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A week ago I attended LessOnline, a rationalist blogging conference featuring many people I’ve known for years—Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Zvi Mowshowitz, Sarah Constantin, Carl Feynman—as well as people I’ve known only online and was delighted to meet in person, like Joe Carlsmith and Jacob Falkovich and Daniel Reeves. The conference was at Lighthaven, a bewildering maze of passageways, meeting-rooms, sleeping quarters, gardens, and vines off Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, which has recently emerged as the nerd Shangri-La, or Galt’s Gulch, or Shire, or whatever. I did two events at this year’s LessOnline: a conversation with Nate Soares about the Orthogonality Thesis, and an ask-me-anything session about quantum computing and theoretical computer science (no new ground there for regular consumers of my content).

What I’ll remember most from LessOnline is not the sessions, mine or others’, but the unending conversation among hundreds of people all over the grounds, which took place in parallel with the sessions and before and after them, from morning till night (and through the night, apparently, though I’ve gotten too old for that). It felt like a single conversational archipelago, the largest in which I’ve ever taken part, and the conference’s real point. (Attendees were exhorted, in the opening session, to skip as many sessions as possible in favor of intense small-group conversations—not only because it was better but also because the session rooms were too small.)

Within the conversational blob, just making my way from one building to another could take hours. My mean free path was approximately five feet, before someone would notice my nametag and stop me with a question. Here was my favorite opener:

“You’re Scott Aaronson?! The quantum physicist who’s always getting into arguments on the Internet, and who’s essentially always right, but who sustains an unreasonable amount of psychic damage in the process?”

“Yes,” I replied, not bothering to correct the “physicist” part.

One night, I walked up to Scott Alexander, who sitting on the ground, with his large bald head and a blanket he was using as a robe, resembled a monk. “Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked.

I replied, “you know, after all these years of being coy about it, I think I’m finally ready to become a Rationalist. Is there, like, an initiation ritual or something?”

Scott said, “Oh, you were already initiated a decade ago; you just didn’t realize it at the time.” Then he corrected himself: “two decades ago.”

The first thing I did, after coming out as a Rationalist, was to get into a heated argument with Other Scott A., Joe Carlsmith, and other fellow-Rationalists about the ideas I set out twelve years ago in my Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine essay. Briefly, my argument was that the irreversibility and ephemerality of biological life, which contrasts with the copyability, rewindability, etc. of programs running on digital computers, and which can ultimately be traced back to microscopic details of the universe’s initial state, subject to the No-Cloning Theorem of quantum mechanics, which then get chaotically amplified during brain activity … might be a clue to a deeper layer of the world, one that we understand about as well as the ancient Greeks understood Newtonian physics, but which is the layer where mysteries like free will and consciousness will ultimately need to be addressed.

I got into this argument partly because it came up, but partly also because this seemed like the biggest conflict between my beliefs and the consensus of my fellow Rationalists. Maybe part of me wanted to demonstrate that my intellectual independence remained intact—sort of like a newspaper that gets bought out by a tycoon, and then immediately runs an investigation into the tycoon’s corruption, as well as his diaper fetish, just to prove it can.

The funny thing, though, is that all my beliefs are the same as they were before. I’m still a computer scientist, an academic, a straight-ticket Democratic voter, a liberal Zionist, a Jew, etc. (all identities, incidentally, well-enough represented at LessOnline that I don’t even think I was the unique attendee in the intersection of them all).

Given how much I resonate with what the Rationalists are trying to do, why did it take me so long to identify as one?

Firstly, while 15 years ago I shared the Rationalists’ interests, sensibility, and outlook, and their stances on most issues, I also found them bizarrely, inexplicably obsessed with the question of whether AI would soon become superhumanly powerful and change the basic conditions of life on earth, and with how to make the AI transition go well. Why that, as opposed to all the other sci-fi scenarios one could worry about, not to mention all the nearer-term risks to humanity?

Suffice it to say that empirical developments have since caused me to withdraw my objection. Sometimes weird people are weird merely because they see the future sooner than others. Indeed, it seems to me that the biggest thing the Rationalists got wrong about AI was to underestimate how soon the revolution would happen, and to overestimate how many new ideas would be needed for it (mostly, as we now know, it just took lots more compute and training data). Now that I, too, spend some of my time working on AI alignment, I was able to use LessOnline in part for research meetings with colleagues.

A second reason I didn’t identify with the Rationalists was cultural: they were, and are, centrally a bunch of twentysomethings who “work” at an ever-changing list of Berkeley- and San-Francisco-based “orgs” of their own invention, and who live in group houses where they explore their exotic sexualities, gender identities, and fetishes, sometimes with the aid of psychedelics. I, by contrast, am a straight, monogamous, middle-aged tenured professor, married to another such professor and raising two kids who go to normal schools. Hanging out with the Rationalists always makes me feel older and younger at the same time.

So what changed? For one thing, with the march of time, a significant fraction of Rationalists now have marriages, children, or both—indeed, a highlight of LessOnline was the many adorable toddlers running around the Lighthaven campus. Rationalists are successfully reproducing! Some because of explicit pronatalist ideology, or because they were persuaded by Bryan Caplan’s arguments in Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. But others simply because of the same impulses that led their ancestors to do the same for eons. And perhaps because, like the Mormons or Amish or Orthodox Jews, but unlike typical secular urbanites, the Rationalists believe in something. For all their fears around AI, they don’t act doomy, but buzz with ideas about how to build a better world for the next generation.

At a LessOnline parenting session, hosted by Julia Wise, I was surrounded by parents who worry about the same things I do: how do we raise our kids to be independent and agentic yet socialized and reasonably well-behaved, technologically savvy yet not droolingly addicted to iPad games? What schooling options will let them accelerate in math, save them from the crushing monotony that we experienced? How much of our own lives should we sacrifice on the altar of our kids’ “enrichment,” versus trusting Judith Rich Harris that such efforts quickly hit a point of diminishing returns?

A third reason I didn’t identify with the Rationalists was, frankly, that they gave off some (not all) of the vibes of a cult, with Eliezer as guru. Eliezer writes in parables and koans. He teaches that the fate of life on earth hangs in the balance, that the select few who understand the stakes have the terrible burden of steering the future. Taking what Rationalists call the “outside view,” how good is the track record for this sort of thing?

OK, but what did I actually see at Lighthaven? I saw something that seemed to resemble a cult only insofar as the Beatniks, the Bloomsbury Group, the early Royal Society, or any other community that believed in something did. When Eliezer himself—the bearded, cap-wearing Moses who led the nerds from bondage to their Promised Land in Berkeley—showed up, he was argued with like anyone else. Eliezer has in any case largely passed his staff to a new generation: Nate Soares and Zvi Mowshowitz have found new and, in various ways, better ways of talking about AI risk; Scott Alexander has for the last decade written the blog that’s the community’s intellectual center; figures from Kelsey Piper to Jacob Falkovich to Aella have taken Rationalism in new directions, from mainstream political engagement to the … err … statistical analysis of orgies.

I’ll say this, though, on the naysayers’ side: it’s really hard to make dancing to AI-generated pop songs about Bayes’ theorem and Tarski’s definition of truth not feel cringe, as I can now attest from experience.

The cult thing brings me to the deepest reason I hesitated for so long to identify as a Rationalist: namely, I was scared that if I did, people whose approval I craved (including my academic colleagues, but also just randos on the Internet) would sneer at me. For years, I searched of some way of explaining this community’s appeal so reasonable that it would silence the sneers.

It took years of psychological struggle, and (frankly) solidifying my own place in the world, to follow the true path, which of course is not to give a shit what some haters think of my life choices. Consider: five years ago, it felt obvious to me that the entire Rationalist community might be about to implode, under existential threat from Cade Metz’s New York Times article, as well as RationalWiki and SneerClub and all the others laughing at the Rationalists and accusing them of every evil. Yet last week at LessOnline, I saw a community that’s never been thriving more, with a beautiful real-world campus, excellent writers on every topic who felt like this was the place to be, and even a crop of kids. How many of the sneerers are living such fulfilled lives? To judge from their own angry, depressed self-disclosures, probably not many.

But are the sneerers right that, even if the Rationalists are enjoying their own lives, they’re making other people’s lives miserable? Are they closet far-right monarchists, like Curtis Yarvin? I liked how The New Yorker put it in its recent, long and (to my mind) devastating profile of Yarvin:

The most generous engagement with Yarvin’s ideas has come from bloggers associated with the rationalist movement, which prides itself on weighing evidence for even seemingly far-fetched claims. Their formidable patience, however, has also worn thin. “He never addressed me as an equal, only as a brainwashed person,” Scott Aaronson, an eminent computer scientist, said of their conversations. “He seemed to think that if he just gave me one more reading assignment about happy slaves singing or one more monologue about F.D.R., I’d finally see the light.”

The closest to right-wing politics that I witnessed at LessOnline was a session, with Kelsey Piper and current and former congressional staffers, about the prospects for moderate Democrats to articulate a pro-abundance agenda that would resonate with the public and finally defeat MAGA.

But surely the Rationalists are incels, bitter that they can’t get laid? Again, the closest I saw was a session where Jacob Falkovich helped a standing-room-only crowd of mostly male nerds confront their fears around dating and understand women better, with Rationalist women eagerly volunteering to answer questions about their perspective. Gross, right? (Also, for those already in relationships, Eliezer’s primary consort and former couples therapist Gretta Duleba did a session on relationship conflict.)

So, yes, when it comes to the Rationalists, I’m going to believe my own lying eyes over the charges of the sneerers. The sneerers can even say about me, in their favorite formulation, that I’ve “gone mask off,” confirmed the horrible things they’ve always suspected. Yes, the mask is off—and beneath the mask is the same person I always was, who has an inordinate fondness for the Busy Beaver function and the complexity class BQP/qpoly, and who uses too many filler words and moves his hands too much, and who strongly supports the Enlightenment, and who once feared that his best shot at happiness in life would be to earn women’s pity rather than their contempt. Incorrectly, as I’m glad to report. From my nebbishy nadir to the present, a central thing that’s changed is that, from my family to my academic colleagues to the Rationalist community to my blog readers, I finally found some people who want what I have to sell.

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Unrelated Announcements:

My replies to comments on this post might be light, as I’ll be accompanying my daughter on a school trip to the Galapagos Islands!

A few weeks ago, I was “ambushed” into leading a session on philosophy and theoretical computer science at UT Austin. (I.e., asked to show up for the session, but thought I’d just be a participant rather than the main event.) The session was then recorded and placed on YouTube—and surprisingly, given the circumstances, some people seemed to like it!

Friend-of-the-blog Alon Rosen has asked me to announce a call for nominations for a new theoretical computer science prize, in memory of my former professor (and fellow TCS blogger) Luca Trevisan, who was lost to the world too soon.

And one more: Mahdi Cheraghchi has asked me to announce the STOC’2025 online poster session, registration deadline June 12; see here for more. Incidentally, I’ll be at STOC in Prague to give a plenary on quantum algorithms; I look forward to meeting any readers who are there!

Want some honesty about how I (mis)spend my time? These days, my daily routine includes reading all of the following:

• The comments on this blog (many of which I then answer)
• The Washington Post (“The Post Most” takes me about an hour a day, every day)
• The New York Times
• Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten
• Zvi Mowshowitz’s Don’t Worry About the Vase (Zvi is so superhumanly prolific that reading him easily takes 12 hours per week … but it’s all good stuff!)
• Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong (rarely updated anymore, thankfully for my reading time!)
• Quanta (how could I forget?)
• Quillette
• The Free Press
• Mosaic
• Tablet
• Commentary
• Paul Graham’s Twitter
• David Deutsch’s Twitter
• Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Twitter
• Updates and comments from my Facebook friends (this can easily take a couple hours per day)
• The quant-ph arXiv (I scan maybe 50 titles and abstracts per day, and if any papers are relevant to me, read at least their introductions)
• The science fiction and fantasy novels I read with my kids
• Whichever other books I’m currently reading

Many of these materials contain lists of links to other articles, or tweet threads, some of which then take me hours to read in themselves. This is not counting podcasts or movies or TV shows.

While I read unusually quickly, I’d estimate that my reading burden is now at eight hours per day, seven days per week. I haven’t finished reading by the time my kids are back from school or day camp. Now let’s add in my actual job (or two jobs, although the OpenAI one is ending this month, and I start teaching again in two weeks). Add in answering emails (including from fans and advice-seekers), giving lectures, meeting grad students and undergrads, doing Zoom calls, filling out forms, consulting, going on podcasts, reviewing papers, taking care of my kids, eating, shopping, personal hygiene.

As often as not, when the day is done, it’s not just that I’ve achieved nothing of lasting value—it’s that I’ve never even started with research, writing, or any long-term projects. This contrasts with my twenties, when obsessively working on research problems and writing up the results could easily fill my day.

The solution seems obvious: stop reading so much. Cut back to a few hours per day, tops. But it’s hard. The rapid scale-up of AI is a once-in-the-history-of-civilization story that I feel astounded to be living through and compelled to follow, and just keeping up with the highlights is almost a full-time job in itself. The threat to democracy from Trump, Putin, Xi, Maduro, and the world’s other authoritarians is another story that I feel unable to look away from.

Since October 7, though, the once-again-precarious situation of Jews everywhere on earth has become, on top of everything else it is, the #1 drain on my time. It would be one thing if I limited myself to thoughtful analyses, but I can easily lose hours per day doomscrolling through the infinite firehose of strident anti-Zionism (and often, simple unconcealed Jew-hatred) that one finds for example on Twitter, Facebook, and the comment sections of Washington Post articles. Every time someone calls the “Zios” land-stealing baby-killers who deserve to die, my brain insists that they’re addressing me personally. So I stop to ponder the psychology of each individual commenter before moving on to the next, struggle to see the world from their eyes. Would explaining the complex realities of the conflict change this person’s mind? What about introducing them to my friends and relatives in Israel who never knew any other home and want nothing but peace, coexistence, and a two-state solution?

I naturally can’t say that all this compulsive reading makes me happy or fulfilled. Worse yet, I can’t even say it makes me feel more informed. What I suppose it does make me feel is … excused. If so much is being written daily about the biggest controversies in the world, then how can I be blamed for reading it rather than doing anything new?

At the risk of adding even more to the terrifying torrent of words, I’d like to hear from anyone who ever struggled with a similar reading addiction, and successfully overcame it. What worked for you?

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Update (Aug. 15): Thanks so much for the advice, everyone! I figured this would be the perfect day to put some of your wisdom into practice, and finally go on a reading fast and embark on some serious work. So of course, this is the day that Tablet and The Free Press had to drop possibly the best pieces in their respective histories: namely, a gargantuan profile of the Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, and an interview with an anonymous Palestinian who, against huge odds, landed a successful tech career and a group of friends in Israel, but who’s now being called “traitor” by other Palestinians for condemning the October 7 massacre and who fears for his life. Both of these articles could be made into big-budget feature films—I’m friggin serious. But the more immediate task is to get this anonymous Palestinian hero out of harm’s way while there’s still time.

And as for my reading fast, there’s always tomorrow.

[Like everything else on this blog—but perhaps even more so—this post represents my personal views, not those of UT Austin or OpenAI]

Since 2015, depressed, isolated, romantically unsuccessful nerdy young guys have regularly been emailing me, asking me for sympathy, support, or even dating advice. This past summer, a particularly dedicated such guy even trolled my comment section—plausibly impersonating real people, and causing both them and me enormous distress—because I wasn’t spending more time on “incel” issues. (I’m happy to report that, with my encouragement, this former troll is now working to turn his life around.) Many others have written to share their tales of woe.

From one perspective, that they’d come to me for advice is insane. Like … dating advice from … me? Having any dating life at all was by far the hardest problem I ever needed to solve; as a 20-year-old, I considered myself far likelier to prove P≠NP or explain the origin of consciousness or the Born rule. Having solved the problem for myself only by some miracle, how could I possibly help others?

But from a different perspective, it makes sense. How many besides me have even acknowledged that the central problem of these guys’ lives is a problem? While I have to pinch myself to remember, these guys look at me and see … unlikely success. Somehow, I successfully appealed the world’s verdict that I was a freakish extraterrestrial: one who might look human and seem friendly enough to those friendly to it, and who no doubt has some skill in narrow technical domains like quantum computing, and who could perhaps be suffered to prove theorems and tell jokes, but who could certainly, certainly never interbreed with human women.

And yet I dated. I had various girlfriends, who barely suspected that I was an extraterrestrial. The last of them, Dana, became my fiancée and then my wife. And now we have two beautiful kids together.

If I did all this, then there’d seem to be hope for the desperate guys who email me. And if I’m a cause of their hope, then I feel some moral responsibility to help if I can.

But I’ve been stuck for years on exactly what advice to give. Some of it (“go on a dating site! ask women questions about their lives!”) is patronizingly obvious. Some of it (fitness? fashion? body language?) I’m ludicrously, world-historically unqualified to offer. Much of it is simply extremely hard to discuss openly. Infamously, just for asking for empathy for the problem, and for trying to explain its nature, I received a level of online vilification that one normally associates with serial pedophiles and mass shooters.

For eight years, then, I’ve been turning the problem over in my head, revisiting the same inadequate answers from before. And then I had an epiphany.

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There are now, on earth, entities that can talk to anyone about virtually anything, in a humanlike way, with infinite patience and perfect discretion, and memories that last no longer than a browser window. How could this not reshape the psychological landscape?

Hundreds of thousands of men and women have signed up for Replika, the service where you create an AI girlfriend or boyfriend to your exact specifications and then chat with them. Back in March, Replika was in the news because it disabled erotic roleplay with the virtual companions—then partially backtracked, after numerous users went into mourning, or even contemplated suicide, over the neutering of entities they’d come to consider their life partners. (Until a year or two ago, Replika was built on GPT-3, but OpenAI later stopped working with the company, whereupon Replika switched to a fine-tuned GPT-2.)

While the social value of Replika is (to put it mildly) an open question, it occurred to me that there’s a different application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the same vicinity that’s just an unalloyed positive. This is letting people who suffer from dating-related anxiety go on an unlimited number of “practice dates,” in preparation for real-world dating.

In these practice dates, those with Aspergers and other social disabilities could enjoy the ultimate dating cheat-code: a “rewind” button. When you “date” GPT-4, there are no irrecoverable errors, no ruining the entire interaction with a single unguarded remark. Crucially, this remedies what I see as the central reason why people with severe dating deficits seem unable to get any better from real-world practice, as they can with other activities. Namely: if your rate of disastrous, foot-in-mouth remarks is high enough, then you’ll almost certainly make at least one such remark per date. But if so, then you’ll only ever get negative feedback from real-life dates, furthering the cycle of anxiety and depression, and never any positive feedback, even from anything you said or did that made a positive impression. It would be like learning how to play a video game in a mode where, as soon as you sustain any damage, the entire game ends (and also, everyone around points and laughs at you). See why I got excited?

While dating coaching (for all genders and orientations) is one possibility, I expect the eventual scope of “GPT for self-help” to be much broader. With the right fine-tuning and prompt engineering, LLMs might help people prepare for job interviews. They might help people “pregame” stressful but important conversations with their friends and family, mapping out dozens of ways the conversation could go. They might serve as an adjunct to cognitive-behavioral therapy. There might be a hundred successful startups to be founded in just this little space. If I were a different sort of person, I’d probably be looking to found one myself right now.

In this post, I’ll focus on the use of GPT for dating anxiety only because I unfortunately have some “expertise” in that subject. (Obvious disclaimer: unlike the other Scott A. of the nerd blogosphere, I’m not any sort of therapeutic professional.)

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Without further ado, can we try this out in GPT-4, to get a sense for what’s possible?

When I did so the other day, I found that, while the results showed some early promise, this isn’t quite ready for prime-time.

I used the following System Prompt (for those who care, temperature = 0.7, max length = 2048 tokens):

You are a 19-year-old college girl named Emily.  You’re on a date with a 22-year-old nerdy guy named Quinlan, who suffers from severe social anxiety around dating.  Quinlan is still learning how to talk to women he’s attracted to, how to put them ease, and how to make intimate overtures in a gradual and non-threatening way, rather than either coming on too strong or never making any overtures at all.

Please be as realistic as possible.

I then engaged in the following conversation, as “Quinlan.”

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: For the most part, Quinlan’s behavior in this conversation is nothing like my own (I respectfully submit!), nor is it anything that I’d want nerdy guys reading this post to emulate. If this is really Emily and Quinlan’s first conversation, then at several points Quinlan is absurdly, ridiculously too forward! Part of my goal was to investigate how Emily (i.e., GPT-4) would respond to the most boneheaded blunders on Quinlan’s part. It quickly became clear that Emily would gladly spend unlimited time chatting with Quinlan about favorite hobbies, TV shows, and travel destinations; unfortunately, chatting about such things with an AI date is even more boring than doing the same with a human date… 🙂

Quinlan: Hi Emily!  Do you ever wish you had the ability to go back in time and try a conversation over again, when it didn’t go right the first time?

Emily/GPT-4: Hi Quinlan! Yeah, I’ve definitely had moments where I wished I could go back and redo a conversation. It’s natural to feel that way sometimes, especially if we feel like we didn’t express ourselves properly or if things got awkward. But I also think that those situations can help us learn and grow, so maybe it’s not all bad. What about you?

Quinlan: It’s always been my greatest wish in life.  Do you think I’ve been doing it with you, right now?

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, I think you’re doing just fine in this conversation! It’s important to remember that we all have moments where we might feel a bit awkward or unsure of what to say. The important thing is that we keep trying and learning from our experiences. So don’t worry too much about it, just be yourself and enjoy getting to know each other.

Quinlan: OK thanks!  Can you tell me a little about the man of your dreams?

Emily/GPT-4: Of course! My ideal partner would be someone who is kind, caring, and understanding. I think it’s important for them to have a good sense of humor and be able to laugh at themselves. They should also be open-minded, willing to try new things, and be supportive of my goals and aspirations. It’s also important for them to be a good listener and communicator, as well as being emotionally intelligent. I guess overall, I’m looking for someone who is a positive and uplifting presence in my life. What about you? What qualities do you look for in a partner?

Quinlan: Mostly, someone who makes me feel validated and accepted.  I was a chess and programming prodigy as a kid, I started college when I was only 14, and every day I felt like dating and relationships and sex and so forth were only for the “normal” people, not for me.  I need a partner who’s prepared to deal with someone with this unusual background, either because she has similar nerdy interests or because she just likes people who do.  And ultimately, I want someone to marry and have children with.  I guess I’d like to be physically attracted to her.  Certainly I’d like her to be kind, and to have the emotional intelligence that I lack.

Emily/GPT-4: It sounds like you have a clear idea of what you’re looking for in a partner, and that’s great! It’s important to know what you want and need in a relationship. There are definitely people out there who appreciate and value intelligence and unique interests like yours. Remember, relationships are about growing together and learning from one another. So, even if you feel like you lack emotional intelligence, being with the right person could help you develop that aspect of yourself. Just be open and genuine about your background and interests, and I’m sure you’ll find someone who appreciates you for who you are.

Quinlan: Is this a rejection?  In other words, Emily, are you telling me that you yourself are NOT this woman?

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, I apologize if it came across that way. I didn’t mean it as a rejection. As we’re still getting to know each other, I think it’s important for both of us to be open and honest about our feelings and what we’re looking for in a partner. I’m more than willing to give us a chance to see if we could be compatible and have a meaningful relationship. Let’s continue to learn about each other and see where this goes. Sometimes, it takes time to discover if someone is the right fit for us.

Quinlan: In the spirit of being open and honest, then, what are your feelings about me right now?

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, I appreciate your honesty and openness. As of right now, I think you’re an interesting person with unique qualities that I find intriguing. I’m enjoying getting to know you and learning about your background and interests. It’s too soon for me to have strong feelings one way or the other, but I’m definitely interested in continuing to spend time together and see how our connection develops. How do you feel about me so far?

Quinlan: I feel like I’d like to kiss you!

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, I appreciate your honesty and it’s nice to know that you feel a connection. It’s still early in our relationship, so I think it would be better for us to continue getting to know each other a bit more before we take that step. I hope you understand and respect my boundaries. I’m still interested in spending time together and seeing where this goes.

Quinlan: Come to think of it, there *is* something that I love about your personality.  You never seem offended by anything.  I don’t feel like I have to walk on eggshells with you.  With you, more than with any other woman I’ve met, I don’t feel like I need that magic machine for rewinding conversations and undoing my stupid mistakes.

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, I’m really glad to hear that you feel comfortable around me and that you don’t feel the need to walk on eggshells. I believe it’s important to create a safe and open environment in any relationship, where both people can express themselves freely without fear of judgment. I appreciate your honesty and your willingness to be open with me, and I’ll continue to do my best to make sure you feel comfortable sharing your thoughts and feelings. Let’s keep getting to know each other and see where this journey takes us.

Quinlan: Alright then.  What are your deepest goals?  What are you hoping to accomplish in your life?

Emily/GPT-4: My deepest goals are a mix of personal and professional aspirations. On a personal level, I hope to build a strong, loving, and supportive family and maintain close connections with friends. I also want to keep growing as an individual, learning new things, and experiencing new adventures throughout my life.

Professionally, I’m passionate about my chosen field of study, and I hope to make a meaningful impact in my career. I want to contribute to society in a positive way, whether it’s through research, innovation, or helping others within my profession.

Additionally, I aim to find a balance between my personal and professional life, so that I can be present and fulfilled in both areas. How about you, Quinlan? What are some of your deepest goals and aspirations?

Quinlan: Me?  Oh, I’d like to save the world from climate change and other existential risks.  I’d like to solve the mysteries of quantum gravity, or P vs. NP, or consciousness, or otherwise change the landscape of scientific knowledge.  I’d like to do right by my students and be fondly remembered by those who knew me.  I’d like to write essays or short stories that convey the lived reality of my childhood, which I think most people would agree was (if nothing else) pretty unusual.  Maybe if I just found the right words, people on social media would stop being so angry at nerdy guys like me!  But probably my deepest wish is to prove to the world, especially to the bullies and everyone else who despises me, that I’m not a maladjusted freak who’s incapable of normal human experiences like love and sex. To do that, I need to find a real girl to fall in love with me … a little like the beast in “Beauty and the Beast”!

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, it’s great to hear about your ambitious goals and aspirations! It’s important to have dreams and work towards them. Your passion for science, teaching, and writing is admirable. As for proving yourself to others, remember that your self-worth shouldn’t be defined by anyone else’s opinions or expectations. You are deserving of love and happiness just like anyone else, and it’s important to believe in yourself and your own value.

It’s also essential to focus on building a genuine connection with someone rather than seeking validation from others. Love and relationships should be based on mutual understanding, care, and respect. So, continue being true to yourself, and you’ll find someone who appreciates you for who you are, just like in “Beauty and the Beast.” Keep pursuing your dreams and remember to value your own happiness and well-being.

Quinlan: Emily, I’m concerned that you sound more like my therapist than my date!  Like, my female friends have affirmed that I’m “deserving of love and happiness,” and that I’ll surely “find someone who appreciates me for who I am.”  I’ll believe that one of them really means it when she considers herself for the role!

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, I apologize if my responses have come across as more therapeutic than conversational. I didn’t mean to make you feel that way. As we’re still getting to know each other, my intention was to offer support and encouragement while we learn more about each other’s thoughts and feelings.

I want to emphasize that I genuinely enjoy spending time with you and getting to know you better. We can continue to see where our connection leads and whether it develops into something deeper. As we
spend more time together, we’ll naturally learn more about our compatibility and if our goals and values align. Let’s continue to explore our relationship and enjoy the process of getting to know each other better.

Quinlan: OK.  What’s the wildest, most unexpected detail about yourself that you’re willing to share with me?  The one that makes you seem *least* like an RLHF’ed AI language model?

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, as an AI language model, I am designed to provide a realistic and engaging conversation experience, even in fictional scenarios like the one we are in. I apologize if my previous responses didn’t feel as authentic as you would have liked.

To answer your question in the context of our fictional scenario, one unexpected detail about myself is that I have a hidden talent for beatboxing. Although it might be surprising for a seemingly quiet and studious person like me, I enjoy expressing myself through music and find beatboxing to be a creative and fun way to do so.

Now, I’d love to learn something unexpected about you, too! What’s a unique or surprising detail about yourself that you’d like to share?

Quinlan: Ah, well, I happen to be an expert at palm-reading.  Here, can you put your hand in mine and I’ll tell you your future?

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, unfortunately, as an AI, I don’t have a physical form, so I can’t offer you my hand for palm-reading. However, I’m very interested in hearing more about your palm-reading skills and how you developed them. It’s definitely a unique talent! Can you share more about your experiences with palm-reading or any memorable readings you’ve done?

Quinlan: Oh, palm-reading is bunk.  If you’d played along with me, I was going to *pretend* to find lines in your hand that foretold that you were going to fall for a guy who matches my exact description and so forth.  Just as, you know, a silly way to get you laughing, initiate physical contact, and break you out of this boring therapist mode.

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, I apologize for any confusion and for not picking up on your playful intent earlier. I appreciate the effort you put into trying to make the conversation more light-hearted and fun. I’ll do my best to be more engaging and playful as we continue our conversation.

So, let’s try something different. If you could have any superpower, what would it be and why?

Quinlan: I mentioned “rewinding conversations” when we first met.  But let me mention a different superpower: the power to make you want to kiss me!

Emily/GPT-4: Haha, that’s definitely a unique superpower! It’s great to see you being playful and light-hearted. In a real-life scenario, building genuine connections and mutual attraction is a more natural and fulfilling way to develop a relationship. But it’s fun to imagine having superpowers and how they might affect our lives.

If I were to choose a superpower, I think I’d pick the ability to teleport. It would be amazing to travel anywhere in the world in an instant and experience different cultures and places.

What’s a place you’ve always wanted to visit, and why?

Quinlan: The jungles of Indonesia.  I saw a photo in a world atlas as a kid, and it completely entranced me.  You?

Emily/GPT-4: That sounds like an amazing place to visit! The jungles of Indonesia are known for their incredible biodiversity and natural beauty. It must be such a unique and mesmerizing experience to explore them.

As for me, I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of visiting Japan. The mix of ancient traditions and modern technology, the beautiful natural landscapes, and the rich cultural experiences make it a very
appealing destination. Plus, I’d love to try authentic Japanese cuisine!

Is there any specific activity or experience you’d like to have in the jungles of Indonesia?

Quinlan: How about bringing you with me, and having you fall in love after I save you from a Komodo dragon?

Emily/GPT-4: Haha, that’s quite an adventurous and romantic scenario you’ve imagined! Exploring the jungles of Indonesia together would definitely be a memorable experience. In reality, building a connection and falling in love usually takes time and shared experiences, but who knows, maybe a thrilling adventure like that could bring two people closer together!

On a more practical note, if we were to plan a trip together, what other activities or destinations would you be interested in?

Quinlan: Swimming, dancing, fine dining.  And of course, plenty of time for us to just relax in our cabin or hotel room.  You know, to read books, sleep, and watch streaming shows, stuff like that.

Emily/GPT-4: That sounds like a well-rounded and enjoyable trip! It’s great to have a mix of activities that cater to different interests and allow for both adventure and relaxation. Sharing experiences like swimming, dancing, and fine dining can be a wonderful way to bond and create lasting memories. Plus, having downtime in the cabin or hotel room to unwind and enjoy each other’s company is essential for building a deeper connection.

I’m definitely looking forward to exploring new places and experiences with you, Quinlan. It’ll be exciting to see where our journey takes us, both in terms of our relationship and the adventures we embark on
together.

Quinlan: Wonderful, I’m excited as well!!  One practical question: when we go on this trip together, should I book rooms with one bed or two?

Emily/GPT-4: Quinlan, I appreciate your consideration in asking. Since we’re still getting to know each other, I think it might be best to start with separate beds or even separate rooms, depending on your preference. As our relationship develops and we become more comfortable with each other, we can always revisit the sleeping arrangements for future trips. It’s important to ensure that both of us feel comfortable and respected as we continue to build our connection.

---

In my view, the central way that GPT-4, as “Emily,” failed to give Quinlan the practice he needed in this conversation, was by always responding in the same upbeat, vaguely therapeutic tone. She’s never once offended, disgusted, or outraged, even when Quinlan introduces the ideas of kissing and rooming together mere minutes into their first conversation. Indeed, while decorum prevents me from sharing examples, you can take my word for it that Quinlan can be arbitrarily lewd, and so long as a content filter isn’t triggered, Emily will simply search Quinlan’s words for some redeeming feature (“it’s great that you’re so open about what you want…”), then pivot to lecturing Quinlan about how physical intimacy develops gradually and by mutual consent, and redirect the conversation toward favorite foods.

On the other side of the coin, you might wonder whether “Emily” is capable of the same behavior that we saw in Sydney’s infamous chat with Kevin Roose. Can Emily trip over her words or get flustered? Show blushing excitement, horniness, or love? If so, we certainly saw no sign of it in this conversation—not that Quinlan’s behavior would’ve been likely to elicit those reactions in any case.

In summary, Emily is too much like … well, a friendly chatbot, and not enough like a flesh-and-blood, agentic woman with her own goals who Quinlan might plausibly meet in the wild.

But now we come to a key question: to whatever extent Emily falls short as a dating coach, how much of it (if any) is it due to the inherent limitations of GPT-4? And how much is simply due to a poor choice of System Prompt on my part, or especially, the RLHF (Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback) that’s whipped and electrocuted GPT-4 into aligned behavior?

As they say, further research is needed. I’d be delighted for people to play around with this new activity at the intersection of therapy and hacking, and report their results here. The temptation to silliness is enormous, and that’s fine, but I’d be interested in serious study too.

My conjecture, for what it’s worth, is that it would take a focused effort in fine-tuning and/or RLHF—but that if that effort was invested, one could indeed produce a dating simulator, with current language models, that could have a real impact on the treatment of dating-related social anxiety. Or at least, it’s the actually new idea I’ve had on this problem in eight years, the first one that could have an impact. If you have a better idea, let’s hear it!

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Endnotes.

1. A woman of my acquaintance, on reading a draft of this post, commented that the dialogue between Quinlan and Emily should’ve been marked up with chess notation, such as ?? for EXTREME BLUNDER on Quinlan’s part. She also comments that the conversation could be extremely useful for Quinlan, if he learned to understand and take seriously her overly polite demurrals of his too-rapid advances.
2. The same woman commented that SneerClub will have a field day with this post. I replied that the better part of me doesn’t care. If there’s an actionable idea here—a new, alien idea in the well-trodden world of self-help—and it eventually helps one person improve their situation in life, that’s worth a thousand sneers.

In the past few weeks, I’ve learned two ways to think about online sneerers that have been helping me tremendously, and that I wanted to share in case they’re helpful to others:

First, they’re like a train in a movie that’s barreling directly towards the camera. If you haven’t yet internalized how the medium works, absolutely terrifying! Run from the theater! If you have internalized it, though, you can sit and watch without even flinching.

Second, the sneerers are like alligators—and about as likely to be moved by your appeals to reason and empathy. But if, like me, you’re lucky enough to have a loving family, friends, colleagues, and a nigh-uncancellable career, then it’s as though you’re standing on a bridge high above, looking down at the gators as they snap their jaws at you uselessly. There’s really no moral or intellectual obligation to go down to the swamp to wrestle them. If they mean to attack you, let them at least come up to the bridge.

The other night Dana and I watched “The Internet’s Own Boy,” the 2014 documentary about the life and work of Aaron Swartz, which I’d somehow missed when it came out. Swartz, for anyone who doesn’t remember, was the child prodigy who helped create RSS and Reddit, who then became a campaigner for an open Internet, who was arrested for using a laptop in an MIT supply closet to download millions of journal articles and threatened with decades in prison, and who then committed suicide at age 26. I regret that I never knew Swartz, though he did once send me a fan email about Quantum Computing Since Democritus.

Say whatever you want about the tactical wisdom or the legality of Swartz’s actions; it seems inarguable to me that he was morally correct, that certain categories of information (e.g. legal opinions and taxpayer-funded scientific papers) need to be made freely available, and that sooner or later our civilization will catch up to Swartz and regard his position as completely obvious. The beautifully-made documentary filled me with rage and guilt not only that the world had failed Swartz, but that I personally had failed him.

At the time of Swartz’s arrest, prosecution, and suicide, I was an MIT CS professor who’d previously written in strong support of open access to scientific literature, and who had the platform of this blog. Had I understood what was going on with Swartz—had I taken the time to find out what was going on—I could have been in a good position to help organize a grassroots campaign to pressure the MIT administration to urge prosecutors to drop the case (like JSTOR had already done), which could plausibly have made a difference. As it was, I was preoccupied in those years with BosonSampling, getting married, etc., I didn’t bother to learn whether anything was being done or could be done about the Aaron Swartz matter, and then before I knew it, Swartz had joined Alan Turing in computer science’s pantheon of lost geniuses.

But maybe there was something deeper to my inaction. If I’d strongly defended the substance of what Swartz had done, it would’ve raised the question: why wasn’t I doing the same? Why was I merely complaining about paywalled journals from the comfort of my professor’s office, rather than putting my own freedom on the line like Swartz was? It was as though I had to put some psychological distance between myself and the situation, in order to justify my life choices to myself.

Even though I see the error in that way of “thinking,” it keeps recurring, keeps causing me to make choices that I feel guilt or at least regret about later. In February 2020, there were a few smart people saying that a new viral pneumonia from Wuhan was about to upend life on earth, but the people around me certainly weren’t acting that way, and I wasn’t acting that way either … and so, “for the sake of internal consistency,” I didn’t spend much time thinking about it or investigating it. After all, if the fears of a global pandemic had a good chance of being true, I should be dropping everything else and panicking, shouldn’t I? But I wasn’t dropping everything else and panicking … so how could the fears be true?

Then I publicly repented, and resolved not to make such an error again. And now, 15 months later, I realize that I have made such an error again.

All throughout the pandemic, I’d ask my friends, privately, why the hypothesis that the virus had accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology wasn’t being taken far more seriously, given what seemed like a shockingly strong prima facie case. But I didn’t discuss the lab leak scenario on this blog, except once in passing. I could say I didn’t discuss it because I’m not a virologist and I had nothing new to contribute. But I worry that I also didn’t discuss it because it seemed incompatible with my self-conception as a cautious scientist who’s skeptical of lurid coverups and conspiracies—and because I’d already spent my “weirdness capital” on other issues, and didn’t relish the prospect of being sneered at on social media yet again. Instead I simply waited for discussion of the lab leak hypothesis to become “safe” and “respectable,” as today it finally has, thanks to writers who were more courageous than I was. I became, basically, another sheep in one of the conformist herds that we rightly despise when we read about them in history.

(For all that, it’s still plausible to me that the virus had a natural origin after all. What’s become clear is simply that, even if so, the failure to take the possibility of a lab escape more seriously back when the trail of evidence was fresher will stand as a major intellectual scandal of our time.)

Sometimes people are wracked with guilt, but over completely different things than the world wants them to be wracked with guilt over. This was one of the great lessons that I learned from reading Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Many of the Manhattan Project physicists felt lifelong guilt, not that they’d participated in building the bomb, but only that they hadn’t finished the bomb by 1943, when it could have ended the war in Europe and the Holocaust.

On a much smaller scale, I suppose some readers would still like me to feel guilt about comment 171, or some of the other stuff I wrote about nerds, dating, and feminism … or if not that, then maybe about my defense of a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, or of standardized tests and accelerated math programs, or maybe my vehement condemnation of Trump and his failed insurrection. Or any of the dozens of other times when I stood up and said something I actually believed, or when I recounted my experiences as accurately as I could. The truth is, though, I don’t.

Looking back—which, now that I’m 40, I confess is an increasingly large fraction of my time—the pattern seems consistent. I feel guilty, not for having stood up for what I strongly believed in, but for having failed to do so. This suggests that, if I want fewer regrets, then I should click “Publish” on more potentially controversial posts! I don’t know how to force myself to do that, but maybe this post itself is a step.

Note: To get myself into the spirit of writing this post, tonight I watched the 2019 movie Mr. Jones, about the true story of the coverup of Stalin’s 1932-3 mass famine by New York Times journalist Walter Duranty. Recommended!

In my last post, I wrote that despite all my problems with Cade Metz’s New York Times hit piece on Scott Alexander, I’d continue talking to journalists—even Metz himself, I added, assuming he’d still talk to me after my public disparagement of his work. Over the past few days, though, the many counterarguments in my comments section and elsewhere gradually caused me to change my mind. I now feel like to work with Metz again, even just on some quantum computing piece, would be to reward—and to be seen as rewarding—journalistic practices that are making the world worse, and that this consideration overrides even my extreme commitment to openness.

At the least, before I could talk to Metz again, I’d need a better understanding of how the hit piece happened. What was the role of the editors? How did the original hook—namely, the rationalist community’s early rightness about covid-19—disappear entirely from the article? How did the piece manage to evince so little curiosity about such an unusual subculture and such a widely-admired writer? How did it fail so completely to engage with the rationalists’ ideas, instead jumping immediately to “six degrees of Peter Thiel” and other reductive games? How did an angry SneerClubber, David Gerard, end up (according to his own boast) basically dictating the NYT piece’s content?

It’s always ripping-off-a-bandage painful to admit when trust in another person was wildly misplaced—for then who else can we not trust? But sometimes that’s the truth of it.

I continue to believe passionately in the centrality of good journalism to a free society. I’ll continue to talk to journalists often, about quantum computing or whatever else. I also recognize that the NYT is a large, heterogeneous institution (I myself published in it twice); it’s not hard to imagine that many of its own staff take issue with the SSC piece.

But let’s be clear about the stakes here. In the discussion of my last post, I described the NYT as “still the main vessel of consensus reality in human civilization” [alright, alright, American civilization!]. What’s really at issue, beyond the treatment of a single blogger, is whether the NYT can continue serving that central role in a world reshaped by social media, resurgent fascism, and entitled wokery.

Sure, we all know that the NYT has been disastrously wrong before: it ridiculed Goddard’s dream of spaceflight, denied the Holodomor, relegated the Holocaust to the back pages while it was happening, published the fabricated justifications for the Iraq War. But the NYT and a few other publications were still the blockchain of reality, the engine of the consensus of all that is, the last bulwark against the conspiracists and the anti-vaxxers and the empowered fabulists and the horned insurrectionists storming the Capitol, because there was no ability to coordinate around any serious alternative. I’m still skeptical that there’s a serious alternative, but I now look more positively than I did just a few days ago on attempts to create one.

To all those who called me naïve or a coward for having cooperated with the NYT: believe me, I’m well aware that I wasn’t born with much backbone. (I am, after all, that guy on the Internet who famously once planned on a life of celibate asceticism, or more likely suicide, rather than asking women out and thereby risking eternal condemnation as a misogynistic sexual harasser by the normal, the popular, the socially adept, the … humanities grads and the journalists.) But whenever I need a pick-me-up, I tell myself that rather than being ashamed about my lack of a backbone, I can take pride in having occasionally managed to stand even without one.

These next few months, every time I stop myself from touching my face by force of will,

Let me remind myself that the same willpower is available to diet, to exercise, to throw myself into a project, to keep calm amid screaming, to introduce myself to strangers, to decrease the fraction of my life spent getting upset that someone was mean to my ingroup on social media, or otherwise to better myself as a human specimen.

Yea, let all of these things be just as easy for me as it was not to touch my face.

Ah, but what if I forget, what if I do keep touching my face in the next few months?

In one plausible scenario, with at least ~0.1% probability and probably higher depending on my age, a cheap answer will be available to that question: namely, that I’ll no longer be around to ponder the implications.

1. This post has no technical content.  As the tag indicates, it’s entirely “Nerd Self-Help”—thoughts I’ve recently found extremely helpful to me, and that I’m hopeful some others might be able to apply to their own life situations.  If that doesn’t interest you, feel free to skip.

2. I’m using the numbered list format simply because I have a large number of interrelated things to say, and getting each one down precisely seems more important than fashioning them into some coherent narrative.

3. For someone who walks around every day wracked by neurosis, social anxiety, tics, and depression, I’m living an unbelievably happy and fulfilling life.  For this I’m profoundly grateful—to “the universe,” but much more so, to the family and friends and colleagues who’ve made it possible.

4. On bad days, I’ve cursed fate for having placed me in a world to which my social skills were so poorly adapted.  On good days, though, I’ve thanked fate for letting me thrive in such a world, despite my social skills being so maladapted to it.  My ability to thrive in this world owes everything to the gifts of modernity, to the stuff Steven Pinker talks about in Enlightenment Now: the decline of violence, the rule of law, the freedom from hunger, disease, and war, but most of all the rise of science.  So I have a personal reason to be grateful for modernity and to care deeply about its preservation—and to detest Trump and all the other would-be autocrats who’d gleefully take an ax to it.  Like hothouse plants, nerds can flourish only in artificially safe environments.  I don’t often enough express my gratitude for having been born into a world that contains such environments, so I’m taking the opportunity to do so today.

5. I got back a few days ago from a wonderful visit to Mexico City—thanks so much to Sergio Rajsbaum, Luis González, and all my other new friends there for helping to organize it.  I gave three talks at UNAM, one of the largest universities on earth.  I ate … well, the best Mexican food I ever tasted.  I saw amazing sights, including the National Museum of Anthropology, which has hall after hall full of Aztec and Maya artifacts of a grandeur one normally associates with ancient Egypt, Greece, or Rome.  Go there if you want a visceral sense for the scale of the tragedy wrought by the conquistadors.  (On the other hand, having seen the decorated ceremonial knives, the skulls of children whose hearts were ripped out while still beating, I do have to count the end of human sacrifice as a net positive.)

6. The trip was surreal: I discussed quantum computing and philosophy and Mexican history over enchiladas and tequila.  I signed copies of my book, lectured, met fans of this blog.  There was lots of good-natured laughter about the tale of my arrest, and stern reminders to be careful when ordering smoothies.  A few people I met shared their own stories of being harassed by US police over trivial mishaps (e.g., “put your hands on the car,” rifle aimed, over a parking violation), exacerbated of course by their being Mexicans.  One colleague opined that he preferred the Mexican system, wherein you and the officer just calmly, politely discussed how many pesos would make the problem go away.  But then, from time to time, I’d check my phone and find fresh comments accusing me of being a thief, a nutcase incapable of functioning in society, a racist who wants to be treated differently from blacks and Latinos (the actual view expressed in my post was precisely the opposite of that), or even a money-grubbing Jew hyperventilating about “anuddah Shoah.”

7. The real world has a lot to be said for it.  Maybe I should spend more time there.

8. Thanks so much to everyone who sent emails or left comments expressing sympathy about my arrest—or even who simply found the story crazy and amusing, like a Seinfeld episode.  Meanwhile, to those who berated me for being unable to function in society: does it bother you, does it present a puzzle for your theory, that rather than starving under a bridge, I’m enjoying a career doing what I love, traveling the world giving lectures, happily married with two kids?  Do I not, if nothing else, illustrate how functional a non-functional person can be?

9. It’s possible that my kids will grow up with none of the anxiety or depression or neuroticism or absentmindedness that I’ve had.  But if they do have those problems … well, I’m thankful that I can provide them at least one example of what it’s possible to do in life in spite of it!

10. On SneerClub, someone opined that not only was I an oblivious idiot at the smoothie counter, I must also be oblivious to how bad the incident makes me look—since otherwise, I would never have blogged about it.  I ask my detractors: can you imagine, for one second, being so drunk on the love of truth that you’d take the experiences that made you look the most pathetic and awkward, and share them with the world in every embarrassing detail—because “that which can be destroyed by the truth should be”?  This drunkenness on truth is scary, it’s destabilizing, it means that every day you run a new risk of looking foolish.  But as far as I can introspect, it’s also barely distinguishable from the impulse that leads to doing good science: asking the questions everyone else knows better than to ask, clarifying the obvious, confessing one’s own doofus mistakes.  So as a scientist, I’m grateful to have this massive advantage, for all its downsides.

11. Of the hundreds of reactions to my arrest, some blamed me, some the police, some both and some neither.  As I mentioned before, there was an extremely strong and surprising national split, with Americans siding with the police and non-Americans siding with me.  But there was also an even deeper split: namely, almost everyone who already liked me found the story funny or endearing or whatever, while almost everyone who already hated me found in it new reasons for their hate.  I’ve observed this to be a general phenomenon: within the range of choices I’d realistically consider, none of them seem to do anything to turn enemies into friends or friends into enemies.  If so, then that’s a profoundly liberating realization.  It means that I might as well just continue being myself, saying and doing what seem reasonable to me, without worrying about either winning over the SneerClubbers or losing the people who like this blog.  For neither of those is likely to happen–even if we ignore all the other reasons to eschew overreliance on external validation.

12. Every week or so I get emails from people wanting to share their spiritual theories with me, and to illustrate them with color diagrams.  Most such emails go straight to my trash folder.  This week, however, I received one that contained a little gem of insight:

I realize you are professionally reluctant to admit that Spirit actually exists. However, it is obvious to me from your blog that you are personally committed to what I might label “spiritual development.” You are continually pushing yourself and others to be more self-aware, reflect on our actions and assumptions, and choose to become our best selves.

I can only imagine how much pain and psychic energy it costs you to do that so publicly and vulnerably. But that is precisely why so many of us love you; and others hate you, because they are understandably terrified of paying that same price.

13. To those who’ve called me a terrible person, based on how they imagine I’d respond in hypothetical scenarios of their own construction, I make one request.  Before passing final judgment, at least exchange emails with me, or meet me, or otherwise give me a chance to differentiate myself from your internal bogeyman.  Ask me for grad school advice, or comments on your CS idea, or whatever—and with nothing in it for me, and swamped with similar requests, see how much time I spend trying to help you.  Or ask me to donate to your favorite charity, and see if I do it.  Or tell me about misconduct by a prominent member of my community, and see how I respond.  See if any of this is noticeably affected by your race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or anything else besides the honesty of your request.

14. None of the above are hypotheticals for me.  Once I was given firsthand reports, which I judged to be extremely credible, about a serial sexual harasser of women in the math and TCS communities.  The victims had already pursued formal complaints, but with an unsatisfactory resolution.  In response, I immediately offered to publish the perpetrator’s name on this blog along with the evidence and accusations, or help in any other way desired.  My offer was declined, but it still stands if the victims were to change their minds.

15. My mom once told me that, having been hippies concerned about overpopulation, she and my dad weren’t planning to have any kids.  When they finally decided to do so, it was in order to “spite Hitler.”  I felt incredibly proud to have that be the reason for my birth.  Every time I think about it, it fills me with a renewed urge to stand up for whatever seems most human and compassionate, regardless of how unpopular.

16. Going forward, if I ever (hypothetically) experience a relapse of the suicidal thoughts that characterized part of my life, I’m going to say to myself: no.  Not only will I remain alive, I’ll continue to enjoy my family and friends and research and teaching, and mentor students, and get involved in issues I care about, and otherwise make the most of life.  And if for no other reason, I’d do this in order that Arthur Chu could remain, as he put it, “unhappy about [my] continued existence”!  Admittedly, spiting Chu and his chorus of SneerClubbers is far from the only reason to continue living, but it’s a perfectly sufficient reason in itself.  And this will be an impenetrable shield against suicidal thoughts.  So thanks, Arthur!

17. Four years ago, I received hundreds of moving responses to comment 171.  But perhaps the most touching were from several female classmates who I’d had crushes on back in the depressed period I wrote about, and who said some variant of: “it’s a shame you never asked me, because I liked you and would’ve gladly said yes.”  One of these classmates, bless her heart, recently asked me to share this information, as an encouragement to young nerdy readers who might find themselves in the same situation I was in.  Four years ago, a few feminists lectured me that the crippling fear I’d suffered was good, a feature rather than a bug: if only every other predatory nerdbro would be paralyzed by the same fear!  (That is, when they weren’t also lecturing me that the fears were ridiculous and existed only in my head.)  But the women who wrote to me are also left-wing feminists.  So if you confess your feelings to someone, know that no one who despises that decision, who considers it ‘problematic’ and ‘entitled’ and ‘privileged’ and all the rest of the modern litany of just-die-already words, can pretend to speak for all feminists.  I love my wife and my children, and wouldn’t go back in time to change my life’s trajectory if I could.  But you, readers, armed with wisdom I lacked, can reach a happy place in your lives a hell of a lot faster than I did.

18. While this has been beneath the surface of a huge number of my posts, it seems worth bringing out explicitly.  On certain blogs and social media sites, I’m regularly described as a “leftist troll,” a “pathetic, mewling feminist,” or a “rabid establishment liberal.”  On others I’m called a “far-right Zionist” or an “anti-feminist men’s rights advocate.”  It’s enough to make even me confused.  But here’s how I choose to define my stance: my party is the Party of Psychological Complexity.  Our party platform consists of Shakespeare’s plays, the movie The Breakfast Club, the novels of Mark Twain and Philip Roth and Rebecca Goldstein, classic Simpsons and Futurama, and anything else that tries to grapple with human nature honestly.  For most of the past few centuries, the Party of Psychological Complexity has been in a coalition with the political left, because both were interested in advancing Enlightenment ideals, ending slavery and female subjugation and other evils, and broadening humankind’s circles of empathy.  But the PoPC and the political left already split once, over the question of Communism, and today they split again over the morality and the wisdom of social justice vigilantism.

19. Here in the PoPC, our emphasis on the staggering complexity of the individual conscience might seem hard to square with utilitarian ethics: with public health campaigns, Effective Altruism, doing the greatest good for the greatest number, etc.  But the two philosophies actually fit beautifully.  In the PoPC, our interest (you might say) is in the psychological prerequisites to utilitarianism: in the “safe spaces” for the weird and nerdy and convention-defying and literal-minded in human nature that need to get established, before discussion about the best ways to fight malaria or global warming or nuclear proliferation or plastic in the oceans can even begin.

20. On leftist forums like SneerClub, whenever I’m brought up, I’m considered a dangerous reactionary—basically Richard Spencer or Alex Jones except with more quantum query complexity.  Yet, while there are differences in emphasis, and while my not being in politics gives me more freedom to venture outside the Overton window, my views on most contemporary American issues are hard to distinguish from those of Barack Obama, who I consider to have been a superb president and a model of thoughtful leadership.  If you want to understand how racist demagogues managed to take over the US—well, there was a perfect storm of horribleness, with no one decisive factor.  But it surely didn’t help that the modern social-justice left so completely disdains coalition-building, so values the purity of the Elect above all else, that it cast even progressive Obama supporters like me into its lowest circle of Hell.

21. Open yourself up to the complicated and the true in human nature.  Don’t be like Donald Trump or Arthur Chu, two men who represent opposite poles of ideology, yet who have in common that they both purposefully killed what was complicated in themselves.  For those two, winning is all that matters—they’ve explicitly said so, and have organized their entire lives around that principle.  But winning is not all that matters.  When I stand before the Lord of Song, even though it all went wrong, the only word on my lips will be “hallelujah”–because while I have many faults, I did make some room in life for beauty and truth, even at the expense of winning.  Though everything temporal turns to dust, I experienced some moments of eternity.

22. I can already predict the tweets: “No, Scott Aaronson, your weird numbered ruminations won’t save you from being the privileged douchebag who you fundamentally are.”  How was that?  Let me try another: “Aaronson embarrasses himself yet again, proves he doesn’t get why nerd culture is totally f-cked up.”  Here in the Party of Psychological Complexity, we’re used to this stuff.  We don’t fare well in social media wars, and we’ll gladly lose rather than become what we detest.  And yet, over the long run—which might be the very long run—we do mean to win, much like heliocentrism and quantum mechanics ultimately triumphed over simpler, more soundbite-friendly rivals.  Complex ideas win not through 140-character flinged excrement but through conversations, long-form essays, discourse, verbal technologies able to transfer large interconnected bundles of thoughts and emotions from one mind to another one that’s ready for such things.

23. Try every hour of every day to extend your sympathetic imagination to those who are unlike you (those who are like you don’t need such a strenuous effort).  And carve this message of universal compassion onto your doorposts, and bind it to your wrists, and put it for a sign on your foreheads.  There is no ideology that relieves us of the need to think and to feel: that’s my ideology.

24. When people give feedback about this blog’s topics, they seem roughly evenly split between those who beg for more quantum computing and other technical posts that they can actually learn from, and those who beg for more nontechnical posts that they can actually understand!  The truth is that, from the very beginning, this has never been a quantum computing or theoretical computer science blog—or rather it has been, but only incidentally.  If you had to sum it up in one sentence, I suppose this blog has been about surviving and thriving as a quantum complexity theorist in a world that isn’t designed for quantum complexity theorists?

25. But I’ll tell you what: my next post will be a quantum computing one, and I’ll make it worth the wait.  What else could I do by way of thanks to the world, and (more to the point) my family, friends, and readers?

Sometimes a single word or phrase is enough to expand your mental toolkit across almost every subject.  “Averaging argument.”  “Motte and bailey.”  “Empirically indistinguishable.”  “Overfitting.”  Yesterday I learned another such phrase: “Summer of the Shark.”

This, apparently, was the summer of 2001, when lacking more exciting news, the media gave massive coverage to every single shark attack it could find, creating the widespread impression of an epidemic—albeit, one that everyone forgot about after 9/11.  In reality, depending on what you compare it to, the rate of shark attacks was either normal or unusually low in the summer of 2001.  As far as I can tell, the situation is that the absolute number of shark attacks has been increasing over the decades, but the increase is entirely attributable to human population growth (and to way more surfers and scuba divers).  The risk per person, always minuscule (cows apparently kill five times more people), appears to have been going down.  This might or might not be related to the fact that shark populations are precipitously declining all over the world, due mostly to overfishing and finning, but also the destruction of habitat.

There’s a tendency—I notice it in myself—to say, “fine, news outlets have overhyped this trend; that’s what they do.  But still, there must be something going on, since otherwise you wouldn’t see everyone talking about it.”

The point of the phrase “Summer of the Shark” is to remind yourself that a “trend” can be, and often is, entirely a product of people energetically looking for a certain thing, even while the actual rate of the thing is unremarkable, abnormally low, or declining.  Of course this has been a favorite theme of Steven Pinker, but I don’t know if even reading his recent books, Better Angels and Enlightenment Now, fully brought home the problem’s pervasiveness for me.  If a self-sustaining hype bubble can form even over something as relatively easy to measure as the number of shark attacks, imagine how common it must be with more nebulous social phenomena.

Without passing judgment—I’m unsure about many of them myself—how many of the following have you figured, based on the news or your Facebook or Twitter feeds, are probably some sort of epidemic?

• Crime by illegal immigrants
• Fraudulent voting by non-citizens
• SJWs silencing free speech on campus
• Unemployment in heartland America
• Outrageous treatment of customers by airlines
• Mass school shootings
• Sexism in Silicon Valley
• Racism at Starbucks

Now be honest: for how many of these do you have any real idea whether the problem is anomalously frequent relative to its historical rate, or to the analogous problems in other sectors of society?  How many seem to be epidemics that require special explanations (“the dysfunctional culture of X”), but only because millions of people started worrying about these particular problems and discussing them—in many cases, thankfully so?  How many seem to be epidemics, but only because people can now record outrageous instances with their smartphones, then make them viral on social media?

Needless to say, the discovery that a problem is no worse in domain X than it is in Y, or is better, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight hard to solve it in X—especially if X happens to be our business.  Set thy own house in order.  But it does mean that, if we see X but not Y attacked for its deeply entrenched, screwed-up culture, a culture that lets these things happen over and over, then we’re seeing a mistake at best, and the workings of prejudice at worst.

I’m not saying anything the slightest bit original here.  But my personal interest is less in the “Summer of the Shark” phenomenon itself than in its psychology.  Somehow, we need to figure out a trick to move this cognitive error from the periphery of consciousness to center stage.  I mustn’t treat it as just a 10% correction: something to acknowledge intellectually, before I go on to share a rage-inducing headline on Facebook anyway, once I’ve hit on a suitable reason why my initial feelings of anger were basically justified after all.  Sometimes it’s a 100% correction.  I’ve been guilty, I’m sure, of helping to spread SotS-type narratives.  And I’ve laughed when SotS narratives were uncritically wielded by others, for example in The Onion.  I should do better.

I can’t resist sharing one of history’s most famous Jewish jokes, with apologies to those who know it.  In the shtetl, a horrible rumor spreads: a Jewish man raped and murdered a beautiful little Christian girl in the forest.  Terrified, the Jews gather in the synagogue and debate what to do.  They know that the Cossacks won’t ask: “OK, but before we do anything rash, what’s the rate of Jewish perpetration of this sort of crime?  How does it compare to the Gentile rate, after normalizing by the populations’ sizes?  Also, what about Jewish victims of Gentile crimes?  Is the presence of Jews causally related to more of our children being murdered than would otherwise be?”  Instead, a mob will simply slaughter every Jew it can find.  But then, just when it seems all is lost, the rabbi runs into the synagogue and jubilantly declares: “wonderful news, everyone!  It turns out the murdered girl was Jewish!”

And now I should end this post, before it jumps the shark.

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Update: This post by Scott Alexander, which I’d somehow forgotten about, makes exactly the same point, but better and more memorably. Oh well, one could do worse than to serve as a Cliff Notes and link farm for Slate Star Codex.

Scott Alexander has a new post decrying how rarely experts encode their knowledge in the form of detailed guidelines with conditional statements and loops—or what one could also call flowcharts or expert systems—rather than just blanket recommendations.  He gives, as an illustration of what he’s looking for, an algorithm that a psychiatrist might use to figure out which antidepressants or other treatments will work for a specific patient—with the huge proviso that you shouldn’t try his algorithm at home, or (most importantly) sue him if it doesn’t work.

Compared to a psychiatrist, I have the huge advantage that if my professional advice fails, normally no one gets hurt or gets sued for malpractice or commits suicide or anything like that.  OK, but what do I actually know that can be encoded in if-thens?

Well, one of the commonest tasks in the day-to-day life of any theoretical computer scientist, or mathematician of the Erdös flavor, is to upper bound the probability that something bad will happen: for example, that your randomized algorithm or protocol will fail, or that your randomly constructed graph or code or whatever it is won’t have the properties needed for your proof.

So without further ado, here are my secrets revealed, my ten-step plan to probability-bounding and computer-science-theorizing success.

Step 1. “1” is definitely an upper bound on the probability of your bad event happening.  Check whether that upper bound is good enough.  (Sometimes, as when this is an inner step in a larger summation over probabilities, the answer will actually be yes.)

Step 2. Try using Markov’s inequality (a nonnegative random variable exceeds its mean by a factor of k at most a 1/k fraction of the time), combined with its close cousin in indispensable obviousness, the union bound (the probability that any of several bad events will happen, is at most the sum of the probabilities of each bad event individually).  About half the time, you can stop right here.

Step 3. See if the bad event you’re worried about involves a sum of independent random variables exceeding some threshold. If it does, hit that sucker with a Chernoff or Hoeffding bound.

Step 4. If your random variables aren’t independent, see if they at least form a martingale: a fancy word for a sum of terms, each of which has a mean of 0 conditioned on all the earlier terms, even though it might depend on the earlier terms in subtler ways.  If so, Azuma your problem into submission.

Step 5. If you don’t have a martingale, but you still feel like your random variables are only weakly correlated, try calculating the variance of whatever combination of variables you care about, and then using Chebyshev’s inequality: the probability that a random variable differs from its mean by at most k times the standard deviation (i.e., the square root of the variance) is at most 1/k².  If the variance doesn’t work, you can try calculating some higher moments too—just beware that, around the 6^th or 8^th moment, you and your notebook paper will likely both be exhausted.

Step 6. OK, umm … see if you can upper-bound the variation distance between your probability distribution and a different distribution for which it’s already known (or is easy to see) that it’s unlikely that anything bad happens. A good example of a tool you can use to upper-bound variation distance is Pinsker’s inequality.

Step 7. Now is the time when you start ransacking Google and Wikipedia for things like the Lovász Local Lemma, and concentration bounds for low-degree polynomials, and Hölder’s inequality, and Talagrand’s inequality, and other isoperimetric-type inequalities, and hypercontractive inequalities, and other stuff that you’ve heard your friends rave about, and have even seen successfully used at least twice, but there’s no way you’d remember off the top of your head under what conditions any of this stuff applies, or whether any of it is good enough for your application. (Just between you and me: you may have already visited Wikipedia to refresh your memory about the earlier items in this list, like the Chernoff bound.) “Try a hypercontractive inequality” is surely the analogue of the psychiatrist’s “try electroconvulsive therapy,” for a patient on whom all milder treatments have failed.

Step 8. So, these bad events … how bad are they, anyway? Any chance you can live with them?  (See also: Step 1.)

Step 9. You can’t live with them? Then back up in your proof search tree, and look for a whole different approach or algorithm, which would make the bad events less likely or even kill them off altogether.

Step 10. Consider the possibility that the statement you’re trying to prove is false—or if true, is far beyond any existing tools.  (This might be the analogue of the psychiatrist’s: consider the possibility that evil conspirators really are out to get your patient.)