Shtetl-Optimized

The other day Dana and I finished watching The Queen’s Gambit, Netflix’s fictional saga of an orphaned girl in the 1960’s, Beth Harmon, who breaks into competitive chess and destroys one opponent after the next in her quest to become the world champion, while confronting her inner demons and addictions.

The show is every bit as astoundingly good as everyone says it is, and I might be able to articulate why. It’s because, perhaps surprisingly given the description, this is a story where chess actually matters—and indeed, the fact that chess matters so deeply to Beth and most of the other characters is central to the narrative.  (As in two pivotal scenes where Beth has sex with a male player, and then either she or he goes right back to working on chess.)

I’ve watched a lot of TV shows and movies, supposedly about scientists, where the science was just an interchangeable backdrop to what the writers clearly regarded as a more important story.  (As one random example, the drama NUMB3RS, supposedly about an FBI mathematician, where “math” could’ve been swapped out for “mystical crime-fighting intuition” with barely any change.)

It’s true that a fictional work about scientists shouldn’t try to be a science documentary, just like Queen’s Gambit doesn’t try to be a chess documentary.  But if you’re telling a story about characters who are obsessed with topic X, then you need to make their obsession plausible, make the entire story hinge on it, and even make the audience vicariously feel the same obsession.

This is precisely what Queen’s Gambit does for chess.  It’s a chess drama where the characters are constantly talking about chess, thinking about chess, and playing chess—and that actually succeeds in making that riveting.  (Even if most of the audience can’t follow what’s happening on the board, it turns out that it doesn’t matter, since you can simply convey the drama through the characters’ faces and the reactions of those around them.)

Granted, a few aspects of competitive chess in the series stood out as jarringly unrealistic even to a novice like me: for example, the almost complete lack of draws.  But as for the board positions—well, apparently Kasparov was a consultant, and he helped meticulously design each one to reflect the characters’ skill levels and what was happening in the plot.

While the premise sounds like a feminist wish-fulfillment fantasy—orphan girl faces hundreds of intimidating white men in the sexist 1960s, orphan girl beats them all at their own game with style and aplomb—this is not at all a MeToo story, or a story about male crudity or predation.  It’s after bigger fish than that.  The series, you might say, conforms to all the external requirements of modern woke ideology, yet the actual plot subverts the tenets of that ideology, or maybe just ignores them, in its pursuit of more timeless themes.

At least once Beth Harmon enters the professional chess world, the central challenges she needs to overcome are internal and mental—just like they’re supposed to be in chess.  It’s not the Man or the Patriarchy or any other external power (besides, of course, skilled opponents) holding her down.  Again and again, the top male players are portrayed not as sexist brutes but as gracious, deferential, and even awestruck by Beth’s genius after she’s humiliated them on the chessboard.  And much of the story is about how those vanquished opponents then turn around and try to help Beth, and about how she needs to learn to accept their help in order to evolve as a player and a human being.

There’s also that, after defeating male player after male player, Beth sleeps with them, or at least wants to.  I confess that, as a teenager, I would’ve found that unlikely and astonishing.  I would’ve said: obviously, the only guys who’d even have a chance to prove themselves worthy of the affection of such a brilliant and unique woman would be those who could beat her at chess.  Anyone else would just be dirt between her toes.  In the series, though, each male player propositions Beth only after she’s soundly annihilated him.  And she’s never once shown refusing.

Obviously, I’m no Beth Harmon; I’ll never be close in my field to what she is in hers.  Equally obviously, I grew up in a loving family, not an orphanage.  Still, I was what some people would call a “child prodigy,” what with the finishing my PhD at 22 and whatnot, so naturally that colored my reaction to the show.

There’s a pattern that goes like this: you’re obsessively interested, from your first childhood exposure, in something that most people aren’t.  Once you learn what the something is, it’s evident to you that your life’s vocation couldn’t possibly be anything else, unless some external force prevents you.  Alas, in order to pursue the something, you first need to get past bullies and bureaucrats, who dismiss you as a nobody, put barriers in your way, despise whatever you represent to them.  After a few years, though, the bullies can no longer stop you: you’re finally among peers or superiors in your chosen field, regularly chatting with them on college campuses or at conferences in swanky hotels, and the main limiting factor is just the one between your ears. 

You feel intense rivalries with your new colleagues, of course, you desperately want to excel them, but the fact that they’re all on the same obsessive quest as you means you can never actually hate them, as you did the bureaucrats or the bullies.  There’s too much of you in your competitors, and of them in you.

As you pursue your calling, you feel yourself torn in the following way.  On the one hand, you feel close to a moral obligation to humanity not to throw away whatever “gift” you were “given” (what loaded terms), to take the calling as far as it will go.  On the other hand, you also want the same things other people want, like friendship, validation, and of course sex.

In such a case, two paths naturally beckon.  The first is that of asceticism: making a virtue of eschewing all temporal attachments, romance or even friendship, in order to devote yourself entirely to the calling.  The second is that of renouncing the calling, pretending it never existed, in order to fit in and have a normal life.  Your fundamental challenge is to figure out a third path, to plug yourself into a community where the relentless pursuit of the unusual vocation and the friendship and the sex can all complement each other rather than being at odds.

It would be an understatement to say that I have some familiarity with this narrative arc.

I’m aware, of course, of the irony, that I can identify with so many contours of Beth Harmon’s journey—I, Scott Aaronson, who half the Internet denounced six years ago as a misogynist monster who denies the personhood and interiority of women.  In that life-alteringly cruel slur, there was a microscopic grain of truth, and it’s this: I’m not talented at imagining myself into the situations of people different from me.  It’s never been my strong suit.  I might like and admire people different from me, I might sympathize with their struggles and wish them every happiness, but I still don’t know what they’re thinking until they tell me.  And even then, I don’t fully understand it.

As one small but illustrative example, I have no intuitive understanding—zero—of what it’s like to be romantically attracted to men, or what any man could do or say or look like that could possibly be attractive to women.  If you have such an understanding, then imagine yourself sighted and me blind.  Intellectually, I might know that confidence or height or deep brown eyes or brooding artistry are supposed to be attractive in human males, but only because I’m told.  As far as my intuition is concerned, pretty much all men are equally hairy, smelly, and gross, a large fraction of women are alluring and beautiful and angelic, and both of those are just objective features of reality that no one could possibly see otherwise.

Thus, whenever I read or watch fiction starring a female protagonist who dates men, it’s very easy for me to imagine that protagonist judging me, enumerating my faults, and rejecting me, and very hard for me to do what I’m supposed to do, which is to put myself into her shoes.  I could watch a thousand female protagonists kiss a thousand guys onscreen, or wake up in bed next to them, and the thousandth-and-first time I’d still be equally mystified about what she saw in such a sweaty oaf and why she didn’t run from him screaming, and I’d snap out of vicariously identifying with her.  (Understanding gay men of course presents similar difficulties; understanding lesbians is comparatively easy.)

It’s possible to overcome this, but it takes an extraordinary female protagonist, brought to life by an extraordinary writer.  Off the top of my head, I can think of only a few.  There were Renee Feuer and Eva Mueller, the cerebral protagonists of Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem and The Late Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind.  Maybe Ellie Arroway from Carl Sagan’s Contact.  And then there’s Beth Harmon.  With characters like these, I can briefly enter a space where their crushes on men seem no weirder or more inexplicable to me than my own teenage crushes … just, you know, inverted.  Sex is in any case secondary to the character’s primary urge to discover timeless truths, an urge that I fully understand because I’ve shared it.

Granted, the timeless truths of chess, an arbitrary and invented game, are less profound than those of quantum gravity or the P vs. NP problem, but the psychology is much the same, and The Queen’s Gambit does a good job of showing that.  To understand the characters of this series is to understand why they could be happier to lose an interesting game than to win a boring one.  And I could appreciate that, even if I was by no means the strongest player at my elementary school’s chess club, and the handicap with which I can beat my 7-year-old daughter is steadily decreasing.

1. Good news, everyone! Following years of requests, this blog finally supports rich HTML and basic TeX in comments. Also, the German spam that used to plague the blog (when JavaScript was disabled) is gone. For all this, I owe deep gratitude to a reader and volunteer named Filip Dimitrovski.
   
2. Filip refused to accept any payment for fixing this blog. Instead, he asked only one favor: namely, that I use my platform to raise public awareness about the plight of the MAOI antidepressant Nardil. Filip tells me that, while tens of thousands of people desperately need Nardil—no other antidepressant ever worked for them—it’s become increasingly unavailable because the pharma companies can no longer make money on it. He points me to a SlateStarCodex post from 2015 that explains the problem in more detail (anyone else miss SlateStarCodex?). More recent links about the worsening crisis here, here, and here.
   
3. Here’s a fantastic interview of Bill Gates by Steven Levy, about the coronavirus debacle in the US. Gates, who’s always been notoriously and strategically nonpartisan, is more explicit than I’ve ever seen him before in explaining how the Trump administration’s world-historic incompetence led to where we are.
   
4. Speaking of which, here’s another excellent article, this one in The American Interest, about the results of “wargames” trying to simulate what happens in the extremely likely event that Trump contests a loss of the November election. Notably, the article sets out six steps that could be taken over the next few months to decrease the chance of a crisis next to which all the previous crises of 2020 will pale.
   
5. A reader asked me to share a link to an algorithm competition, related to cryptographic “proofs of time,” that ends on August 31. Apparently, my having shared a link to a predecessor of this competition—at the request of friend-of-the-blog Bram Cohen—played a big role in attracting good entries.
   
6. Huge congratulations to my former PhD student Shalev Ben-David, as well as Eric Blais, for co-winning the FOCS’2020 Best Paper Award—along with two other papers—for highly unconventional work about a new minimax theorem for randomized algorithms. (Ben-David and Blais also have a second FOCS paper, which applies their award paper to get the first tight composition theorem for randomized query complexity. Here’s the full list of FOCS papers—lots of great stuff, for a conference that of course won’t physically convene!) Anyway, a central idea in Ben-David and Blais’s new work is to use proper scoring rules to measure the performance of randomized algorithms—algorithms that now make statements like “I’m 90% sure that this is a yes-input,” rather than just outputting a 1-bit guess. Notably, Shalev tells me that he learned about proper scoring rules by reading rationalist blogs. So next time you lament your untold hours sacrificed to that pastime, remind yourself of where it once led!
   
7. What have I been up to lately? Besides Busy Beaver, hanging out with my kids, and just trying to survive? Mostly giving a lot of Zoom lectures! For those interested, here’s a Q&A that I recently did on the past and present of quantum computing, hosted by Andris Ambainis in Latvia. It did feel a bit surreal when my “interviewer” asked me to explain how I got into quantum computing research, and my answer was basically: “well, as you know, Andris, a lot of it started when I got hold of your seminal paper back in 1999…”

1. This is really getting depressing. One of the only things that makes it bearable—even though in some sense it shouldn’t—is that most of humanity is in this together. For once, there’s no question of “why me?”
2. Having watched the eighth and final episode of Devs, the thought occurred to me: if I’d had the opportunity to restart the world from 8 months ago, even inside a simulation, I’d seize the chance and never look back.
3. I think I finally figured out how to explain the issue with Devs to my literary sophisticate readers. Namely: Devs consists, precisely, of the cultural appropriation of quantum computing. Now, I never felt like cultural appropriation was the world’s worst problem—not even before a pandemic started overflowing the morgues—so I wouldn’t say I was offended by Alex Garland appropriating the images and buzzwords of my quantum computing tribe for a basically unrelated purpose, but it is what it is. Again: Devs is the show for you, if you want a haunting, slow-paced, well-produced meditation about free will and determinism and predicting the future and parallel worlds and “what if the whole universe is a simulation?,” and the various ideas I would’ve had about such topics around the age of 11. It’s just not a show about quantum computing. I hope that makes it clear.
4. I read with interest this anonymous but PGP-signed article, laying out the case that it’s plausible that covid accidentally leaked from either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan CDC, rather than originating at the Huanan seafood market. Or, as an intermediate hypothesis, that an infected animal from one of those labs ended up at the seafood market. (Note that this is completely different from the hypothesis that covid was purposefully engineered—the authors of the article find that totally implausible, and I agree with them.) Notably, the Wuhan labs are known to have experimented with bat coronaviruses very much like covid, and are known to have performed “gain-of-function” experiments on them, and were probably the central labs in China for such experiments. And viruses are known to have leaked from other labs in China on other occasions, and the nature → seafood market route has unresolved issues, like where exactly the crossover from bats to pangolins (or some other intermediate species) is supposed to have happened, such that people would only start getting infected at the seafood market and not at its faraway suppliers, and … well, anyway, read the article and form your own judgment!
5. I find it interesting that three months ago, I would’ve hesitated even to share such a link, because my internal critic would’ve screamed “this looks too much like tinfoil-hat stuff—are you ready for all the people you respect sneering at you?” But the me of three months ago is not the me of today. I make no apologies for adapting my thoughts to the freak branch of the multiverse where I actually find myself.

This is my first post in more than a month that’s totally unrelated to the covid crisis. Or rather, it’s related only insofar as it’s about a Hulu miniseries, the sort of thing that many of us have more occasion to watch while holed up at home.

Three weeks ago, a journalist named Ben Lindbergh—who’d previously asked me to comment on the scientific accuracy of Avengers: Endgame—asked me the same question about the miniseries Devs, which I hadn’t previously heard of.

[Warning: Spoilers follow]

‘Devs,’ I learned, is a spooky sci-fi action thriller about a secretive Silicon Valley company that builds a quantum computer that can perfectly reconstruct the past, down to what Jesus looked like on the cross, and can also (at least up to a point) predict the future.

And I was supposed, not only to endure such a show, but to comment on the accuracy of its invocations of quantum computing? This didn’t sound promising.

But, y’know, I was at home quarantined. So I agreed to watch the first episode. Which quickly turned into the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh episodes (the eighth and final one isn’t out yet).

It turns out that ‘Devs’ isn’t too bad, except that it’s not particularly about quantum computers. The latter is simply a buzzword chosen by the writers for a plot concept that would’ve been entirely familiar to the ancient Greeks, who called it the Delphic Oracle. You know, the mysterious entity that prophesies your fate, so then you try to escape the prophecy, but your very evasive maneuvers make the prophecy come true? Picture that, except with qubits—and for some reason, in a gleaming golden laboratory that has components that float in midair.

At this point, I’ll just link you to Ben Lindbergh’s article about the show: Making Sense of the Science and Philosophy of ‘Devs.’ His long and excellent piece quotes me extensively enough that I see no need also to analyze the show in this blog post. (It also quotes several academic philosophers.)

Instead, I’ll just share a few tidbits that Ben left out, but that might be amusing to quantum computing fans.

• The first episode opens with a conversation between two characters about how even “elliptical curve” cryptography is insecure against attack by quantum computers. So I immediately knew both that the writers had one or more consultants who actually knew something about QC, and also that those consultants were not as heavily involved as they could’ve been.

• Similarly: in a later scene, some employees at the secretive company hold what appears to be a reading group about Shor’s algorithm. They talk about waves that interfere and cancel each other out, which is great, but beyond that their discussion sounded to me like nonsense. In particular, their idea seemed to be that the waves would reinforce at the prime factors p and q themselves, rather than at inverse multiples of the period of a periodic function that only indirectly encodes the factoring problem. (What do you say: should we let this one slide?)

• “How many qubits does this thing have?” “A number that there would be no point in describing as a number.” ROFL

• In the show, a crucial break comes when the employees abandon a prediction algorithm based on the deBroglie-Bohm pilot wave interpretation, and substitute one based on Everett’s many-worlds interpretation. Which I could actually almost believe, except that the many-worlds interpretation seems to contradict the entire premise of the rest of the show?

• A new employee, after he sees the code of the superpowerful quantum computer for the first time, is so disoriented and overwhelmed that he runs and vomits into a toilet. I, too, have had that reaction to the claims of certain quantum computing companies, although in some sense for the opposite reason.

Anyway, none of the above addresses the show’s central conceit: namely, that the Laplace demon can be made real, the past and future rendered fully knowable (with at most occasional breaks and exceptions) by a machine that’s feasible to build. This conceit is fascinating to explore, but also false.

In the past, if you’d asked me to justify its falsity, I would’ve talked about chaos, and quantum mechanics, and the unknowability of the fine details of the universe’s state; I might’ve even pointed you to my Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine essay. I also would’ve mentioned the severe conceptual difficulties in forcing Nature to find a fixed-point of a universe where you get to see your own future and act on that information (these difficulties are just a variant of the famous Grandfather Paradox).

But it occurs to me that, just as the coronavirus has now made plain the nature of exponential growth, even to the world’s least abstract-minded person, so too it’s made plain the universe’s unpredictability. Let’s put it this way: do you find it plausible that the quantum computer from ‘Devs,’ had you booted it up six months ago, would’ve known the exact state of every nucleotide in every virus in every bat in Wuhan? No? Then it wouldn’t have known our future.

And I see now that I’ve violated my promise that this post would have nothing to do with covid.

I’m thinking of writing a novel where human civilization is threatened by a global pandemic, and is then almost singlehandedly rescued by one man … a man who reigned for decades as the world’s prototypical ruthless and arrogant tech billionaire, but who was then transformed by the love of his wife. That is, if the billionaire can make it past government regulators as evil as they are stupid. I need some advice: how can I make my storyline a bit subtler, so critics don’t laugh it off as some immature nerd fantasy?

Updates (April 5): Thanks to several commenters for emphasizing that the wife needs to be a central character here: I agree! The other thing is, I don’t want Fox News cheering my novel for its Atlas Shrugged vibe. So maybe the pandemic is only surging out of control in the US because of the incompetence of a Republican president? I don’t want to go ridiculously overboard, but like, maybe the president is some thuggish conman with the diction of a 5-year-old, who the deluded Republicans cheer anyway? And maybe he’s also a Bible-thumping fundamentalist? OK, that’s too much, so maybe the fundamentalist is like the vice president or something, and he gets put in charge of the pandemic response and then sets about muzzling the scientists? As I said, I really need advice on making the messages subtler.

Many people have suggested coating handles, doorknobs and so forth with virus-killing copper tape. It’s a shame that this isn’t being tried on a wider scale. In the meantime, though, here’s a related but different idea that I had last night.

Imagine we could coat every doorknob, every light switch, every railing, every other surface that people might touch in public buildings, with some long-lasting disgusting, sticky, slimy substance. For a variety of reasons, one probably wouldn’t use actual excrement, although it wouldn’t hurt if the substance looked like that. Or it could be a sickly neon green or red, to make it impossible to conceal when you’d gotten the substance on your hands.

What would be the result? Of course, people would avoid touching these surfaces. If they had to, they’d do so with a napkin or glove whenever possible. If they had to touch them bare-handedly, they’d rush to wash their hands with soap as soon as possible afterwards. Certainly they wouldn’t touch their faces before having washed their hands.

In short, they’d show exactly the behaviors that experts agree are among the most helpful, if our goal is to slow the spread of the coronavirus. In effect, we’d be plugging an unfortunate gap in our evolutionary programming—namely, that the surfaces where viruses can thrive aren’t intuitively disgusting to us, as (say) vomit or putrid meat are—by making those surfaces disgusting, as they ought to be in the middle of a pandemic.

Note that, even if it somehow turns out to be infeasible to coat all the touchable surfaces in public buildings with disgusting goo, you might still derive great personal benefit from imagining them so covered. If you manage to pull that off, it will yield just the right heuristic for when and how often you should now be washing your hands (and avoiding touching your face), without no need for additional conscious reflection.

Mostly, having the above thoughts made me grateful for my friend Robin Hanson. For as long Robin is around, tweeting and blogging from his unique corner of mindspace, no one will ever be able to say that my ideas for how to control the coronavirus were the world’s weirdest or most politically tone-deaf.

Scott’s Update (Dec. 26): Comments on this post are now closed, since I felt that whatever progress could be made, had been, and I wanted to move on to more interesting topics. Thanks so much to everyone who came here to hash things out in good faith—which, as far as I’m concerned, included the majority of the participants on both sides.

If you want to see the position paper that led to the name change movement, see What’s In A Name? The Need to Nip NIPS, by Daniela Witten, Elana Fertig, Anima Anandkumar, and Jeff Dean. I apologize for not linking to this paper in the original post.

To recap what I said many times in this post and the comments: I myself am totally fine with the name NeurIPS. I think several of the arguments for changing the name were good arguments—and I thank some of the commenters on this post for elucidating those arguments without shaming anybody or calling them names. In any case the decision is done, and it belongs to the ML community, not to me and not to Steven Pinker.

The one part that I’m against is the bullying of anyone who disagrees by smearing them as a misogynist. And then, recursively, the smearing as a misogynist of anyone who objected to that bullying, and so on and so on. Most supporters of the name change did not engage in such bullying, but one leader of the movement very conspicuously did, and continues to do it even now (to, I’m told, the consternation even of many of her allies).

Since this post went up, something extremely interesting happened: Steven Pinker and I started getting emails from researchers in the NeurIPS community that said, in various words: “thank you for openly airing perspectives that we could not air, without jeopardizing our careers.” We were told that even women in ML, and even those who agreed with the activists on most points, could no longer voice opposition without risking their hiring or tenure. This put into a slightly different light, I thought, the constant claims of some movement leaders about their own marginalization and powerlessness.

Since I was 7 or 8 years old, the moral lodestar of my life has been my yearning (too often left unfulfilled) to stand up to the world’s bullies. Bullies come in all shapes and sizes: some are gangsters or men who sexually exploit vulnerable women; one, alas, is even the President of the United States. But bullying knows no bounds of ideology or gender. Some bullies resort to whisper networks, or Twitter shaming campaigns, or their power in academic hierarchies, to shut down dissenting voices. With the latter kinds of bully—well, to whatever extent this blog is now in a position to make some difference, I’d feel morally complicit if it didn’t.

As I wrote in the comments: may the 2020s be an era of intellectual freedom, compassion, and understanding for all people regardless of background. –SA

Scott’s prologue:

Happy Christmas and Merry Chanukah!

As a followup to last Thursday’s post about the term “quantum supremacy,” today all of us here at Shtetl-Optimized are humbled to host a guest post by Steven Pinker: the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, Enlightenment Now (which I reviewed here), and other books.

The former NIPS—Neural Information Processing Systems—has been the premier conference for machine learning for 30 years. As many readers might know, last year NIPS changed its name to NeurIPS: ironically, giving greater emphasis to an aspect that I’m told has been de-emphasized at that conference over time. The reason, apparently, was that some male attendees had made puns involving the acronym “NIPS” and nipples.

I confess that the name change took me by surprise, simply because it had never occurred to me to make the NIPS/nipples connection—not when I gave a plenary at NIPS in 2012, and not when my collaborators and I coauthored a NIPS paper. It’s not that I’m averse to puerile humor. It’s just that neither I, nor anyone else I knew, had apparently ever felt the need for a shorthand for “nipples.” Of course, once I did learn about this controversy, it became hard to hear “NIPS” without thinking about it.

Back when this happened, Steven Pinker tweeted about NIPS being “forced to change its acronym … because some thought it was sexist. ?????,” apparently as part of a longer thread about “the new Victorians.” In response, a computer science professor sent Pinker an extremely stern email, saying that Pinker’s tweeting about this had “caused harm to our community” and “just [made] the world a bleaker place for everyone.” After linking to a National Academies report on bias in STEM, the email ended: “I hope you will choose to inform yourself on the discussion to which you have just contributed and that you will offer a well-considered follow up.” I won’t risk betraying confidences by quoting further. Of course, the author is warmly welcomed to share anything they wish in the comments here (or I can add it to the main post).

Steve’s guest post today consists of his response to this email. (He told me that, after sending it, he received no further responses.)

I don’t have any dog in the NIPS/NeurIPS debate, being at most on the “margin” (har!) of machine learning. And in any case the debate ended a year ago: the name is now NeurIPS and it’s not changing back. Reopening the issue would seem to invite a strong risk of social-media denunciation for no possible gain.

So why am I doing this? Mostly because I thought it was in the interest of humanity to know that, even when Steven Pinker is answering someone’s email, with no expectation that his reply will be made public, he writes the same way he does in his books: with clarity, humor, and an amusing quote from his mom.

But also because—again, without taking a position on the NIPS vs. NeurIPS issue itself—there’s a tactic displayed by Pinker’s detractors that fundamentally grates on me. This is where you pretend to an open mind, but it turns out that you’re open only to the possibility that your opponent might not have read enough reports and studies to “do better”—i.e., that they sinned out of ignorance rather than out of malice. You don’t open your mind even a crack to the possibility that the opponent might have a point.

Without further ado, here’s Steven Pinker’s email:

I appreciate your frank comments. At the same time, I do not agree with them. Please allow me to explain.

If this were a matter of sexual harassment or other hostile behavior toward women, I would of course support strong measures to combat it. Any member of the Symposium who uttered demeaning comments toward or about women certainly deserves censure.

But that is not what is at issue here. It’s an utterly irrelevant matter: the three-decades-old acronym for the Neural Information Processing Symposium, the pleasingly pronounceable NIPS. To state what should be obvious: nip is not a sexual word. As Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, I can support this claim.

(And as my mother wrote to me: “I don’t get it. I thought Nips was a brand of caramel candy.”)  [Indeed, I enjoyed those candies as a kid. –SA] Even if people with an adolescent mindset think of nipples when hearing the sound “nips,” the society should not endorse the idea that the concept of nipples is sexist. Men have nipples too, and women’s nipples evolved as organs of nursing, not sexual gratification. Indeed, many feminists have argued that it’s sexist to conceptualize women’s bodies from the point of view of male sexuality.

If some people make insulting puns that demean women, the society should condemn them for the insults, not concede to their puerility by endorsing their appropriation of an innocent sound. (The Linguistics Society of America and Boston Debate League do not change their names to disavow jejune clichés about cunning linguists and master debaters.) To act as if anything with the remotest connection to sexuality must be censored to protect delicate female sensibilities is insulting to women and reminiscent of prissy Victorian taboos against uncovered piano legs or the phrase “with the naked eye.”

Any harm to the community of computer scientists has been done not by me but by the pressure group and the Symposium’s surrender. As a public figure who hears from a broad range of people outside the academic bubble, I can tell you that this episode has not played well. It’s seen as the latest sign that academia has lost its mind—that it has traded reasoned argument, conceptual rigor, proportionality, and common sense for prudish censoriousness, snowflake sensibility, and virtue signaling. I often hear from intelligent non-leftists, “Why should I be impressed by the scientific consensus on climate change? Everyone knows that academics just fall into line with the politically correct position.” To secure the credibility of the academy, we have to make reasoned distinctions, and stop turning our enterprise into a laughingstock.

To repeat: none of this deprecates the important effort to stamp out harassment and misogyny in science, which I’m well aware of and thoroughly support, but which has nothing to do with the acronym NIPS.

You are welcome to share this note with interested parties.

Best,
Steve

While I wait to board a flight at my favorite location on earth—Philadelphia International Airport—I figured I might as well blog something to mark the 50^th anniversary of Apollo 11. (Thanks also to Joshua Zelinsky for a Facebook post that inspired this.)

I wasn’t alive for Apollo, but I’ve been alive for 3/4 of the time after it, even though it now seems like ancient history—specifically, like a Roman cathedral being gawked at by a medieval peasant, like an achievement by some vanished, more cohesive civilization that we can’t even replicate today, let alone surpass.

Which brings me to a depressing mystery: why do so many people now deny that humans walked on the moon at all? Like, why that specifically? While they’re at it, why don’t they also deny that WWII happened, or that the Beatles existed?

Surprisingly, skepticism of the reality of Apollo seems to have gone all the way back to the landings themselves. One of my favorite stories growing up was of my mom, as a teenager, working as a waitress at an Israeli restaurant in Philadelphia, on the night of Apollo 11 landing. My mom asked for a few minutes off to listen to news of the landing on the radio. The owners wouldn’t grant it—explaining that it was all Hollywood anyway, just some actors in spacesuits on a sound stage, and obviously my mom wasn’t so naïve as to think anyone was actually walking to the moon?

Alas, as we get further and further from the event, with no serious prospect of ever replicating it past the stage of announcing an optimistic timetable (nor, to be honest, any scientific reason to replicate it), as the people involved die off, and as our civilization becomes ever more awash in social-media-fueled paranoid conspiracies, I fear that moon-landing denalism will become more common.

Because here’s the thing: Apollo could happen, but only because of a wildly improbable, once-in-history confluence of social and geopolitical factors. It was economically insane, taking 100,000 people and 4% of the US federal budget for some photo-ops, a flag-planting, some data and returned moon rocks that had genuine scientific value but could’ve been provided much more cheaply by robots. It was dismantled immediately afterwards like a used movie set, rather than leading to any greater successes. Indeed, manned spaceflight severely regressed afterwards, surely mocking the expectations of every last science fiction fan and techno-utopian who was alive at that time.

One could summarize the situation by saying that, in certain respects, the Apollo program really was “faked.” It’s just that the way they “faked” it, involved actually landing people on the moon!

[BY REQUEST: SPOILERS FOLLOW]

Today Ben Lindbergh, a writer for The Ringer, put out an article about the scientific plausibility (!) of the time-travel sequences in the new “Avengers” movie. The article relied on two interviewees:

(1) David Deutsch, who confirmed that he has no idea what the “Deutsch proposition” mentioned by Tony Stark refers to but declined to comment further, and

(2) some quantum computing dude from UT Austin who had no similar scruples about spouting off on the movie.

To be clear, the UT Austin dude hadn’t even seen the movie, or any of the previous “Avengers” movies for that matter! He just watched the clips dealing with time travel. Yet Lindbergh still saw fit to introduce him as “a real-life [Tony] Stark without the vast fortune and fancy suit.” Hey, I’ll take it.

Anyway, if you’ve seen the movie, and/or you know Deutsch’s causal consistency proposal for quantum closed timelike curves, and you can do better than I did at trying to reconcile the two, feel free to take a stab in the comments.

1. I really liked this article by Chris Monroe, of the University of Maryland and IonQ, entitled “Quantum computing is a marathon not a sprint.” The crazier expectations get in this field—and right now they’re really crazy, believe me—the more it needs to be said.
2. In a piece for Communications of the ACM, Moshe Vardi came out as a “quantum computing skeptic.” But it turns out what he means by that is not that he knows a reason why QC is impossible in principle, but simply that it’s often overhyped and that it will be hard to establish a viable quantum computing industry. By that standard, I’m a “QC skeptic” as well! But then what does that make Gil Kalai or Michel Dyakonov?
3. Friend-of-the-blog Bram Cohen asked me to link to this second-round competition for Verifiable Delay Functions, sponsored by his company Chia. Apparently the first link I provided actually mattered in sending serious entrants their way.
4. Blogging, it turns out, is really, really hard when (a) your life has become a pile of real-world obligations stretching out to infinity, and also (b) the Internet has become a war zone, with anything you say quote-mined by people looking to embarrass you. But don’t worry, I’ll have more to say soon. In the meantime, doesn’t anyone have more questions about the research papers discussed in the previous post? Y’know, NEEXP in MIP*? SBP versus QMA? Gentle measurement of quantum states and differential privacy turning out to be almost the same subject?