nothing the US can or should do about this, even that it was folly to imagine we could impose parochial Western values, like women’s rights, on a culture that doesn’t want them. These are the people who saw fit to lecture me on my feminist failings.

I’m depressed that there’s an exceedingly good chance that both of my kids will get covid, as they’ve returned to school and preschool in Austin, TX, where the Delta variant is raging out of control, new reports of cases among the kids’ schoolmates come almost every day, Daniel has been quarantined at home for the past week because of one such case, there’s no vaccination mandate (and a looming battle over mask mandates), and—crucially, tragically, incredibly—the FDA has not only slow-walked approval of covid vaccines for children under 12, but has pushed back the approval even further than it previously planned, ignoring unprecedented public objections from the American Academy of Pediatrics. The FDA blankfaces have done this in spite of the reality, obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain, that they’re thereby consigning thousands of children to their deaths, that whatever ultra-rare risks the vaccine poses to children are infinitesimal compared to the overwhelming benefit.

Since I worry that I wasn’t clear enough, how about this: in a just world, the FDA in its current form would be dismantled, and all those who needlessly delayed the delivery of covid vaccines to children would be tried for manslaughter [while I still think the case for authorizing covid vaccines for kids right now is overwhelmingly clear, I hereby retract this particular remark, which was based on a factor 5-10 overestimate of the covid mortality risk for kids—for more, see this comment]. The blankfaces have already killed more people through pointlessly delaying the approval of covid vaccines than their agency could plausibly have saved through its entire history: do they need to take the children as well? As far as I’m concerned, those who defend the status quo—those who meet the on-the-ground reality of overflowing pediatric hospitals with obfuscatory words about procedures and best practices and the need for yet more data—are no better either morally or intellectually than the anti-vaxx conspiracy theorists, their rightly-reviled cousins.

As icing on the cake, I’m depressed that the College Board is no longer administering the SAT to children under 13, apparently because of federal regulations—-which means that Johns Hopkins CTY’s famed Study of Exceptional Talent, a program that made a big difference in my life three decades ago, has been suspended indefinitely. Imagine being a nerdy 11-year-old in 2021: no more tracking, no more gifted programs, no more magnet schools, no more acceleration, no getting vaccinated against deadly disease (!!), … oh, and if perchance you felt the urge to take the SAT, just to prove that you could outscore the grownups who decided to impose all this on you, then no, you’re no longer allowed to do that either.

The one bright spot in the endlessly bleak picture is that Daniel, my 4-year-old son, now plays a pretty mean chess game, if not quite at the level of Beth Harmon. Having just learned the rules a few months ago, Daniel now gives me and Dana (admittedly, no one would mistake either of us for Magnus Carlsen) extremely competitive matches; just yesterday he beat several adults in a park. Daniel has come to spend much of his free time (and now that he’s quarantined, he has a lot) playing chess against his iPad and watching chess videos. To be clear, he has very little emotional maturity even for a 4-year-old, and unlike me at the same age, he has no overwhelming passion for numbers or counting, but with chess I’ve finally found a winner. Now I just need to hope that they don’t ban chess-playing for children under 13.

So that’s it, it’s off my chest. Commenters: what else have you got that might cheer me up?

For years, I’ve had a private term I’ve used with my family. To give a few examples of its use:

No, I never applied for that grant. I spent two hours struggling to log in to a web portal designed by the world’s top blankfaces until I finally gave up in despair.

No, I paid for that whole lecture trip out of pocket; I never got the reimbursement they promised. Their blankface administrator just kept sending me back the form, demanding more and more convoluted bank details, until I finally got the hint and dropped it.

No, my daughter Lily isn’t allowed in the swimming pool there. She easily passed their swim test last year, but this year the blankface lifeguard made up a new rule on the spot that she needs to retake the test, so Lily took it again and passed even more easily, but then the lifeguard said she didn’t like the stroke Lily used, so she failed her and didn’t let her retake it. I complained to their blankface athletic director, who launched an ‘investigation.’ The outcome of the ‘investigation’ was that, regardless of the ground truth about how well Lily can swim, their blankface lifeguard said she’s not allowed in the pool, so being blankfaces themselves, they’re going to stand with the lifeguard.

Yeah, the kids spend the entire day indoors, breathing each other’s stale, unventilated air, then they finally go outside and they aren’t allowed on the playground equipment, because of the covid risk from them touching it. Even though we’ve known for more than a year that covid is an airborne disease. Everyone I’ve talked there agrees that I have a point, but they say their hands are tied. I haven’t yet located the blankface who actually made this decision and stands by it.

What exactly is a blankface? He or she is often a mid-level bureaucrat, but not every bureaucrat is a blankface, and not every blankface is a bureaucrat. A blankface is anyone who enjoys wielding the power entrusted in them to make others miserable by acting like a cog in a broken machine, rather than like a human being with courage, judgment, and responsibility for their actions. A blankface meets every appeal to facts, logic, and plain compassion with the same repetition of rules and regulations and the same blank stare—a blank stare that, more often than not, conceals a contemptuous smile.

The longer I live, the more I see blankfacedness as one of the fundamental evils of the human condition. Yes, it contains large elements of stupidity, incuriosity, malevolence, and bureaucratic indifference, but it’s not reducible to any of those. After enough experience, the first two questions you ask about any organization are:

1. Who are the blankfaces here?
2. Who are the people I can talk with to get around the blankfaces?

As far as I can tell, blankfacedness cuts straight across conventional political ideology, gender, and race. (Age, too, except that I’ve never once encountered a blankfaced child.) Brilliance and creativity do seem to offer some protection against blankfacedness—possibly because the smarter you are, the harder it is to justify idiotic rules to yourself—but even there, the protection is far from complete.

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Twenty years ago, all the conformists in my age cohort were obsessed with the Harry Potter books and movies—holding parties where they wore wizard costumes, etc. I decided that the Harry Potter phenomenon was a sort of collective insanity: from what I could tell, the stories seemed like startlingly puerile and unoriginal mass-marketed wish-fulfillment fantasies.

Today, those same conformists in my age cohort are more likely to condemn the Harry Potter series as Problematically white, male, and cisnormative, and J. K. Rowling herself as a monstrous bigot whose acquaintances’ acquaintances should be shunned. Naturally, then, there was nothing for me to do but finally read the series! My 8-year-old daughter Lily and I have been partner-reading it for half a year; we’re just finishing book 5. (After we’ve finished the series, we might start on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality … which, I confess, I’ve also never read.)

From book 5, I learned something extremely interesting. The most despicable villain in the Harry Potter universe is not Lord Voldemort, who’s mostly just a faraway cipher and abstract embodiment of pure evil, no more hateable than an earthquake. Rather, it’s Dolores Jane Umbridge, the toadlike Ministry of Magic bureaucrat who takes over Hogwarts school, forces out Dumbledore as headmaster, and terrorizes the students with increasingly draconian “Educational Decrees.” Umbridge’s decrees are mostly aimed at punishing Harry Potter and his friends, who’ve embarrassed the Ministry by telling everyone the truth that Voldemort has returned and by readying themselves to fight him, thereby defying the Ministry’s head-in-the-sand policy.

Anyway, I’ll say this for Harry Potter: Rowling’s portrayal of Umbridge is so spot-on and merciless that, for anyone who knows the series, I could simply define a blankface to be anyone sufficiently Umbridge-like.

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This week I also finished reading The Premonition, the thrilling account of the runup to covid by Michael Lewis (who also wrote The Big Short, Moneyball, etc). Lewis tells the stories of a few individuals scattered across US health and government bureaucracies who figured out over the past 20 years that the US was breathtakingly unprepared for a pandemic, and who struggled against official indifference, mostly unsuccessfully, to try to fix that. As covid hit the US in early 2020, these same individuals frantically tried to pull the fire alarms, even as the Trump White House, the CDC, and state bureaucrats all did everything in their power to block and sideline them. We all know the results.

It’s no surprise that, in Lewis’s telling, Trump and his goons come in for world-historic blame: however terrible you thought they were, they were worse. It seems that John Bolton, in particular, gleefully took an ax to everything the two previous administrations had done to try to prepare the federal government for pandemics—after Tom Bossert, the one guy in Trump’s inner circle who’d actually taken pandemic preparation seriously, was forced out for contradicting Trump about Russia and Ukraine.

But the left isn’t spared either. The most compelling character in The Premonition is Charity Dean, who escaped from the Christian fundamentalist sect in which she was raised to put herself through medical school and become a crusading public-health officer for Santa Barbara County. Lewis relates with relish how, again and again, Dean startled the bureaucrats around her by taking matters into her own hands in her war against pathogens—e.g., slicing into a cadaver herself to take samples when the people whose job it was wouldn’t do it.

In 2019, Dean moved to Sacramento to become California’s next chief public health officer, but then Governor Gavin Newsom blocked her expected promotion, instead recruiting someone from the outside named Sonia Angell, who had no infectious disease experience but to whom Dean would have to report. Lewis reports the following as the reason:

“It was an optics problem,” says a senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services. “Charity was too young, too blond, too Barbie. They wanted a person of color.” Sonia Angell identified as Latina.

After it became obvious that the White House and the CDC were both asleep at the wheel, the competent experts’ Plan B was to get California to set a national standard, one that would shame all the other states into acting, by telling the truth about covid and by aggressively testing, tracing, and isolating. And here comes the tragedy: Charity Dean spent from mid-January till mid-March trying to do exactly that, and Sonia Angell blocked her. Angell—who comes across as a real-life Dolores Umbridge—banned Dean from using the word “pandemic,” screamed at her for her insubordination, and systematically shut her out of meetings. Angell’s stated view was that, until and unless the CDC said that there was a pandemic, there was no pandemic—regardless of what hospitals across California might be reporting to the contrary.

As it happens, California was the first state to move aggressively against covid, on March 19—basically because as the bodies started piling up, Dean and her allies finally managed to maneuver around Angell and get the ear of Governor Newsom directly. Had the response started earlier, the US might have had an outcome more in line with most industrialized countries. Half of the 630,000 dead Americans might now be alive.

Sonia Angell fully deserves to have her name immortalized by history as one of the blankest of blankfaces. But of course, Angell was far from alone. Robert Redfield, Trump’s CDC director, was a blankface extraordinaire. Nancy Messonnier, who lied to stay in Trump’s good graces, was a blankface too. The entire CDC and FDA seem to have teemed with blankfaces. As for Anthony Fauci, he became a national hero, maybe even deservedly so, merely by not being 100% a blankface, when basically every other “expert” in the US with visible power was. Fauci cleared a depressingly low bar, one that the people profiled by Lewis cleared at Simone-Biles-like heights.

In March 2020, the fundamental question I had was: where are the supercompetent rule-breaking American heroes from the disaster movies? What’s taking them so long? The Premonition satisfyingly answers that question. It turns out that the heroes did exist, scattered across the American health bureaucracy. They were screaming at the top of their lungs. But they were outvoted by the critical mass of blankfaces that’s become one of my country’s defining features.

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Some people will object that the term “blankface” is dehumanizing. The reason I disagree is that a blankface is someone who freely chose to dehumanize themselves: to abdicate their human responsibility to see what’s right in front of them, to act like malfunctioning pieces of electronics even though they, like all of us, were born with the capacity for empathy and reason.

With many other human evils and failings, I have a strong inclination toward mercy, because I understand how someone could’ve succumbed to the temptation—indeed, I worry that I myself might’ve succumbed to it “but for the grace of God.” But here’s the thing about blankfaces: in all my thousands of dealings with them, not once was I ever given cause to wonder whether I might have done the same in their shoes. It’s like, of course I wouldn’t have! Even if I were forced (by my own higher-ups, an intransigent computer system, or whatever else) to foist some bureaucratic horribleness on an innocent victim, I’d be sheepish and apologetic about it. I’d acknowledge the farcical absurdity of what I was making the other person do, or declaring that they couldn’t do. Likewise, even if I were useless in a crisis, at least I’d get out of the way of the people trying to solve it. How could I live with myself otherwise?

The fundamental mystery of the blankfaces, then, is how they can be so alien and yet so common.

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Update (Aug. 3): Surprisingly many people seem to have read this post, and come away with the notion that a “blankface” is simply anyone who’s a stickler for rules and formalized procedures. They’ve then tried to refute me with examples of where it’s good to be a stickler, or where I in particular would believe that it’s good.

But no, that’s not it at all.

Rules can be either good or bad. All things considered, I’d probably rather be on a plane piloted by a robotic stickler for safety rules, than by someone who ignored the rules at his or her discretion. And as I said in the post, in the first months of covid, it was ironically the anti-blankfaces who were screaming for rules, regulations, and lockdowns; the blankfaces wanted to continue as though nothing had changed!

Also, “blankface” (just like “homophobe” or “antisemite”) is a serious accusation. I’d never call anyone a blankface merely for sticking with a defensible rule when it turned out, in hindsight, that the rule could’ve been relaxed.

Here’s how to tell a blankface: suppose you see someone enforcing or interpreting a rule in a way that strikes you as obviously absurd. And suppose you point it out to them.

Do they say “I disagree, here’s why it actually does make sense”? They might be mistaken but they’re not a blankface.

Do they say “tell me about it, it makes zero sense, but it’s above my pay grade to change”? You might wish they were more dogged or courageous but again they’re not a blankface.

Or do they ignore all your arguments and just restate the original rule—seemingly angered by what they understood as a challenge to their authority, and delighted to reassert it? That’s the blankface.