Shtetl-Optimized

Several people asked me to comment on an entry by Hartmut Neven in the Google Research Blog, about using D-Wave’s “quantum” computers for image recognition.

I said nothing: what is there to say?  Didn’t I already spend enough time on this subject for 10⁴⁰⁰ lifetimes?  I want to create, explore, discover things that no one expected—not be some talking-head playing his assigned role in a script, a blogger-pundit who journalists know they can rely on to say “f(X)” whenever X happens.  Even if f(X) is true.  Why can’t I just tell the world what f is and be done with it?

Then more people asked me to comment.

I set the matter aside.  I worked on the complexity problem that’s currently obsessing me.  I met with students, sent recommendation letters, answered emails, went ice-skating with my girlfriend.

Then more people asked me to comment.

And I thought: yes, I believe it’s vital for scientists to communicate with the broader public, not just a few colleagues.  And yes, it’s important for scientists to offer a skeptical perspective on the news—since otherwise, they implicitly cede the field to those making dubious and unsubstantiated claims.  And yes, blogging is a wonderful tool for scientists to connect directly with anyone in the world who’s curious about their work.  But isn’t there some statute of limitations on a given story?  When does it end?  And why me?

Then more people asked me to comment—so I wrote the following only-slightly-fictionalized exchange.

Skeptic: Let me see if I understand correctly.  After three years, you still haven’t demonstrated two-qubit entanglement in a superconducting device (as the group at Yale appears to have done recently)?  You still haven’t explained how your “quantum computer” demos actually exploit any quantum effects?  While some of your employees are authoring or coauthoring perfectly-reasonable papers on various QC topics, those papers still bear essentially zero relation to your marketing hype?  The academic physicists working on superconducting QC—who have no interest in being scooped—still pay almost no attention to you?  So, what exactly has changed since the last ten iterations?  Why are we still talking?

D-Wave: Then you must not have read our latest press release!  Your questions are all obsolete, because now we’re recruiting thousands of volunteers over the Internet to study the power of adiabatic quantum computing!

Onlooker: Hmm, an interesting counterargument!  D-Wave might not be using quantum mechanics, but they are using the Internet!  And their new project even has a cool code-name: “AQUA@home”!  So, skeptic, how do you respond to that?

Skeptic (distractedly): You know, when I was eight years old, and dreamed of building starships and artificial intelligences in my basement, my first order of business was always to invent code-names—not just for the projects themselves, but for every little subcomponent of them.  The second order of business was to think through the marketing aspects.  What should the robot look like?  What recreational facilities should be available on the starship, and what color should it be painted?  It really, genuinely felt like I was making concrete progress toward realizing my plans.  Sure, the engine and control system still needed to be built, but at least I had code-names and “design specs”!  How many others had even gotten that far?

D-Wave: Who cares?  This isn’t some children’s game.  Keep in mind that we’re delivering a product—serving our customers, by solving the 4-by-4 Sudoku puzzles they rely on to keep their businesses running.

Skeptic: We’ve been through this how many times?  A pigeon can probably be trained to solve 4-by-4 Sudokus.  So the only relevant questions concern the details of how you solve them.  For example, how do you encode a problem instance?  How much of the work is done in the encoding procedure itself?  What evidence do you have for quantum coherence at intermediate points of the computation?  Can you measure an entanglement witness, to give people confidence that you’re doing something other than classical simulated annealing?

Onlooker: Hmm, those do seem like important questions…

D-Wave: But they’re based on outdated premises!  Today, we’re pleased to announce that, using what might be a quantum computer, and might also be a noisy, probabilistic classical computer, we can solve 5-by-5 Sudoku puzzles!

Onlooker: Whoa, awesome!  So we’re back to square one then.  As long as D-Wave’s demos only involved 4-by-4 Sudokus, the skeptic’s arguments almost had me persuaded.  But 5-by-5?  I don’t know what to think anymore.  Skeptic, where are you?  What’s your reaction to this latest development?

Skeptic: …

D-Wave: That silence you hear is the sound of the skeptic’s worldview crashing all around him!  But we haven’t even played our top card yet.  Today, we’re positively ecstatic to announce that we’ve entered into an official-sounding partnership with GOOGLE, Inc. (or anyway, with someone who works at Google Research).  Together, we’re harnessing the power of quantum adiabatic optimization to create the next generation of car-recognition systems!

Onlooker: WOW!  This debate is over, then.  I confess: D-Wave on its own did seem a bit flaky to me.  But Google is the company born without sin.  Everything they do, have done, and will ever do is perfect by definition—from building the search engine that changed the world, to running mail servers that only fail for an insignificant 0.001% of users, to keeping the Chinese people safe from lies.  And, as Google is infallible, so too its 20,000 diverse employees—who are encouraged to spend 20% of their time on high-risk, exploratory projects—have nevertheless failed to come up with a single idea that didn’t pan out.  Skeptic, show your face!  Will you admit that, through grit, moxie, old-fashioned Canadian inventiveness, and the transformative power of the Internet, D-Wave has finally achieved what the naysayers said was impossible—namely, getting someone from Google Research to coauthor a paper with them?

Skeptic: Yes.  I concede!  D-Wave wins, and I hereby retire as skeptic.  In particular, the next time D-Wave announces something, there’s no need to ask me for my reaction.  I’ll be busy tending to my own project, codenamed ARGHH@home, which consists of banging my head against a brick wall.

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In a New York Times column that exemplifies the highest instincts of science journalism, Dennis Overbye writes about two physicists’ idea that creating a Higgs boson is so abhorrent to the universe that backwards-in-time causal influences have conspired to prevent humans from seeing one—first by causing Congress to cancel the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993, and more recently by causing the faulty electrical connections that have delayed the startup of the LHC.  (For reactions, see pretty much any science blog.  Peter Woit writes that, with the exception of a defense by Sean Carroll, “pretty much all of [the blog chatter] has been unremittingly hostile, when not convinced that these papers must be some sort of joke.”)

One of the originators of the theory, Holger Bech Nielsen, sounded familiar, so I looked him up.  It turns out I once heard him lecture about a plan to predict the specific masses and coupling constants of the Standard Model, by starting from the assumption that the laws of physics were “chosen randomly” (from which distribution was never exactly clear).  It struck me at the time that we had a shnood among shnoods here, a leader in the field of aggressively-wrong physics.

However, I didn’t know at the time about Nielsen and his collaborator Masao Ninomiya’s universe-conspiring-to-stop-the-LHC proposal.  Mulling over the new theory, I realized that it has the ring of truth about it.  Specifically, assuming (as I do) that Nielsen and Nanomiya are correct, their theory can explain an bigger deeper mystery than why we haven’t yet seen a Higgs boson: namely, why haven’t I blogged for a month?  Why, when there’s plenty to blog about … when I just spent two weeks at the Kavli Institute in Santa Barbara for their special semester on quantum computing, when I’m now at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, for an exciting, lower-bound-packed workshop on algebraic methods in computational complexity?

Clearly, the universe itself must have decided last month that this blog was so abhorrent to it, it would employ quantum postselection effects to force me to procrastinate whenever I would otherwise have posted something.  An obvious corollary is that, if I do manage to post something nevertheless, it will bring about the immediate end of the universe.

The beautiful thing about science is that theories of this kind can be tested by observation.  So:

3 …

2 …

1 …

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Yesterday DJ Strouse, a student in MIT’s quantum computing summer school, pointed me to A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart, the most blistering indictment of K-12 “math” education I’ve ever encountered.

Lockhart says pretty much everything I’ve wanted to say about this subject since the age of twelve, and does so with the thunderous rage of an Old Testament prophet.  If you like math, and more so if you think you don’t like math, I implore you to read his essay with every atom of my being.

Which is not to say I don’t have a few quibbles:

1. I think Lockhart gives too much credit to the school system when he portrays the bureaucratization, hollowing-out, and general doofusication of knowledge as unique to math.  In my experience, science, literature, and other fields are often butchered with quite as much gusto.  Not until grad school, for example, had I sufficiently recovered from eleventh-grade English to give Shakespeare another try (or from Phys Ed do push-ups).

2. Lockhart doesn’t discuss the many ways motivated students can and do end up learning what math is, despite the best efforts of the school system to prevent it.  These side-channels include the web, the books of Martin Gardner, recreational programming, and math competitions and camps.  Obviously it’s no defense of an execrable system to point out how some people learn in spite of it—but these omissions make the overall picture too depressing even for me (which is really saying something).

3. In describing math purely as a soul-uplifting pursuit of beautiful patterns, Lockhart leaves open the question of why, in that case, it’s been in bed with science and technology throughout its history—not merely for the education bureaucrats but for Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss.  (Of course, like most relationships, this one is not without its sniping feuds.)  Personally I have no problem with teachers who want to recognize and celebrate that aspect of math, provided the students respond to it.  “So you say you want theorems that are not only beautiful, but also inspired by physics or economics or cryptography?  Line up then, because here comes a heaping helping of them…”

4. Lockhart doesn’t address an interesting problem that’s arisen in my own teaching over the last few years.  Namely, what happens when you try to teach as he advocates—with history and philosophy and challenging puzzles and arguments about the definitions and improvisation and digressions—but the students want more structure and drill and routine?  Should you deny it to them?  (For myself, I concluded that brains come in different types, and that it would be presumptuous to assume a teaching style that wouldn’t work for me can’t possibly work for anyone else.  Still, before beginning a traditional rote drill session, it’s probably a good idea for all parties involved to agree on a safe-word.)

In the end, Lockhart’s lament is subversive, angry, and radical … but if you know anything about math and anything about K-12 “education” (at least in the United States), I defy you to read it and find a single sentence that isn’t permeated, suffused, soaked, and encrusted with truth.

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Update (April 4): I just finished reading Postmodern Pooh by Frederick Crews—a hilarious spoof of modern literary criticism, by someone who was the chair of Berkeley’s English department and understands the theories he’s ridiculing as well as anyone. I actually found Crews’ fake Marxist, feminist, and deconstructionist exegeses of Winnie the Pooh far more persuasive than the “serious” scholarship he “reverently” quotes.  Crews seems to be breathing life into straw opponents here: making the obscurantist literary theories much more sensible and interesting than they really are, in order to give himself some challenge knocking them down. (The real fun comes when his intentionally goofy arguments start working on you—when you yourself can no longer read innocent passages about Eeyore, Piglet, and Tigger without seeing the simmering sexual innuendo and class struggle.)  For anyone who likes the sort of books I discuss in this post, I recommend Postmodern Pooh in the strongest terms.

Several commenters on my last post asked why I’d waste time with Atlas Shrugged, given its evident flaws.  The reason is simple: because when there’s so little literature that gets emotional about rationality, you’re tempted to take what you can.  Throughout history, the weapons of art—poetry, literature, movies—have been deployed mercilessly against scientists, engineers, and anyone else so naïve or simplistic as to think there are “right” and “wrong” answers.  Other times, a work of literature will praise “scientists,” but the science itself will be cringeworthy—and worse yet, the juvenile humor at the core of how science works will be absent, replaced by a wooden earnestness more in line with the writer’s preconceptions.  Occasionally, though, what you might call the “satiric rationalist impulse” (if you were writing a PhD thesis about it) has found superb expression in literature.  So in this post, I’d like to celebrate a few literary works that exemplify what appealed to me about Ayn Rand as a teenager—but do so without Rand’s shrill libertarianism, suspicion of modern science, or deification of Nietszchean quasi-rapist supermen.At the head of the list is the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei.  I submit that Galileo’s greatest contribution here was not his account of how it could be possible for the Earth to go around the Sun even though we don’t feel the Earth’s motion.  For that achievement was far surpassed by his creation of Simplicio: the amiable doofus (standing in for scholastic astronomers) who answers Salviati’s patient explanations with pompous Latin phrases and quotations from Aristotle.  Apparently the main reason Galileo was hauled before the Inquisition was not his scientific arguments, which the Church assumed most people wouldn’t understand or care about anyway.  Rather, Pope Urban VIII was outraged that Galileo put his (the Pope’s) own arguments about the limits of empirical thinking into the mouth of Simplicio.I find it interesting that Galileo’s dialogues are almost never assigned in high schools, despite being not merely among the most influential works of all time, but also uproariously funny.  Why is that?  After 400 years, is the parody still too barbed for some people’s taste?

Next on the list is Huckleberry Finn.  Unlike Galileo’s dialogues, this one is assigned in American high schools.  But the final chapters—the ones where Tom Sawyer proposes increasingly elaborate and fanciful schemes to rescue Jim, rejecting as insufferably naïve Huck’s idea of simply going to the shed and freeing him—tend to be downplayed or denigrated as comic fluff that detracts from the novel’s Deep Important Message.  (It’s fun to imagine critics scratching their heads in bewilderment: what could Twain have been trying to say in the final chapters?  Surely he wasn’t questioning the value of obfuscating the obvious?)

As far as I know, the only person ever to win a Nobel Prize in Literature for writing that was explicitly anti-obscurantist was Bertrand Russell.  (Orwell might have gotten one had he lived longer; maybe a case could also be made for Churchill.)  In retrospect, Russell’s clarity seems to have been a serious mistake: had he learned to write as cryptically as his student Wittgenstein, his reputation today would’ve been vastly greater.  Alas, more recent “public rationalists”—such as Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Richard Feynman, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins—have repeated Russell’s mistake of boringly saying what they mean, and for that reason, have failed to produce any serious literature.

Any list of the world’s great anti-pomposity literature has to include Sokal’s Social Text hoax.  But since the amount of ink already spilled about that illustrious hoax can only be explained using noncommutative (and hence nonlinear) chaos theory, let me address postmodernism using a more recent and less conventional choice: an interview with Priya Venkatesan conducted by The Dartmouth Review.  For those with better things to do than follow academic blogs, Venkatesan is a former instructor at Dartmouth College who’s announced that she’s suing the students in her freshman writing seminar for harassment because they (1) argued with her ideas, (2) asked too many impertinent questions about French critical theory and deconstructionism, (3) didn’t accord her sufficient respect as someone with both a Masters and a PhD, and (4) submitted poor teaching evaluations.  I know, it sounds like something some right-wing commentator would make up—which is why reading Venkatesan at length, in her own words, is so fascinating.  The reason I put this interview on my list is not Venkatesan herself (eloquent though she is), but her interviewer, Tyler Brace.  Brace seems acutely aware of his historical responsibility in interviewing this real-life Simplicio: the polite, faux-naïve questions give Venkatesan ample rope to hang not only herself, but (in my opinion) an entire academic subculture that made her possible.

My last entrant into the snarky rationalist canon is the recent poem Storm by Tim Minchin (see here for the YouTube version).  It far surpasses my own feeble attempt at this sort of poetry: When I Heard the Learn’d Poet, which I wrote in 11^th-grade English.

Look, there’s an obvious paradox in the idea of “rationalist literature.”  Almost by definition, people who like rationality are going to want to write dry, methodical arguments, rather than novels or poems that bypass the neocortex and directly engage the emotions.  But the consequence is that they’ll tend to cede the emotional field without contest to the woo merchants.  If you want to defend yourself against obscurantist sharks, you need to enter the dark waters where the sharks live.  That’s why, in my view, the rare efforts to do that—to right the historical imbalance, to sing Modus Ponens from the rooftops—are actually worth something.  If you know of other good literature in this category, let me know in the comments section.

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The above is a question that’s interested me for as long as I can remember, though I avoided blogging about it until now.  See, unlike many libertarian economist Ayn-Rand types, I don’t actually like asking social or political questions the very asking of which marks you as eccentric and Aspergerish.  I’d rather apply myself to proving lower bounds, popularizing quantum mechanics, or other tasks that are (somewhat) more respected by the society I depend on for my dinner.  And I’d rather pick battles, like evolution or climate change, where truth and justice have well-connected allies on their side and a non-negligible chance of winning.  For years, I’ve been studying the delicate art of keeping my mouth shut when what I have to say will be deeply unpopular—and despite lapses, I’ve actually made a great deal of progress since (let’s say) the age of 14.

There are times, though, when a question strikes such an emotional chord with me that I break down and ask it in spite of everything.  Such a case was provoked by this story in the New York Times a few weeks ago (registration required), about a 17-year-old girl who was jailed for creating a MySpace page.

At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.

Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.

She was handcuffed and taken away as her stunned parents stood by.

“I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare,” said Hillary, 17, who was sentenced in 2007. “All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing.”

The answers became a bit clearer on Thursday as the judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

The article expresses disapproval about the corruption of the judge and the severity of the sentence, but seems completely unfazed by the idea of an American citizen standing before a judge to answer for a satirical website.  And this is actually understandable given the context.  While children’s rights law is a notoriously murky area, it seems fair to say that children’s “individual rights” (free speech, due process, etc.) are generally thin to nonexistent, certainly in the US and probably elsewhere too.  So for example, if Ms. Transue had been punished by her school rather than a court for setting up her website, it probably wouldn’t even have been news.

The law strikes me as inconsistent in its attitude toward minors: first it denies them individual rights, on the ground that they’re not yet capable of exercising moral judgment.  But then it punishes them harshly for all sorts of offenses (in many cases more harshly than adults), thereby presupposing the moral responsibility they’re not yet supposed to have.

Now, if I had political capital to spend, I would not want to spend it on children’s rights, just as I wouldn’t want to spend it on legalizing marijuana.  In both cases, I’m guessing that lions will embrace vegetarianism and the polynomial hierarchy will collapse to the 23^rd level before American law changes significantly.  But I’ve also noticed an interesting difference between the two issues.  In the case of marijuana, almost every brainful person I’ve met (whether “liberal” or “conservative”) has agreed that the current American laws are an absurdity; that all the power is on one side of the issue while all the evidence and arguments are on the other side; and that eventually, one imagines this will all be as obvious to everyone as it’s obvious today (say) that contraceptives should be legal.  It’s just a question of time, of the regrettable generations-long delay between the inarguable and the acted-upon.

By contrast, when it comes to granting legal rights to children, people whose intelligence I respect seem compelled to give really bad arguments for the status quo—arguments that (so to speak) a 12-year-old could demolish.   (I know of only two famous intellectuals who’ve publicly advocated changing things: the educator John Holt and the quantum computing pioneer David Deutsch.  Anyone know of others?)

For simplicity, let’s restrict attention to the question of whether suffrage should be extended to a large class of people under 18: either by lowering the voting age (say, to 12 or 14), or better yet (in my view), by giving any citizen the vote once he or she reaches a certain age or passes a test of basic civics knowledge analogous to a driver’s-ed or citizenship test.  (Just like with the plurality voting system, showing that the current rule is terrible is the easy part; figuring out the best among many possible better rules to replace it is the harder and more interesting problem.)

I’ll also restrict attention to the US, even though most of the discussion applies more broadly.  Finally, I’ll use the word “children” to mean “children and teenagers”; I like it more than legal terms like “minors” or “people under 18.”

As John Stuart Mill pointed out in The Subjection of Women, it’s not clear how you make an affirmative case against a form of discrimination: pretty much all you can do is stand around, wait for people to suggest pro-discrimination arguments, and then answer them.

People say: should toddlers have the vote?  Should embryos?  You have to draw a line somewhere!  But the real question is: granting that one has to draw a line, granting that any line will be arbitrary and unfair, can’t one at least make it vastly, manifestly less unfair than the current line?  To give two examples: if you can be imprisoned for a crime, shouldn’t you be able to vote?  If you can demonstrate knowledge of American politics and history well beyond that of the average voter, shouldn’t you be able to vote?  (In 1971, the 26^th Amendment lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, on the ground that anyone who can be drafted into the military should be able to vote.  It seems to me that one can take that same logic much further.)

People say: if you want to grant the vote to sufficiently knowledgeable children, then shouldn’t you also take it away from sufficiently ignorant adults?  Well, it’s going to be quite a while before the glorious age of the intellectual meritocracy, when all shall submit willingly to Plato’s philosopher-kings.  And before that happens, we’ll have probably all upgraded ourselves to post-Einsteinian superintelligences anyway, by downloading the requisite applet from the iBrain store—so the question of what to do with the ignoramuses will be moot.  Until that day, I’m content to imagine something that’s merely politically impossible (like giving the vote to anyone over 18 and to all knowledgeable minors), rather than 2 to the politically impossible power.
(Notice also that slippery-slope arguments get invoked every time any new step away from medieval morality is on the table: if we legalize gay marriage, then don’t we also need to legalize polygamy, etc. etc.  Again, the fact that any rule we can think of is imperfect, doesn’t imply that some rules we can think of wouldn’t be much better than the current ones.)

People say: if you’re going to grant votes to some children and not others on the basis of a test, isn’t that elitist?  But why isn’t the driver’s-ed test or the citizenship test given to immigrants similarly elitist?

People say: even supposing they can pass some test, doesn’t everyone know that children are too immature and unwise to be entrusted with awesome burden of democracy?  Ah, and who are the mature, wise elders, those paragons of Enlightenment rationality, who twice elected George W. Bush?  If minors could vote, wouldn’t Bush have almost certainly lost both times—thereby averting (or at least mitigating) the global disaster from which we’re now struggling to recover?  Or was that a fluke: a case of the young disproportionately getting the right answer by accident, while the older and wiser made one of their rare mistakes?  Or am I being ‘reductive’ and ‘simplistic’?  Does our belief in the political immaturity of the young belong to that special category of truths, the ones too profound to be confronted by data or experience?

People say: but children only care about the present; they lack foresight.  But isn’t it children pressuring their parents to worry about climate change and the Amazon rainforest, more often than the other way around?  And isn’t that just what you’d expect, if children formed a self-interested bloc much like any other; if they grasped (some clearly, others less so) that they’d eventually run the planet, and if they consequently cared more rather than less about the distant future? So if—like me and many others—you see excessive short-term focus as the central tragedy of politics, then shouldn’t you be chomping at the bit to let more young people vote?

People say: but children will just vote however their parents tell them to.  But to whatever extent this is true, doesn’t it undercut the previous fears, of immature brats voting in Mickey Mouse for president?  And if millions of wives in conservative parts of the country still vote however their husbands tell them to, is that an argument for denying those wives the vote?  And don’t most people of every age simply vote their demographics?

People say: but only a tiny minority of precocious, high-IQ children could possibly care about voting—and while you might have a point in their case, you ignore the 99% of children who only care about the latest Hannah Montana accessory.  But if less than 1% of Americans want to run for Congress, or file a Freedom of Information Act request, or do computer security research that’s outlawed by the DMCA, does that make those rights unimportant?  At the risk of the usual charge—elitism—doesn’t the tiny minority that cares about such things tend to have a disproportionate impact on everyone else?

Also, suppose that in Victorian England, only a tiny percentage of women cared about politics rather than the latest in corsets and garden mazes: should that have carried much weight as an argument against women’s suffrage?  What if the denial of rights to a whole class of people is a reason why many in that class focus on trivialities, rather than the other way around?

People say: but it’s obvious that children shouldn’t vote, because they’re not economically self-sufficient.  Again, wouldn’t it save time to pass these arguments through the “Victorian England / women’s suffrage” filter before making them, rather than after?

People say: ah, but there’s no comparison between the two cases, since unlike Victorian women, children will be able to vote once they’re old enough.  Right, and what about the children who die before they’re 18?  Even ignoring those cases, is it obvious that it’s okay to deny people their fundamental rights, provided that those people, in turn, will someday get to deny fundamental rights to others?

People say: at any rate, denying the vote to children doesn’t seem to have any particularly bad consequences.  I wish I agreed; the reasons why I don’t are really a topic for another post.  Briefly, though, I think our culture’s insistence on treating children as children even after those children are ready to be treated as adults is

1. weird from the standpoint of anthropology and evolutionary psychology,
2. an excellent prescription for turning out adults who still think the way children are supposed to,
3. a useful tool for cracking down on unwanted precocity of all kinds, and
4. a terrific way to make up for the unfortunate encroachments these past few centuries of justice, civilized behavior, and protections for the nerdy and weak, by keeping human beings in such a savage environment for the first years of their lives that by the time they’re let out, the new Enlightenment nonsense has difficulty gaining a foothold.

(For more on similar themes, see Paul Graham’s justly-celebrated essay Why Nerds Are Unpopular, or my Return to the Beehive.)  The denial of suffrage is just a small part of the story—nowhere near the most important part—but it works as an example.

Finally people say: that’s just the way things are.  This argument—also useful for justifying chattel slavery if you happen to live in 1845—is, at last, a sound one. I agree with it and accept it.  Because of this argument, I’ll now admit that this entire post has been nothing more than an intellectual exercise, a way for me to procrastinate from answering email.  I don’t actually believe any of what I wrote—nor, for that matter, do I believe anything.  Still, purely out of academic curiosity, I’d be interested to know: are there any other arguments for the legal status of Hillary Transue, besides its being the way things are?

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Most Respected Profeser Sir Dr. Scot Andersen: I wish to join your esteemed research group. I have taken two courses in Signal Processing at the Technical College of Freedonia; thus, it is clear that I would be a perfect fit for your laboratory at MIT. Please respond immediately with a specific date for the commencement of my studies.

Scott, did you hear the news yet?? There's a link on Slashdot about how to solve NP-complete problems in linear time using Peanut M&M's! There's also an interview with Dr. Doofus McRoofus in New Scientist, where he says quantum computing proves the reality of time travel! Plus, a mathematician at the University of Trivialshire has apparently announced a new number system where you can take not only square roots, but also the square roots of square roots! What do you think about all these developments? Please blog your reaction ASAP!

Dr. Aaronson, while your writings are of some interest, you have nevertheless a great deal to learn from my more refined insight and sagacity. In particular, your references to the so-called "theory of evolution" are surprisingly naïve and simplistic. You seem wholly unaware of the profound conundrum of how a system with a low degree of order can obtain progressively higher degrees of order, in direct contradistinction to the Second Law of Thermodynamics... [17 pages omitted] Please let me know when you will be available to enter into a sustained dialogue about the flawed presuppositions underlying empirical positivism.

Hello, I am interested in leaning about computer science !! Please give me some links to get started.

Brief responses here. Back in the day, I prided myself on answering emails individually, and vowed I’d never become the sort of academic who puts an FAQ on his home page and tells people to read it before emailing him. And I kept that vow — three whole months into starting a faculty job.

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Needing a token of my years in Waterloo, I figured it was finally time to trade in my Pleistocene Nokia phone for a BlackBerry. So I used some of my startup funds to buy a BlackBerry 8830 World Edition from Verizon. What particularly excited me about this model was that it was advertised as having a built-in GPS receiver — meaning (or so I thought) that I’d be able to pull up Google Maps wherever I was, and never get lost again.

Well, today the phone arrived, and I found out that Verizon has disabled the GPS (see here, here, and here). The reason, apparently, is that at some unknown time in the future, it plans to sell an inferior navigation service for $10/month, and doesn’t want people getting for free what it will later rip them off for.

I’ve been having fun imagining the conversation between Mike Lazaridis (the founder of Research in Motion, the Waterloo-based company that makes BlackBerries) and Verizon:

Lazaridis: It’s an abomination! As long as I draw breath, I’ll never agree to your crippling my invention!

Verizon CEO (breathing heavily): Young Lazaridis, come over to the Dark Side.

Lazaridis (pause): Actually, how much are you offering? I’ve been needing cash, ever since blowing all those millions on the Perimeter Institute and the Institute for Quantum Computing…

Some will say I’m a sucker, buyer beware, etc. The more sympathetic will call me a victim of false advertising — indeed, of the exact sort of corporate behavior that my best friend Alex Halderman and his adviser Ed Felten have battled for years with some spectacular successes.

Recently I attended a talk by the legendary free-software activist Richard Stallman, who thundered like an Old Testament prophet about human beings’ inalienable right to understand, modify, and share the technology they own. At the time I agreed with Stallman intellectually but found him a bit obsessive. Now I have my own dog in this fight.

I’ve always known that American cell phone companies are evil: they have shitty, unreliable networks, enormous advertising budgets, and miniscule R&D budgets. But Verizon has taken things to a level even I wouldn’t have predicted.

We’re not living in anything close to the efficient market dreamed of by my economist friends like Robin Hanson. The invisible hand has palsy and four missing fingers. And the proof is that, when a company like Verizon pulls a Monty Burns, there’s almost no risk it runs — almost nothing it fears. Indeed, about the only risk it does run is that some of its customers might have blogs — and that some of the savvier readers of those blogs might figure out how to hack the crippled phones and share that information with the world…

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Today’s topic is one I was hoping I could avoid, since I know that my stance will alienate many of my own supporters. But after I read the comments on this post by Bill Gasarch, and reflected on all the men, women, and children who were dispossessed of their land while the world did nothing, I realized I could no longer remain silent.

Most of you will know what I’m talking about, but for those who don’t: I urge the readers of this blog to join me in severing all academic ties with the settler state of New Zealand, until that state makes complete restitution for its historic crimes against the Maori people. That means no more giving seminars at the University of Auckland. No more reading papers with “ac.nz” in the author’s email address. Indeed, no more involvement with any physics or climate research in Antarctica, the flights to which leave from Christchurch.

Some will say my proposed boycott smacks of anti-Kiwi prejudice. But in reality, some of my best friends are Kiwis. Furthermore, I hope and expect that those Kiwis who care about justice will embrace my proposal, for the chance it affords their rogue state to confront the lies and denial upon which it was founded.

Others will ask: if we’re going to boycott Kiwi scientists over the dispossession of the Maori, then why not boycott Australian scientists over the aboriginals, Chinese scientists over the Tibetans, or American scientists over the Native Americans, Iraqis, Vietnamese, or Guatemalans? I trust, however, that sensible people will recognize this question for the Kiwi diversionary tactic that it is. For what could Australia, China, or the US possibly have to do with New Zealand? Until the Kiwis acknowledge that the issue is them and only them, there is no hope for progress.

Even in a world rife with violence and despair, I can think of no single issue with a greater claim upon our conscience. And that is why I ask again: who will join me in severing all academic ties with New Zealand?

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If you reject an overwhelming consensus on some issue in the hard sciences — whether it’s evolution, general relativity, climate change, or anything else — this blog is an excellent place to share your concerns with the world. Indeed, you’re even welcome to derail discussion of completely unrelated topics by posting lengthy rants against the academic orthodoxy — the longer and angrier the better! However, if you wish to do this, I respectfully ask that you obey the following procedure:

1. Publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal setting out the reasons for your radical departure from accepted science.
2. Reference the paper in your rant.

If you attempt to skip to the “rant” part without going through this procedure, your comments may be deleted without warning. Repeat offenders will be permanently banned from the blog. Life is short. I make no apologies.

Scott Aaronson
Rebel for the Scientific Consensus

Update (4/11): I am, of course, under no illusions whatsoever that my requirement of having published a relevant peer-reviewed paper will eliminate all tinfoil-hat rants from the comments section. My hope, rather, is that it will make those rants that I do receive more interesting and original.

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Look, I promise this will be the last D-Wave post in a while. But there have been two developments that, as Planet Earth’s primary D-Wave skepticism clearinghouse, I feel a duty to report.

First, Jason Pontin’s article in the Sunday New York Times has appeared. It’s not perfect, but to get in a description of quantum computing that was even somewhat accurate required a long, word-by-word and phrase-by-phrase battle with the editors of the business section.

Second, Umesh Vazirani sent me a document summarizing the skeptical case against D-Wave, which anyone coming to this blog from the Tech Review or New York Times might find helpful. (Hey, as long as you’re here, stick around for a bit!) I’ve posted Umesh’s criticisms below.

Finally, Happy Easter from all of us here in the shtetl!

Reasons To Be Skeptical About D-Wave’s Claims

by Guest Blogger Umesh Vazirani

1. An Unconvincing Demo: D-wave’s demo consisted of a computer in a box that could solve simple problems. We have no way of knowing whether the computer in the box was an ordinary classical computer or a quantum computer. For the problem the computer solves — finding ground states for 16 bit Ising problems — a classical computer would work just as quickly. This demo is the only public evidence D-wave has presented in support of its claims.

2. A Physics Breakthrough?: Achieving 16 coherent superconducting quantum bits would be quite a breakthrough. Physicists working on superconducting qubits have not been able to achieve more than two coherent quantum bits in the lab. In the absence of evidence from D-Wave that their 16 qubits are coherent, scientists are understandably skeptical. If D-Wave’s qubits are not coherent, as many scientists suspect, their computer would be classical, not quantum. This would still be consistent with the results of the demo, since the decohering qubits would act like classical random bits, and the adiabatic computer would act like a classical computer implementing simulated annealing, which would be quite fast for a small 16 bit Ising problem. It is possible to test the quantum states of D-Wave’s computer for coherence, but Geordie Rose’s statements suggest that no such tests have been made.

3. Claims of Big Algorithmic Breakthrough Without Evidence: 16-bit quantum computers are useless from a practical standpoint because they can only solve very small problems that could just as easily be solved using a classical computer. Thus, D-Wave’s demo, even if it really was a quantum computer, will only be practically useful if the technology will scale to the larger problems that cannot be solved with a classical computer. Unless D-Wave has made a major algorithmic breakthrough as well as a major practical one, however, D-Wave’s computer, even if implemented with thousands of qubits, will not provide a speedup over classical computers. D-Wave does not implement a general purpose quantum computer, only one that can implement adiabatic optimization. They wish to use it to solve the Ising model, which is thought to be beyond the reach of classical computers, but there is no known efficient algorithm for solving the Ising model using this adiabatic approach. It is possible to achieve a quadratic speedup for unstructured search problems using adiabatic optimization, but that result requires an ability to tune the rate of the adiabatic process — something which appears to researchers to be extremely hard if not impossible for the Ising problem. Geordie Rose’s public statements suggest that he doesn’t understand this issue, which makes computer scientists skeptical that any breakthrough has been made.

To summarize: For D-Wave to achieve a practically useful quantum computer using their technology, they would have to have made a breakthrough in physics, as well as a breakthrough in the design of their algorithm. Scientists are skeptical both because D-Wave has failed to provide any supporting evidence, and also because their public statements suggest a lack of understanding of the issues involved.

You might ask why researchers are putting so much energy into debunking the D-Wave hype. One reason is that QC researchers feel a responsibility to the public to not overhype quantum computers. Quantum computing is an exciting field that has caught the imagination of the public. This is a good thing. But if the quantum computing effort starts to mingle fact with fiction, then the entire effort loses its credibility.

Another reason is that D-Wave’s unsupported claims are undermining the efforts of the researchers who are working very hard on these problems. It’s as if there was a new biotech company claiming to be at the brink of a revolutionary cure for cancer. If it is true, it is great, but if it’s not, then it undermines the efforts of the legitimate cancer researchers.

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