Shtetl-Optimized

After reading these blog posts dealing with the possibility of the Large Hadron Collider creating a black hole of strangelet that would destroy the earth — as well as this report from the LHC Safety Assessment Group, and these websites advocating legal action against the LHC — I realized that I can remain silent about this important issue no longer.

As a concerned citizen of Planet Earth, I demand that the LHC begin operations as soon as possible, at as high energies as possible, and continue operating until such time as it is proven completely safe to turn it off.

Given our present state of knowledge, we simply cannot exclude the possibility that aliens will visit the Earth next year, and, on finding that we have not yet produced a Higgs boson, find us laughably primitive and enslave us. Or that a wormhole mouth or a chunk of antimatter will be discovered on a collision course with Earth, which can only be neutralized or deflected using new knowledge gleaned from the LHC. Yes, admittedly, the probabilities of these events might be vanishingly small, but the fact remains that they have not been conclusively ruled out. And that being the case, the Precautionary Principle dictates taking the only safe course of action: namely, turning the LHC on as soon as possible.

After all, the fate of the planet might conceivably depend on it.

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I’ve had a miserable week (only partly because of the headaches and coughing fits that have been keeping me up all night), and feel a need to be of use to some other human being without leaving my apartment. So this thread is for you to ask about whatever’s on your mind — complexity classes, philosophy, grad school advice, anteaters … anything asked in earnest will be responded to, in considerably less than the two years it took me for Lev R.

Update (4/13): Having spent a good part of the weekend answering 57 questions about everything from quantum computing to painting elephants, I think it’s time to call it quits. Thanks to everyone who submitted; it really cheered me up! We’ll do this again sometime.

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Consider the following less-than-hypothetical scenarios:

• Joseph Weizenbaum (who passed away two weeks ago), the MIT computer scientist who created the ELIZA chatbot in the 1960’s, spent the rest of his career decrying the evils of computer science research, holding (perhaps strangely) both that almost everything that’s done with computers could be done just as well without them, and that computers have made possible terrible things like missile guidance systems that now threaten our civilization.

• Distinguished mathematician Doron Zeilberger argues that mathematicians are wasting their time pursuing chimeras like “beauty” and “elegance,” and that within the near future, mathematics will be entirely the domain of computers.

• Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was born into a Muslim family in Somalia, and who escaped from an arranged marriage after being forced to undergo FGM, tells Westerners they’re deluding themselves if they think current Islamic practices are compatible with Enlightenment values.

• John Browne, the Chief Executive of BP, tells the world that urgent action is needed on global warming.

• A former atheist stumps for Christianity (or vice versa).

The obvious question in all these cases is: how much extra credence does a person gain by belonging, or having once belonged, to the group he or she is criticizing? From a strict rationalist standpoint, the answer would seem to be zero: surely all that matters is the soundness of the arguments! Who cares if the keynote speaker at the anti-widget rally also happens to be past president of the Widget Club?

I can think of three possible reasons for giving extra credence to attacks from insiders:

1. The insider might simply know more about the realities of the situation than an outsider, or be less able to ignore those realities.
2. One assumes the insider is someone who’s at least grappled with the best arguments from her own side before rejecting them. (In FantasyLand, one could assume that anyone making an argument had first grappled with the best arguments from the opposing side, but FantasyLand≠Earth.)
3. When someone relentlessly attacks a single group of people — seeming to find them behind every perfidy on earth — history says to assume the worst about their motivations, and not to accept the refrain “I’m only criticizing them for their own good!” However, it’s possible that members of the group themselves should merit a pass in this regard. (Though even here there are exceptions: for example, if the person has renounced all ties with the despised group, or, as in the case of Bobby Fischer, refuses to accept the reality of his membership in it.)

On the other hand, I can think of five reasons why not to give extra credence to attacks from insiders:

1. Given any exotic mixture of beliefs and group affiliations, there’s almost certainly someone on earth who fits the description — and is even available for a fee to speak at your next event. If you want an accomplished scientist who sees science as an expensive sham or tool of the military, you can find one. If you want a former Republican hardliner who’s now a Naderite, you can find one. If you want a Jew who renounces Jews or Israel, you can find a stadium of them. So you can’t conclude anything from the mere existence of such people — at most, you can possibly learn something from their number.
2. Any group of people — computer scientists, CEO’s, Israelis, African-Americans — will consist (to put it mildly) of multiple factions, some of whom might seek to gain an advantage over the other factions by blasting their group as a whole before the outside world. So one can’t simply accept someone’s presentation of himself as a lone, courageous whistleblower, without first understanding the internal dynamics of the group he comes from and is criticizing.
3. The very fact that people within a group feel free to criticize it can in some cases speak well about the group’s tolerance for dissent, and thereby undermine some of the critics’ central claims. (Of course, one has to verify that the tolerated dissenters aren’t just a sham maintained by the ruling faction, as in Communist regimes throughout their history.)
4. Some people simply enjoy dissenting from their peers, as a way of proving their independence or of drawing attention to themselves.
5. Just as most people like to toot their own group’s horn, a few are masochistically biased toward the opposite extreme. We can all think of people who, for whatever deep psychological reasons, feel a constant need to repent the sins of themselves or their group, in a manner wildly out of proportion to any actual guilt. Granted, anyone can understand the conflict a physicist might feel over having participated in the Manhattan Project. On the other hand, when the invention you’re renouncing is the ELIZA chatbot, the question arises of whether you’ve earned the right to Faust-like penitence over the unspeakable evil you’ve unleashed.

So what’s my verdict? Belonging to the group you’re criticizing can give you one or two free starting chips at the table of argument, entitling you to a hearing where someone else wouldn’t be so entitled. But once you’ve sat down and entered the game, from then on you have to play by the same rules as everyone else.

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About as logically sound as the original, and with a better backbeat (link to MP3). From computer science grad student / hip-hop artist MC Plus+.

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Alas, this weekend I became engrossed by the “OJ Simpson trial for nerds”: the ongoing trial of Hans Reiser (the famous Linux file system developer and supposedly-brilliant high-school accelerant) for the murder of his ex-wife Nina. What makes the case interesting is that Reiser’s defense largely consists of the claim that he was too nerdy and Aspbergerish, too lacking in basic social skills, to realize that doing innocuous things in the weeks following Nina’s disappearance like

• removing the passenger seat of his car, soaking the floorboards, and hiding the car several miles from his house,
• not returning calls from numerous friends and family members searching for his ex-wife (except to tell one that he needed to talk to his lawyer),
• hiding his hard disks, and
• telling his mother (in a wiretapped phone conversation) why he was happy his ex-wife went missing

might lead non-nerds to suspect he was guilty.

Like the “Twinkie defense,” Reiser’s “nerd defense” is an invitation to parody. But my feeling is that in this case, even the “nerd” characterization of Reiser itself is open to question. For one thing, Reiser has a blackbelt in judo and appears to have been obsessed with cultivating physical aggressiveness, both in himself and in his eight-year-old son. For another, it seems the reason he was able to attract Nina in the first place was his swaggering confidence. So while portraying Reiser as a nerdy nebbish might be convenient both for journalists and for Reiser’s defense team, he seems to me to be much closer to an aggressive narcissist.

(Of course that doesn’t imply he’s guilty. But I have to say that, thus far in the trial, Reiser and his defense lawyer have done an excellent job of convincing me that he is. Certainly the defense theory — that in an elaborate frame-up of Hans, Nina suddenly abandoned her two children, friends, and new job, left her car by the side of the road with the groceries to rot in the back, and went into hiding in an unspecified former Soviet state with a fake identity and passport — is difficult for a sane person to accept. And unfortunately for Hans, the fact that Nina was far from a perfect specimen of humanity — sleeping with Hans’s best friend, embezzling his company’s money, and divorcing him as soon as she got her US citizenship — only adds to the prima facie likelihood that her body is currently rotting somewhere in the Sierra Nevadas.)

On the other hand, Reiser was certainly wise to hide his hard disks rather than relying on disk encryption. For this week a team of nine researchers at Princeton and elsewhere — including my friends Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger — released a paper showing how to take a DRAM chip out of one computer, put it into another computer, and read its contents even though the chip had no power in the interim. (One hint: use canned-air spray dusters as a cheap alternative to liquid nitrogen for “cryopreserving” the chip.) The story made it to the Science Times, although they failed to mention most of the authors by name.

But, you ask, how else have I been procrastinating this weekend? Ah. Peter Woit links to a remarkable set of oral histories from people who were involved with the Princeton math department in the 1930’s. Read Alonzo Church (he of the Church-Turing Thesis) list his graduate students and forget to mention Alan Turing, and Nathan Jacobson talk about the disgusting food that Mrs. Einstein would bring to department receptions. In the midst of possibly the greatest concentration of intellect the world has ever seen or will see, and on the eve of perhaps the greatest calamity the world has ever seen, what is it that people worried about? The oak paneling in Fine Hall, and other trivialities completely different from the sorts of things we academics would worry about today.

Oh right: at the behest of you, my loyal readers, I’m now more than halfway through Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep, an entertaining novel that depicts a far future with malevolent AI beings, faster-than-light travel, and (possibly the nerdiest science-fiction premise of all time) Usenet newsgroups spanning the galaxy, whose flamewars play a major role in the rise and fall of civilizations. Vinge’s estimate of how much longer Usenet would stay relevant was off by a factor of only about 10,000.

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When I first saw the headline, I assumed it was from The Onion or (more likely) some local MIT humor publication. But no, it’s from the Associated Press.

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For the past few days I’ve been at FOCS’2007 in Providence, Rhode Island, where apparently I’m supposed to have been live-blogging the conference. This came as news to me. (One of the organizers wrote to ask if I’d be posting live updates. I replied that I might post something eventually.)

The trouble is, I still have tons of “backblog” from my previous trip to Latvia and Germany. And so, in the hopes of someday catching up, without further ado I hereby post some photos from Europe.

Sure, I support moderate-to-liberal Democrats … as a temporary measure until zee vorkers take over zee vorl’ [laughs maniacally]

(The above photos were taken in an underground bunker a couple hours from Riga, which the Soviets secretly built in the 70’s, and to which top Communist party officials planned to retreat in case of a nuclear war. Of course, no provisions were made for the rest of the population. Apparently the Soviets built shelters like these all over Latvia. Most of them were converted to bowling alleys or library storage space, but one was preserved for tourists.)

My gracious hosts in Latvia: longtime colleague (and sometime Shtetl-Optimized commenter) Andris Ambainis, Andris’s Ambai-niece Ilze, and Ilze’s husband Girts.

When I think about Munich, Germany, so many mental associations spring immediately into my mind: the fine baroque architecture, the nearby Bavarian alps, the freshly-baked pretzels that are a Munich specialty, the open spaces perfect for rallies and demonstrations of all kinds — but most of all, of course, I think of Oktoberfest! Here you see me drinking genuine bier served by a genuine bier wench (not pictured) with my gracious hosts from the Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik: Norbert Schuch, Ignacio Cirac, and Michael Wolf.

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Watch a sphere get turned inside out with no cuts or creases. Hat tip: John Baez.

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I was, of course, delighted that Columbia University invited my good friend Mahmoud to speak there, and dismayed only by the tedious introduction by President Lee Bollinger. (“Having demonstrated conclusively that today’s featured speaker is a murderous tyrant with no more right to partake in the civilized world than Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun, let me now, without further ado…”) However long your speaker’s list of achievements, crimes against humanity, etc. might be, I think talk introductions should be two minutes tops.

But since this particular event has already been covered on more blogs than the Monster has subgroups, today I thought I’d roll out an occasional new Shtetl-Optimized feature — in which, for want of anything better to blog about, I discuss some books I’ve read recently.

The Truth About The Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It by Marcia Angell.

Like many in the US, I once “knew” that drug companies have to charge such absurd prices here because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to fund their R&D. This book reveals the hilarious truth about what drug company R&D actually consists of. My favorite examples: coloring Prozac pink instead of green, marketing it for “premenstrual dysphoric disorder” instead of depression, and charging three times as much for it. Inventing new drugs for high blood pressure that are less effective than diuretics available since the 1950’s, but have the advantage of being patentable. Proving in clinical trials that a new drug works better than an old one, as long as you compare 40mg of the one to 20mg of the other.

The book paints a picture of the pharmaceutical industry as, basically, an organized crime syndicate that’s been successful in co-opting the government. It trumpets the free market but depends almost entirely for its existence on bad patent laws that it helped write; it bribes doctors to prescribe worse expensive drugs instead of better cheap ones; it waits for government-funded university researchers to discover new drugs, then bottles them up, makes billions of dollars, and demands credit for its life-saving innovations.

Among the arguments put forward by the rare negative reviewers of this book on Amazon, the following was my favorite (I’ll let you supply a counterargument):

Who do you folks think are paid higher, scientists in the Unis and government programs, or scientists in the industry? … Marcia saying the Universities and the NIH are more innovative in developing drugs than the Pharma Industry is like saying (using sports analogy) Minor League baseball is better than the MLB. Which players do you think are paid more? Common sense my friends.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.

This book has received a lot of attention lately, and deserves all of it. The topic is: if humans disappeared tomorrow, how long would it take for the world’s forests and coral reefs to regenerate, garbage to decompose, excess CO₂ to wash out of the sky, giant land mammals to reappear in North America, etc.? Of course this is just a different way of asking: “exactly how badly have humans screwed up the planet?” Weisman’s key insight, though, is that it’s less depressing to read about the world regenerating itself than about its being destroyed.

It’s hard to identify a clear thesis in this book, just lots of interesting observations: for example, that African elephants weren’t hunted to extinction whereas woolly mammoths probably were because only the former evolved to fear humans; and that, if North and South Korea ever reunite, it will be a disaster for the dozens of endangered species that now survive only in a four-mile-wide demilitarized strip between the two. The prose is beautiful throughout, and sometimes reaches heights rarely seen in environmental writing. After explaining the role of volcanoes in climate change, Weisman says: “the problem is, by tapping the Carboniferous Formation and spewing it up into the sky, we’ve become a volcano that hasn’t stopped erupting since the 1700s.”

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Taking a cue from the Pontiff, I thought I’d provide three quick updates on my personal life (no, not my personal personal life; that’s none of your business).

1. Last week I bought and moved into a condo in East Cambridge, a 10-minute walk from campus, with lovely views of Boston, the Charles River, and the Red Line T going over the bridge:
   
   (That’s mom on the sofa.) I can’t stress enough how fundamentally my life has changed now that I’m a homeowner. For example, instead of paying rent each month, I now pay something called a “mortgage,” and instead of going to a landlord, it goes to a bank. Also I get a massive tax break for some reason.
2. The students showed up this week, and the semester is here. No, I’m not teaching this fall, but there’s still plenty to do, from organizing a theory lunch to deciding what kind of whiteboard should go in my office. (With a border or without? How big a tray for pens? These are serious decisions.) On Wednesday I went to an orientation for new MIT faculty, at which I got to tell President Susan Hockfield about quantum lower bounds, the prospects for practical quantum computers, and how her fine institution rejected me twice. Along with the usual pleasantries, Hockfield said one thing that deeply impressed me: “I know it’s gone out of fashion in many places, but you’re still allowed to use the word ‘truth’ here.”
3. Besides moving, besides getting oriented, I’ve also been distracted from my blogging career by involvement with some … what’s it called? … actual research. Sorry about that; I assure you it’s just a temporary aberration.

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