Shtetl-Optimized

A friend and I were discussing whether there’s anything I could possibly say, on this blog, in 2025, that wouldn’t provoke an outraged reaction from my commenters. So I started jotting down ideas. Let’s see how I did.

1. Pancakes are a delicious breakfast, especially with blueberries and maple syrup.
   
2. Since it’s now Passover, and no pancakes for me this week, let me add: I think matzoh has been somewhat unfairly maligned. Of course it tastes like cardboard if you eat it plain, but it’s pretty tasty with butter, fruit preserves, tuna salad, egg salad, or chopped liver.
   
3. Central Texas is actually really nice in the springtime, with lush foliage and good weather for being outside.
   
4. Kittens are cute. So are puppies, although I’d go for kittens given the choice.
   
5. Hamilton is a great musical—so much so that it’s become hard to think about the American Founding except as Lin-Manuel Miranda reimagined it, with rap battles in Washington’s cabinet and so forth. I’m glad I got to take my kids to see it last week, when it was in Austin (I hadn’t seen it since it its pre-Broadway previews a decade ago). Two-hundred fifty years on, I hope America remembers its founding promise, and that Hamilton doesn’t turn out to be America’s eulogy.
   
6. The Simpsons and Futurama are hilarious.
   
7. Young Sheldon and The Big Bang Theory are unjustly maligned. They were about as good as any sitcoms can possibly be.
   
8. For the most part, people should be free to live lives of their choosing, as long as they’re not harming others.
   
9. The rapid progress of AI might be the most important thing that’s happened in my lifetime. There’s a huge range of plausible outcomes, from “merely another technological transformation like computing or the Internet” to “biggest thing since the appearance of multicellular life,” but in any case, we ought to proceed with caution and with the wider interests of humanity foremost in our minds.
   
10. Research into curing cancer is great and should continue to be supported.
    
11. The discoveries of NP-completeness, public-key encryption, zero-knowledge and probabilistically checkable proofs, and quantum computational speedups were milestones in the history of theoretical computer science, worthy of celebration.
    
12. Katalin Karikó, who pioneered mRNA vaccines, is a heroine of humanity. We should figure out how to create more Katalin Karikós.
    
13. Scientists spend too much of their time writing grant proposals, and not enough doing actual science. We should experiment with new institutions to fix this.
    
14. I wish California could build high-speed rail from LA to San Francisco. If California’s Democrats could show they could do this, it would be an electoral boon to Democrats nationally.
    
15. I wish the US could build clean energy, including wind, solar, and nuclear. Actually, more generally, we should do everything recommended in Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s phenomenal new book Abundance, which I just finished.
    
16. The great questions of philosophy—why does the universe exist? how does consciousness relate to the physical world? what grounds morality?—are worthy of respect, as primary drivers of human curiosity for millennia. Scientists and engineers should never sneer at these questions. All the same, I personally couldn’t spend my life on such questions: I also need small problems, ones where I can make definite progress.
    
17. Quantum physics, which turns 100 this year, is arguably the most metaphysical of all empirical discoveries. It’s worthy of returning to again and again in life, asking: but how could the world be that way? Is there a different angle that we missed?
    
18. If I knew for sure that I could achieve Enlightenment, but only by meditating on a mountaintop for a decade, a further question would arise: is it worth it? Or would I rather spend that decade engaged with the world, with scientific problems and with other people?
    
19. I, too, vote for political parties, and have sectarian allegiances. But I’m most moved by human creative effort, in science or literature or anything else, that transcends time and place and circumstance and speaks to the eternal.
    
20. As I was writing this post, a bird died by flying straight into the window of my home office. As little sense as it might make from a utilitarian standpoint, I am sad for that bird.

The United States is now a country that disappears people.

Visa holders, green card holders, and even occasionally citizens mistaken for non-citizens: Trump’s goons can now seize them off the sidewalk at any time, handcuff them, detain them indefinitely in a cell in Louisiana with minimal access to lawyers, or even fly them to an overcrowded prison in El Salvador to be tortured.

It’s important to add: from what I know, some of the people being detained and deported are genuinely horrible. Some worked for organizations linked to Hamas, and cheered the murder of Jews. Some trafficked fentanyl. Some were violent gang members.

There are proper avenues to deport such people, in normal pre-Trumpian US law. For example, you can void someone’s visa by convincing a judge that they lied about not supporting terrorist organizations in their visa application.

But already other disappeared people seem to have been entirely innocent. Some apparently did nothing worse than write lefty op-eds or social media posts. Others had innocuous tattoos that were mistaken for gang insignia.

Millennia ago, civilization evolved mechanisms like courts and judges and laws and evidence and testimony, to help separate the guilty from the innocent. These are known problems with known solutions. No new ideas are needed.

One reader advised me not to blog about this issue unless I had something original to say: how could I possibly add to the New York Times’ and CNN’s daily coverage of every norm-shattering wrinkle? But other readers were livid at me for not blogging, even interpreting silence or delay as support for fascism.

For those readers, but more importantly for my kids and posterity, let me say: no one who follows this blog could ever accuse me of reflexive bleeding-heart wokery, much less of undue sympathy for “globalize the intifada” agitators. So with whatever credibility that grants me: Shtetl-Optimized unequivocally condemns the “grabbing random foreign students off the street” method of immigration enforcement. If there are resident aliens who merit deportation, prove it to a friggin’ judge (I’ll personally feel more confident that the law is being applied sanely if the judge wasn’t appointed by Trump). Prove that you got the right person, and that they did what you said, and that that violated the agreed-upon conditions of their residency according to some consistently-applied standard. And let the person contest the charges, with advice of counsel.

I don’t want to believe the most hyperbolic claims of my colleagues, that the US is now a full Soviet-style police state, or inevitably on its way to one. I beg any conservatives reading this post, particularly those with influence over events: help me not to believe this.

The world is complicated, and the following things can all be true:

(1) Trump and his minions would love to destroy American academia, to show their power, thrill their base, and exact revenge on people who they hate. They will gladly seize on any pretext to do so. For those of us, whatever our backgrounds, who chose to spend our lives in American academia, discovering and sharing new knowledge—this is and should be existentially terrifying.

(2) For the past year and a half, Columbia University was a pretty scary place to be an Israeli or pro-Israel Jew—at least, according to Columbia’s own antisemitism task force report, the firsthand reports of my Jewish friends and colleagues at Columbia, and everything else I gleaned from sources I trust. The situation seems to have been notably worse there than at most American universities. (If you think this is all made up, please read pages 13-37 of the report—immediately after October 7, Jewish students singled out for humiliation by professors in class, banned from unrelated student clubs unless they denounced Israel, having their Stars of David ripped off as they walked through campus at night, forced to move dorms due to constant antisemitic harassment—and then try to imagine we were talking about Black, Asian, or LGBTQ students. How would expect a university to respond, and how would you want it to? More recent incidents included the takeover of a Modern Israeli History class—guards were required for subsequent lectures—and the occupation of Barnard College.) Last year, I decided to stop advising Jewish and Israeli students to go to Columbia, or at any rate, to give them very clear warnings about it. I did this with extreme reluctance, as the Columbia CS department happens to have some of my dearest colleagues in the world, many of whom I know feel just as I do about this.

(3) Having been handed this red meat on a silver platter, the Trump Education Department naturally gobbled it up. They announced that they’re cancelling $400 million in grants to Columbia, to be reinstated in a month if Columbia convinces them that they’re fulfilling their Title VI antidiscrimination obligations to Jews and Israelis. Clearly the Trumpists mean to make an example of Columbia, and thereby terrify other universities into following suit.

(4) Tragically and ironically, this funding freeze will primarily affect Columbia’s hard science departments, which rely heavily on federal grants, and which have remained welcoming to Jews and Israelis. It will have only a minimal effect on Columbia’s social sciences and humanities departments—the ones that nurtured the idea of Hamas and Hezbollah as heroic resistance—as those departments receive much less federal funding in the first place. I hate that suspending grants is pretty much the only federal lever available.

(5) When an action stands to cause so much pain to the innocent and so little to the guilty, I can’t on reflection endorse it—even if it might crudely work to achieve an outcome I want, and all the less if it won’t achieve that outcome.

(6) But I can certainly hope for a good outcome! From what I’ve been told, Katrina Armstrong, the current president of Columbia, has been trying to do the right thing ever since she inherited this mess. In response to the funding freeze, President Armstrong issued an excellent statement, laying out her determination to work with the Education Department, crack down on antisemitic harassment, and restore the funding, with no hint of denial or defensiveness. While I wouldn’t want her job right now, I’m rooting for her to succeed.

(7) Time for some game theory. Consider the following three possible outcomes:
(a) Columbia gets back all its funding by seriously enforcing its rules (e.g., expelling students who threatened violence against Jews), and I can again tell Jewish and Israeli students to attend Columbia with zero hesitation
(b) Everything continues just like before
(c) Columbia loses its federal funding, essentially shuts down its math and science research, and becomes a shadow of what it was
Now let’s say that I assign values of 100 to (a), 50 to (b), and -1000 to (c). This means that, if (say) Columbia’s humanities professors told me that my only options were (b) and (c), I would always flinch and choose (b). And thus, I assume, the professors would tell me my only options were (b) and (c). They’d know I’d never hold a knife to their throat and make them choose between (a) and (c), because I’d fear they’d actually choose (c), an outcome I probably want even less than they do.

Having said that: if, through no fault of my own, some mobster held a knife to their throat and made them choose between (a) and (c)—then I’d certainly advise them to pick (a)! Crucially, this doesn’t mean that I’d endorse the mobster’s tactics, or even that I’d feel confident that the knife won’t be at my own throat tomorrow. It simply means that you should still do the right thing, even if for complicated reasons, you were blackmailed into doing the right thing by a figure of almost cartoonish evil.

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I welcome comments with facts or arguments about the on-the-ground situation at Columbia, American civil rights law, the Trumpists’ plans, etc. But I will ruthlessly censor comments that try to relitigate the Israel/Palestine conflict itself. Not merely because I’m tired of that, the Shtetl-Optimized comment section having already litigated the conflict into its constituent quarks, but much more importantly, because whatever you think of it, it’s manifestly irrelevant to whether or not Columbia tolerated a climate of fear for Jews and Israelis in violation of Title VI, which is understandably the only question that American judges (even the non-Trumpist ones) will care about.

It now seems the switch of Cancel Culture has only two settings:

1. everything is cancellable—including giving intellectual arguments against specific DEI policies, or teaching students about a Chinese filler word (“ne-ge”) that sounds a little like the N-word, or else
2. nothing is cancellable—not even tweeting “normalize Indian hate” and “I was racist before it was cool,” shortly before getting empowered to remake the US federal government.

How could we possibly draw any line between these two extremes? Wouldn’t that require … judgment? Common sense? Consideration of the facts of individual cases?

I, of course, survived attempted cancellation by a large online mob a decade ago, led by well-known figures such as Amanda Marcotte and Arthur Chu. Though it was terrifying at the time—it felt like my career and even my life were over—I daresay that, here in 2025, not many people would still condemn me for trying to have the heartfelt conversation I did about nerds, feminism, and dating, deep in the comments section of this blog. My side has now conclusively “won” that battle. The once-terrifying commissars of the People’s Republic of Woke, who delighted in trying to ruin me, are now bound and chained, as whooping soldiers of the MAGA Empire drag them by their hair to the torture dungeons.

And this is … not at all the outcome I wanted? It’s a possible outcome that I foresaw in 2014, and was desperately trying to help prevent, through fostering open dialogue between shy male nerds and feminists? I’m now, if anything, more terrified for my little tribe of pro-Enlightenment, science-loving nerds than I was under the woke regime? Speaking of switches with only two settings.

Anyway, with whatever moral authority this experience vests in me, I’d like to suggest that, in future cancellation controversies, the central questions ought to include the following:

1. What did the accused person actually say or do? Disregarding all confident online discourse about what that “type” of person normally does, or wants to do.
2. Is there a wider context that often gets cut from social media posts, but that, as soon as you know it, makes the incident seem either better or worse?
3. How long ago was the offense: more like thirty years or like last week?
4. Was the person in a radically different condition than they are now—e.g., were they very young, or undergoing a mental health episode, or reacting to a fresh traumatic incident, or drunk or high?
5. Were the relevant cultural norms different when the offense happened? Did countless others say or do the same thing, and if so, are they also at risk of cancellation?
6. What’s reasonable to infer about what the person actually believes? What do they want to have happen to whichever group they offended? What would they do to the group given unlimited power? Have they explicitly stated answers to these questions, either before or after the incident? Have they taken real-world actions by which we could judge their answers as either sincere or insincere?
7. If we don’t cancel this person, what are we being asked to tolerate? Just that they get to keep teaching and publishing views that many people find objectionable? Or that they get to impose their objectionable views on an entire academic department, university, company, organization, or government?
8. If we agree that the person said something genuinely bad, did they apologize or express regret? Or, if what they said got confused with something bad, did they rush to clarify and disclaim the bad interpretation?
9. Did they not only refuse to clarify or apologize, but do the opposite? That is, did they express glee about what they were able to get away with, or make light of the suffering or “tears” of their target group?

People can debate how to weigh these considerations, though I personally put enormous weight on 8 and 9, what you could call the “clarification vs. glee axis.” I have nearly unlimited charity for people willing to have a good-faith moral conversation with the world, and nearly unlimited contempt for people who mock the request for such a conversation.

The sad part is that, in practice, the criteria for cancellation have tended instead to be things like:

• Is the target giving off signals of shame, distress, and embarrassment—thereby putting blood in the water and encouraging us to take bigger bites?
• Do we, the mob, have the power to cancel this person? Does the person’s reputation and livelihood depend on organizations that care what we think, that would respond to pressure from us?

The trouble with these questions is that, not only are their answers not positively correlated with which people deserve to be cancelled, they’re negatively correlated. This is precisely how you get the phenomenon of the left-wing circular firing squad, which destroys the poor schmucks capable of shame even while the shameless, the proud racists and pussy-grabbers, go completely unpunished. Surely we can do better than that.

In nearly twenty years of blogging, I’ve unfortunately felt more and more isolated and embattled. It now feels like anything I post earns severe blowback, from ridicule on Twitter, to pseudonymous comment trolls, to scary and aggressive email bullying campaigns. Reflecting on this, though, I came to see that such strong reactions are an understandable response to my extremist stances. When your beliefs smash the Overton Window into tiny shards like mine do, what do you expect? Just consider some of the intransigent, hard-line stances I’ve taken here on Shtetl-Optimized:

(1) US politics. I’m terrified of right-wing authoritarian populists and their threat to the Enlightenment. For that and many other reasons, I vote straight-ticket Democrat, donate to Democratic campaigns, and encourage everyone else to do likewise. But I also wish my fellow Democrats would rein in the woke stuff, stand up more courageously to the world’s autocrats, and study more economics, so they understand why rent control, price caps, and other harebrained interventions will always fail.

(2) Quantum computing. I’m excited about the prospects of QC, so much that I’ve devoted most of my career to that field. But I also think many of QC’s commercial applications have been wildly oversold to investors, funding agencies, and the press, and I haven’t been afraid to say so.

(3) AI. I think the spectacular progress of AI over the past few years raises scary questions about where we’re headed as a species.  I’m neither in the camp that says “we’ll almost certainly die unless we shut down AI research,” nor the camp that says “the good guys need to race full-speed ahead to get AGI before the bad guys get it.” I’d like us to proceed in AI research with caution and guardrails and the best interests of humanity in mind, rather than the commercial interests of particular companies.

(4) Climate change. I think anthropogenic climate change is 100% real and one of the most urgent problems facing humanity, and those who deny this are being dishonest or willfully obtuse.  But because I think that, I also think it’s way past time to explore technological solutions like modular nuclear reactors, carbon capture, and geoengineering. I think we can’t virtue-signal or kumbaya our way out of the climate crisis.

(5) Feminism and dating. I think the emancipation of women is one of the modern world’s greatest triumphs.  I reserve a special hatred for misogynistic, bullying men. But I also believe, from experience, that many sensitive, nerdy guys severely overcorrected on feminist messaging, to the point that they became terrified of the tiniest bit of assertiveness or initiative in heterosexual courtship. I think this terror has led millions of them to become bitter “incels.”  I want to figure out ways to disrupt the incel pipeline, by teaching shy nerdy guys to have healthy, confident dating lives, without thereby giving asshole guys license to be even bigger assholes.

(6) Israel/Palestine. I’m passionately in favor of Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state, without which my wife’s family and many of my friends’ and colleagues’ families would have been exterminated. However, I also despise Bibi and the messianic settler movement to which he’s beholden. I pray for a two-state solution where Israelis and Palestinians will coexist in peace, free from their respective extremists.

(7) Platonism. I think that certain mathematical questions, like the Axiom of Choice or the Continuum Hypothesis, might not have any Platonic truth-value, there being no fact of the matter beyond what can be proven from various systems of axioms. But I also think, with Gödel, that statements of elementary arithmetic, like the Goldbach Conjecture or P≠NP, are just Platonically true or false independent of any axiom system.

(8) Science and religion. As a secular rationalist, I’m acutely aware that no ancient religion can be “true,” in the sense believed by either the ancients or modern fundamentalists. Still, the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to see religions as vast storehouses containing (among much else) millennia of accumulated wisdom about how humans can or should live. As in the parable of Chesterton’s Fence, I think this wisdom is often far from obvious and nearly impossible to derive from first principles. So I think that, at the least, secularists will need to figure out their own long-term methods to encourage many of the same things that religion once did—such as stable families, childbirth, self-sacrifice and courage in defending one’s community, and credible game-theoretic commitments to keeping promises and various other behaviors.

(9) Foreign policy and immigration. I’d like the US to stand more courageously against evil regimes, such as those of China, Russia, and Iran. At the same time, I’d like the US to open our gates much wider to students, scientists, and dissidents from those nations who seek freedom in the West. I think our refusal to do enough of this is a world-historic self-own.

(10) Academia vs. industry. I think both have advantages and disadvantages for people in CS and other technical fields. At their best, they complement each other. When advising a student which path to pursue, I try to find out all I can about the student’s goals and personality.

(11) Population ethics. I’m worried about how the earth will support 9 or 10 billion people with first-world living standards, which is part of why I’d like career opportunities for women, girls’ education, contraception, and (early-term) abortion to become widely available everywhere on earth. All the same, I’m not an antinatalist. I think raising one or more children in a loving home should generally be celebrated as a positive contribution to the world.

(12) The mind-body problem. I think it’s possible that there’s something profound we don’t yet understand about consciousness and its relation to the physical world. At the same time, I think the burden is clearly on the mind-body dualists to articulate what that something might be, and how to reconcile it with the known laws of physics. I admire the audacity of Roger Penrose in tackling this question head-on, but I don’t think his solution works.

(13) COVID response. I think the countries that did best tended to be those that had some coherent stategy—whether that was “let the virus rip, keep schools open, quarantine only the old and sick,” or “aggressively quarantine everyone and wait for a vaccine.” I think countries torn between these strategies, like the US, tended to get the worst of all worlds. On the other hand, I think the US did one huge thing right, which was greatly to accelerate (by historical standards) the testing and distribution of the mRNA vaccines. For the sake of the millions who died and the billions who had their lives interrupted, I only wish we’d rushed the vaccines much more. We ought now to be spending trillions on a vaccine pipeline that’s ready to roll within weeks as soon as the next pandemic hits.

(14) P versus NP. From decades of intuition in math and theoretical computer science, I think we can be fairly confident of P≠NP—but I’d “only” give it, say, 97% odds. Here as elsewhere, we should be open to the possibility of world-changing surprises.

(15) Interpretation of QM. I get really annoyed by bad arguments against the Everett interpretation, which (contrary to a popular misconception) I understand to result from scientifically conservative choices. But I’m also not an Everettian diehard. I think that, if you push questions like “but is anyone home in the other branches?” hard enough, you arrive at questions about personal identity and consciousness that were profoundly confusing even before quantum mechanics. I hope we someday learn something new that clarifies the situation.

Anyway, with extremist, uncompromising views like those, is it any surprise that I get pilloried and denounced so often?

All the same, I sometimes ask myself: what was the point of becoming a professor, seeking and earning the hallowed protections of tenure, if I can’t then freely express radical, unbalanced, batshit-crazy convictions like the ones in this post?

Today is the day I became radicalized in my Jewish and Zionist identities.

Uhhh, you thought that had already happened? Like maybe in the aftermath of October 7, or well before then? Hahahaha no. You haven’t seen nothin’ yet.

See, a couple days ago, I was consoling myself on Facebook that, even as the arts and humanities and helping professions appeared to have fully descended into 1930s-style antisemitism, with “Zionists” (i.e., almost all Jews) now regularly getting disinvited from conferences and panels, singled out for condemnation by their teachers, placed on professional blacklists, etc. etc.—still, at least we in math, CS, and physics have mostly resisted these insanities. This was my way of trying to contain the damage. Sure, I told myself, all sorts of walks of life that had long been loony got even loonier, but at least it won’t directly affect me, here in my little bubble of polynomial-time algorithms and lemmas and chalk and LaTeX and collegiality and sanity.

So immediately afterward, as if overhearing, the International Olympiad on Informatics announced that, by a vote of more than two-thirds of its delegates, it’s banning the State of Israel from future competition. For context, the IOI is the world’s main high-school programming contest. I once dreamed of competing in the IOI, but then I left high school at age 15, which is totally the reason why I didn’t make it. Incredibly, despite its tiny size, Israel placed #2 in this month’s contest, which was held in Egypt. (The Israeli teenagers had to compete remotely, since Egypt could not guarantee their safety.)

Anyway, apparently the argument that carried the day at IOI was that, since Russia had previously been banned, it was only fair to ban Israel too. Is it even worth pointing out that Russia launched a war of conquest and annihilation against a neighbor, while Israel has been defending itself from such a war launched by its neighbors? I.e., that Israel is the “Ukraine” here, not the “Russia”? Do you even have to ask whether Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or China were also banned? Will it change anyone’s mind that, if we read Israel’s enemies in their own words—as I do, every day—they constantly tell us that, in their view, Israel’s fundamental “aggression” was not building settlements or demolishing houses or rigging pagers, but simply existing? (“We don’t want no two states!,” they explain. “We want all of ’48,” they explain.)

Surely, then, the anti-Zionists, the ones who rush to assure us they’re definitely not antisemites, must have some plan for what will happen to half the world’s remaining Jews after the little Zionist lifeboat is gone, after the new river-to-the-sea state of Palestine has expelled the hated settler-colonialists? Surely the plan won’t just be to ship the Jews back to the countries that murdered or expelled their grandparents, most of which have never offered to take them back? Surely the plan won’t be the same plan from last time—i.e., the plan that the Palestinian leadership enthusiastically supported the last time, the plan that it yearned to bring to Tel Aviv and Haifa, the plan called (where it was successfully carried out) by such euphemisms as Umsiedlung nach dem Osten and Endlösung der Judenfrage?

I feel like there must be sane answers to these questions, because if there aren’t, then too many people around the globe have covered themselves in a kind of shame that I thought had died a generation before I was born. And, like, these are people who consider themselves the paragons of enlightened morality: weeping for the oppressed, marching for LGBTQ+, standing on the right side of history. They organize literary festivals and art shows and (god help me) even high-school programming contests. They couldn’t also be monsters full of hatred, could they? Even though, the last time the question was tested, they totally were?

Let me add, in fairness: four Israeli high-school students will still be suffered to compete in the IOI, “but only as individuals.” To my mind, then, the right play for those students is to show up next year, do as well as they did this year, and then disqualify themselves by raising an Israeli flag in front of the cameras. Let them honor the legacy of Israel’s Olympic athletes, who kept showing up to compete (and eventually, to win medals) even after the International Olympic Committee had made clear that it would not protect them from being massacred mid-event. Let them exemplify what Mark Twain famously said of “the Jew,” that “he has made a marvellous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him.”

But why do I keep abusing your time with this, when you came to hear about quantum computing or AI safety? I’ll get back to those soon enough. But truthfully, if speaking clearly about the darkness now re-enveloping civilization demanded it, I’d willingly lose every single non-Jewish friend I had, and most of my Jewish friends too. I’d completely isolate myself academically, professionally, and socially. I’d give up 99% of the readership of this blog. Better that than to look in the mirror and see a coward, a careerist, a kapo.

I thank the fates or the Born Rule, then, that I won’t need to do any of that. I’ve lived my life surrounded by friends and colleagues from Alabama and Alaska, China and India, Brazil and Iran, of every race and religion and sexual orientation and programming indentation style. Some of my Gentile friends 300% support me on this issue. Most of the rest are willing to hear me out, which is enough for friendship. If I can call the IOI’s Judenboykott what it is while keeping more than half of my readers, colleagues, and friends—that’s not even much of a decision, is it?

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Important Update (September 26): Jonathan Mosheiff, of Israeli’s IOI delegation, got in touch with me and gave me permission to share the document below, which in my view shows that the anti-Israel animus at IOI goes much deeper than I realized, and that the process taken to remove Israel was fundamentally corrupt and in violation of the IOI’s own promises. –SA

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I served as the Israeli team leader at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) from 2011 to 2015, and since then, I have maintained an unofficial advisory role to the team. Currently, I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Ben-Gurion University.

There are two key issues that need to be addressed:

Israel’s Participation in IOI 2024

At IOI 2023, the Israeli delegation was informed by the Egyptian delegation that Israel would not be able to attend IOI 2024 as an official delegation under the Israeli flag. Instead, Israel could participate under a neutral “IOI flag,” similar to how Russia participated in the 2021 Olympic Games in Tokyo. The Egyptians cited security concerns as the reason for this restriction, a claim that is highly questionable. The Israeli delegation inquired whether, after the IOI concluded, the official IOI scoreboard would reflect Israel’s representation under the Israeli flag rather than a neutral one. The Egyptian organizers responded that they would be unable to make this change, without providing any justification. This clearly undermines the credibility of their security-related reasoning.

In March 2024, Ben Burton, the IOI President from Australia, officially notified Israel that it would not be invited to participate in IOI 2024, not even under a neutral flag. This decision directly contravenes IOI rules, which mandate that the host nation must invite all IOI member countries. It’s important to differentiate between two scenarios: In some cases, a host country may invite another nation, but that nation cannot attend due to visa issues. However, this was not the situation here. Egypt did not issue Israel a letter of invitation and ignored Israel’s attempts at communication. To my knowledge, this is only the second instance in IOI history where a host nation failed to invite another nation—the first being Iran’s refusal to invite Israel when it hosted IOI 2017.

The IOI International Committee (the executive branch of the IOI) has not provided any explanation as to how the host nation could be allowed to act in this manner. They did propose a solution where Israel would participate remotely. Along with Israel, Iran also had to participate remotely due to visa issues, as did one German contestant. However, the treatment of Iran and Israel was vastly different. Iranian contestants (and the one German contestant) were acknowledged in all official on-site IOI publications and were recognized at both the opening and closing ceremonies. In contrast, Israel was completely ignored and went unrecognized throughout IOI 2024. The Israeli contestants were only “retroactively added” to the competition by the International Committee after IOI 2024 had concluded. Even now, our contestants cannot obtain official placement certificates, as the host nation deleted them from the competition servers. As far as I am aware, no other country in IOI history has been treated this way.

The Vote to Sanction Israel

In March 2024, the IOI President issued a brief statement indicating that there were requests to sanction Israel and that an email would be sent to all participating nations to gather their opinions. On August 3rd, 2024, a second email was sent, requesting that opinions be submitted directly to the International Committee rather than through a public discussion. In this email, Israel was already being compared to Russia. Israel submitted a position letter and requested that it be shared with all member nations, but the International Committee declined to disseminate Israel’s position. The IOI President assured Israel that, should a vote on sanctions be held during IOI 2024, Israel would be allowed to participate in the discussion remotely and have its voice heard. On August 16th, the International Committee announced that such a vote would indeed take place, and that Israel would be included in both the discussion and the vote.

IOI 2024 began on September 1st, 2024. At that time, the Israeli delegation was informed that they would not be allowed to participate in the discussion, even remotely. Israel was permitted to submit a written statement, which would be made available for all team leaders to download, but it was never read aloud during any discussions. The reason given was that Israel had been effectively erased from IOI 2024 by the hosts, and the International Committee acquiesced to this. Meanwhile, the Egyptian and Palestinian delegations were actively lobbying for votes throughout the week of IOI 2024. The discussion and vote on sanctions took place on the final day of IOI 2024 during a meeting of the General Assembly (the legislative branch of the IOI, where each nation has one vote). Israel was not even permitted to listen to the discussion (our leaders managed to hear it only because a sympathetic team leader unofficially opened a Zoom channel for them), let alone speak. The discussion itself was problematic in many ways. For instance, it grouped Israel together with Russia and Belarus. Ultimately, a majority voted to sanction Israel, along with Russia and Belarus, which had already been sanctioned previously.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – From the university campuses of Assyria to the thoroughfares of Ur to the palaces of the Hittite Empire, students across the Fertile Crescent have formed human chains, camel caravans, and even makeshift tent cities to protest the oppression of innocent Egyptians by the rogue proto-nation of “Israel” and its vengeful, warlike deity Yahweh. According to leading human rights organizations, the Hebrews, under the leadership of a bearded extremist known as Moses or “Genocide Moe,” have unleashed frogs, wild beasts, hail, locusts, cattle disease, and other prohibited collective punishments on Egypt’s civilian population, regardless of the humanitarian cost.

Human-rights expert Asenath Albanese says that “under international law, it is the Hebrews’ sole responsibility to supply food, water, and energy to the Egyptian populace, just as it was their responsibility to build mud-brick store-cities for Pharoah. Turning the entire Nile into blood, and plunging Egypt into neverending darkness, are manifestly inconsistent with the Israelites’ humanitarian obligations.”

Israelite propaganda materials have held these supernatural assaults to be justified by Pharoah’s alleged enslavement of the Hebrews, as well as unverified reports of his casting all newborn Hebrew boys into the Nile. Chanting “Let My People Go,” some Hebrew counterprotesters claim that Pharoah could end the plagues at any time by simply releasing those held in bondage.

Yet Ptahmose O’Connor, Chair of Middle East Studies at the University of Avaris, retorts that this simplistic formulation ignores the broader context. “Ever since Joseph became Pharoah’s economic adviser, the Israelites have enjoyed a position of unearned power and privilege in Egypt. Through underhanded dealings, they even recruited the world’s sole superpower—namely Adonai, Creator of the Universe—as their ally, removing any possibility that Adonai could serve as a neutral mediator in the conflict. As such, Egypt’s oppressed have a right to resist their oppression by any means necessary. This includes commonsense measures like setting taskmasters over the Hebrews to afflict them with heavy burdens, and dealing shrewdly with them lest they multiply.”

Professor O’Connor, however, dismissed the claims of drowned Hebrew babies as unverified rumors. “Infanticide accusations,” he explained, “have an ugly history of racism, Orientalism, and Egyptophobia. Therefore, unless you’re a racist or an Orientalist, the only possible conclusion is that no Hebrew babies have been drowned in the Nile, except possibly by accident, or of course by Hebrews themselves looking for a pretext to start this conflict.”

Meanwhile, at elite academic institutions across the region, the calls for justice have been deafening. “From the Nile to the Sea of Reeds, free Egypt from Jacob’s seeds!” students chanted. Some protesters even taunted passing Hebrew slaves with “go back to Canaan!”, though others were quick to disavow that message. According to Professor O’Connor, it’s important to clarify that the Hebrews don’t belong in Canaan either, and that finding a place where they do belong is not the protesters’ job.

In the face of such stridency, a few professors and temple priests have called the protests anti-Semitic. The protesters, however, dismiss that charge, pointing as proof to the many Hebrews and other Semitic peoples in their own ranks. For example, Sa-Hathor Goldstein, who currently serves as Pithom College’s Chapter President of Jews for Pharoah, told us that “we stand in solidarity with our Egyptian brethren, with the shepherds, goat-workers, and queer and mummified voices around the world. And every time Genocide Moe strikes down his staff to summon another of Yahweh’s barbaric plagues, we’ll be right there to tell him: Not In Our Name!”

“Look,” Goldstein added softly, “my own grandparents were murdered by Egyptian taskmasters. But the lesson I draw from my family’s tragic history is to speak up for oppressed people everywhere—even the ones who are standing over me with whips.”

“If Yahweh is so all-powerful,” Goldstein went on to ask, “why could He not devise a way to free the Israelites without a single Egyptian needing to suffer? Why did He allow us to become slaves in the first place? And why, after each plague, does He harden Pharoah’s heart against our release? Not only does that tactic needlessly prolong the suffering of Israelites and Egyptians alike, it also infringes on Pharoah’s bodily autonomy.”

But the strongest argument, Goldstein concluded, arching his eyebrow, is that “ever since I started speaking out on this issue, it’s been so easy to get with all the Midianite chicks at my school. That’s because they, like me, see past the endless intellectual arguments over ‘who started’ or ‘how’ or ‘why’ to the emotional truth that the suffering just has to stop, man.”

Last night, college towns across the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile were aglow with candelight vigils for Baka Ahhotep, an Egyptian taskmaster and beloved father of three cruelly slain by “Genocide Moe,” in an altercation over alleged mistreatment of a Hebrew slave whose details remain disputed.

According to Caitlyn Mentuhotep, a sophomore majoring in hieroglyphic theory at the University of Pi-Ramesses who attended her school’s vigil for Ahhotep, staying true to her convictions hasn’t been easy in the face of Yahweh’s unending plagues—particularly the head lice. “But what keeps me going,” she said, “is the absolute certainty that, when people centuries from now write the story of our time, they’ll say that those of us who stood with Pharoah were on the right side of history.”

Have a wonderful holiday!

Dear Twitter Anti-Zionists,

For five months, ever since Oct. 7, I’ve read you obsessively. While my current job is supposed to involve protecting humanity from the dangers of AI (with a side of quantum computing theory), I’m ashamed to say that half the days I don’t do any science; instead I just scroll and scroll, reading anti-Israel content and then pro-Israel content and then more anti-Israel content. I thought refusing to post on Twitter would save me from wasting my life there as so many others have, but apparently it doesn’t, not anymore. (No, I won’t call it “X.”)

At the high end of the spectrum, I religiously check the tweets of Paul Graham, a personal hero and inspiration to me ever since he wrote Why Nerds Are Unpopular twenty years ago, and a man with whom I seem to resonate deeply on every important topic except for two: Zionism and functional programming. At the low end, I’ve read hundreds of the seemingly infinite army of Tweeters who post images of hook-nosed rats with black hats and sidecurls and dollar signs in their eyes, sneering as they strangle the earth and stab Palestinian babies. I study their detailed theories about why the October 7 pogrom never happened, and also it was secretly masterminded by Israel just to create an excuse to mass-murder Palestinians, and also it was justified and thrilling (exactly the same melange long ago embraced for the Holocaust).

I’m aware, of course, that the bottom-feeders make life too easy for me, and that a single Paul Graham who endorses the anti-Zionist cause ought to bother me more than a billion sharers of hook-nosed rat memes. And he does. That’s why, in this letter, I’ll try to stay at the higher levels of Graham’s Disagreement Hierarchy.

More to the point, though, why have I spent so much time on such a depressing, unproductive reading project?

Damned if I know. But it’s less surprising when you recall that, outside theoretical computer science, I’m (alas) mostly known to the world for having once confessed, in a discussion deep in the comment section of this blog, that I spent much of my youth obsessively studying radical feminist literature. I explained that I did that because my wish, for a decade, was to confront progressivism’s highest moral authorities on sex and relationships, and make them tell me either that

(1) I, personally, deserved to die celibate and unloved, as a gross white male semi-autistic STEM nerd and stunted emotional and aesthetic cripple, or else
(2) no, I was a decent human being who didn’t deserve that.

One way or the other, I sought a truthful answer, one that emerged organically from the reigning morality of our time and that wasn’t just an unprincipled exception to it. And I felt ready to pursue progressive journalists and activists and bloggers and humanities professors to the ends of the earth before I’d let them leave this one question hanging menacingly over everything they’d ever written, with (I thought) my only shot at happiness in life hinging on their answer to it.

You might call this my central character flaw: this need for clarity from others about the moral foundations of my own existence. I’m self-aware enough to know that it is a severe flaw, but alas, that doesn’t mean that I ever figured out how to fix it.

It’s been exactly the same way with the anti-Zionists since October 7. Every day I read them, searching for one thing and one thing only: their own answer to the “Jewish Question.” How would they ensure that the significant fraction of the world that yearns to murder all Jews doesn’t get its wish in the 21st century, as to a staggering extent it did in the 20th? I confess to caring about that question, partly (of course) because of the accident of having been born a Jew, and having an Israeli wife and family in Israel and so forth, but also because, even if I’d happened to be a Gentile, the continued survival of the world’s Jews would still seem remarkably bound up with science, Enlightenment, minority rights, liberal democracy, meritocracy, and everything else I’ve ever cared about.

I understand the charges against me. Namely: that if I don’t call for Israel to lay down its arms right now in its war against Hamas (and ideally: to dissolve itself entirely), then I’m a genocidal monster on the wrong side of history. That I value Jewish lives more than Palestinian lives. That I’m a hasbara apologist for the IDF’s mass-murder and apartheid and stealing of land. That if images of children in Gaza with their limbs blown off, or dead in their parents arms, or clawing for bread, don’t cause to admit that Israel is evil, then I’m just as evil as the Israelis are.

Unsurprisingly I contest the charges. As a father of two, I can no longer see any images of child suffering without thinking about my own kids. For all my supposed psychological abnormality, the part of me that’s horrified by such images seems to be in working order. If you want to change my mind, rather than showing me more such images, you’ll need to target the cognitive part of me: the part that asks why so many children are suffering, and what causal levers we’d need to push to reach a place where neither side’s children ever have to suffer like this ever again.

At risk of stating the obvious: my first-order model is that Hamas, with the diabolical brilliance of a Marvel villain, successfully contrived a situation where Israel could prevent the further massacring of its own population only by fighting a gruesome urban war, of a kind that always, anywhere in the world, kills tens of thousands of civilians. Hamas, of course, was helped in this plan by an ideology that considers martyrdom the highest possible calling for the innocents who it rules ruthlessly and hides underneath. But Hamas also understood that the images of civilian carnage would (rightly!) shock the consciences of Israel’s Western allies and many Israelis themselves, thereby forcing a ceasefire before the war was over, thereby giving Hamas the opportunity to regroup and, with God’s and of course Iran’s help, finally finish the job of killing all Jews another day.

And this is key: once you remember why Hamas launched this war and what its long-term goals are, every detail of Twitter’s case against Israel has to be reexamined in a new light. Take starvation, for example. Clearly the only explanation for why Israelis would let Gazan children starve is the malice in their hearts? Well, until you think through the logistical challenges of feeding 2.3 million starving people whose sole governing authority is interested only in painting the streets red with Jewish blood. Should we let that authority commandeer the flour and water for its fighters, while innocents continue to starve? No? Then how about UNRWA? Alas, we learned that UNRWA, packed with employees who cheered the Oct. 7 massacre in their Telegram channels and in some cases took part in the murders themselves, capitulates to Hamas so quickly that it effectively is Hamas. So then Israel should distribute the food itself! But as we’ve dramatically witnessed, Israel can’t distribute food without imposing order, which would seem to mean reoccupying Gaza and earning the world’s condemnation for it. Do you start to appreciate the difficulty of the problem—and why the Biden administration was pushed to absurd-sounding extremes like air-dropping food and then building a floating port?

It all seems so much easier, once you remove the constraint of not empowering Hamas in its openly-announced goal of completing the Holocaust. And hence, removing that constraint is precisely what the global left does.

For all that, by Israeli standards I’m firmly in the anti-Netanyahu, left-wing peace camp—exactly where I’ve been since the 1990s, as a teenager mourning the murder of Rabin. And I hope even the anti-Israel side might agree with me that, if all the suffering since Oct. 7 has created a tiny opening for peace, then walking through that opening depends on two things happening:

1. the removal of Netanyahu, and
2. the removal of Hamas.

The good news is that Netanyahu, the catastrophically failed “Protector of Israel,” not only can, but plausibly will (if enough government ministers show some backbone), soon be removed in a democratic election.

Hamas, by contrast, hasn’t allowed a single election since it took power in 2006, in a process notable for its opponents being thrown from the roofs of tall buildings. That’s why even my left-leaning Israeli colleagues—the ones who despise Netanyahu, who marched against him last year—support Israel’s current war. They support it because, even if the Israeli PM were Fred Rogers, how can you ever get to peace without removing Hamas, and how can you remove Hamas except by war, any more than you could cut a deal with Nazi Germany?

I want to see the IDF do more to protect Gazan civilians—despite my bitter awareness of survey data suggesting that many of those civilians would murder my children in front of me if they ever got a chance. Maybe I’d be the same way if I’d been marinated since birth in an ideology of Jew-killing, and blocked from other sources of information. I’m heartened by the fact that despite this, indeed despite the risk to their lives for speaking out, a full 15% of Gazans openly disapprove of the Oct. 7 massacre. I want a solution where that 15% becomes 95% with the passing of generations. My endgame is peaceful coexistence.

But to the anti-Zionists I say: I don’t even mind you calling me a baby-eating monster, provided you honestly field one question. Namely:

Suppose the Palestinian side got everything you wanted for it; then what would be your plan for the survival of Israel’s Jews?

Let’s assume that not only has Netanyahu lost the next election in a landslide, but is justly spending the rest of his life in Israeli prison. Waving my wand, I’ve made you Prime Minister in his stead, with an overwhelming majority in the Knesset. You now get to go down in history as the liberator of Palestine. But you’re now also in charge of protecting Israel’s 7 million Jews (and 2 million other residents) from near-immediate slaughter at the hands of those who you’ve liberated.

Granted, it seems pretty paranoid to expect such a slaughter! Or rather: it would seem paranoid, if the Palestinians’ Grand Mufti (progenitor of the Muslim Brotherhood and hence Hamas) hadn’t allied himself with Hitler in WWII, enthusiastically supported the Nazi Final Solution, and tried to export it to Palestine; if in 1947 the Palestinians hadn’t rejected the UN’s two-state solution (the one Israel agreed to) and instead launched another war to exterminate the Jews (a war they lost); if they hadn’t joined the quest to exterminate the Jews a third time in 1967; etc., or if all this hadn’t happened back before there were any settlements or occupation, when the only question on the table was Israel’s existence. It would seem paranoid if Arafat had chosen a two-state solution when Israel offered it to him at Camp David, rather than suicide bombings. It would seem paranoid if not for the candies passed out in the streets in celebration on October 7.

But if someone has a whole ideology, which they teach their children and from which they’ve never really wavered for a century, about how murdering you is a religious honor, and also they’ve actually tried to murder you at every opportunity—-what more do you want them to do, before you’ll believe them?

So, you tell me your plan for how to protect Israel’s 7 million Jews from extermination at the hands of neighbors who have their extermination—my family’s extermination—as their central political goal, and who had that as their goal long before there was any occupation of the West Bank or Gaza. Tell me how to do it while protecting Palestinian innocents. And tell me your fallback plan if your first plan turns out not to work.

We can go through the main options.

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(1) UNILATERAL TWO-STATE SOLUTION

Maybe your plan is that Israel should unilaterally dismantle West Bank settlements, recognize a Palestinian state, and retreat to the 1967 borders.

This is an honorable plan. It was my preferred plan—until the horror of October 7, and then the even greater horror of the worldwide left reacting to that horror by sharing celebratory images of paragliders, and by tearing down posters of kidnapped Jewish children.

Today, you might say October 7 has sort of put a giant flaming-red exclamation point on what’s always been the central risk of unilateral withdrawal. Namely: what happens if, afterward, rather than building a peaceful state on their side of the border, the Palestinian leadership chooses instead to launch a new Iran-backed war on Israel—one that, given the West Bank’s proximity to Israel’s main population centers, makes October 7 look like a pillow fight?

If that happens, will you admit that the hated Zionists were right and you were wrong all along, that this was never about settlements but always, only about Israel’s existence? Will you then agree that Israel has a moral prerogative to invade the West Bank, to occupy and pacify it as the Allies did Germany and Japan after World War II? Can I get this in writing from you, right now? Or, following the future (October 7)² launched from a Judenfrei West Bank, will your creativity once again set to work constructing a reason to blame Israel for its own invasion—because you never actually wanted a two-state solution at all, but only Israel’s dismantlement?

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(2) NEGOTIATED TWO-STATE SOLUTION

So, what about a two-state solution negotiated between the parties? Israel would uproot all West Bank settlements that prevent a Palestinian state, and resettle half a million Jews in pre-1967 Israel—in exchange for the Palestinians renouncing their goal of ending Israel’s existence, via a “right of return” or any other euphemism.

If so: congratulations, your “anti-Zionism” now seems barely distinguishable from my “Zionism”! If they made me the Prime Minister of Israel, and put you in charge of the Palestinians, I feel optimistic that you and I could reach a deal in an hour and then go out for hummus and babaganoush.

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(3) SECULAR BINATIONAL STATE

In my experience, in the rare cases they deign to address the question directly, most anti-Zionists advocate a “secular, binational state” between the Jordan and Mediterranean, with equal rights for all inhabitants. Certainly, that would make sense if you believe that Israel is an apartheid state just like South Africa.

To me, though, this analogy falls apart on a single question: who’s the Palestinian Nelson Mandela? Who’s the Palestinian leader who’s ever said to the Jews, “end your Jewish state so that we can live together in peace,” rather than “end your Jewish state so that we can end your existence”? To impose a binational state would be to impose something, not only that Israelis regard as an existential horror, but that most Palestinians have never wanted either.

But, suppose we do it anyway. We place 7 million Jews, almost half the Jews who remain on Earth, into a binational state where perhaps a third of their fellow citizens hold the theological belief that all Jews should be exterminated, and that a heavenly reward follows martyrdom in blowing up Jews. The exterminationists don’t quite have a majority, but they’re the second-largest voting bloc. Do you predict that the exterminationists will give up their genocidal ambition because of new political circumstances that finally put their ambition within reach? If October-7 style pogroms against Jews turn out to be a regular occurrence in our secular binational state, how will its government respond—like the Palestinian Authority? like UNRWA? like the British Mandate? like Tsarist Russia?

In such a case, perhaps the Jews (along with those Arabs and Bedouins and Druze and others who cast their lot with the Jews) would need form a country-within-a-country: their own little autonomous zone within the binational state, with its own defense force. But of course, such a country-within-a-country already formed, for pretty much this exact reason. It’s called Israel. A cycle has been detected in your arc of progress.

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(4) EVACUATION OF THE JEWS FROM ISRAEL

We come now to the anti-Zionists who are plainspoken enough to say: Israel’s creation was a grave mistake, and that mistake must now be reversed.

This is a natural option for anyone who sees Israel as an “illegitimate settler-colonial project,” like British India or French Algeria, but who isn’t quite ready to call for another Jewish genocide.

Again, the analogy runs into obvious problems: Israelis would seem to be the first “settler-colonialists” in the history of the world who not only were indigenous to the land they colonized, as much as anyone was, but who weren’t colonizing on behalf of any mother country, and who have no obvious such country to which they can return.

Some say spitefully: then let the Jews go back to Poland. These people might be unaware that, precisely because of how thorough the Holocaust was, more Israeli Jews trace their ancestry to Muslim countries than to Europe. Is there to be a “right of return” to Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, and Yemen, for all the Jews forcibly expelled from those places and for their children and grandchildren?

Others, however, talk about evacuating the Jews from Israel with goodness in their hearts. They say: we’d love the Israelis’ economic dynamism here in Austin or Sydney or Oxfordshire, joining their many coreligionists who already call these places home. What’s more, they’ll be safer here—who wants to live with missiles raining down on their neighborhood? Maybe we could even set aside some acres in Montana for a new Jewish homeland.

Again, if this is your survival plan, I’m a billion times happier to discuss it openly than to have it as unstated subtext!

Except, maybe you could say a little more about the logistics. Who will finance the move? How confident are you that the target country will accept millions of defeated, desperate Jews, as no country on earth was the last time this question arose?

I realize it’s no longer the 1930s, and Israel now has friends, most famously in America. But—what’s a good analogy here? I’ve met various Silicon Valley gazillionaires. I expect that I could raise millions from them, right now, if I got them excited about a new project in quantum computing or AI or whatever. But I doubt I could raise a penny from them if I came to them begging for their pity or their charity.

Likewise: for all the anti-Zionists’ loudness, a solid majority of Americans continue to support Israel (which, incidentally, provides a much simpler explanation than the hook-nosed perfidy of AIPAC for why Congress and the President mostly support it). But it seems to me that Americans support Israel in the “exciting project” sense, rather than in the “charity” sense. They like that Israelis are plucky underdogs who made the deserts bloom, and built a thriving tech industry, and now produce hit shows like Shtisel and Fauda, and take the fight against a common foe to the latter’s doorstep, and maintain one of the birthplaces of Western civilization for tourists and Christian pilgrims, and restarted the riveting drama of the Bible after a 2000-year hiatus, which some believe is a crucial prerequisite to the Second Coming.

What’s important, for present purposes, is not whether you agree with any of these rationales, but simply that none of them translate into a reason to accept millions of Jewish refugees.

But if you think dismantling Israel and relocating its seven million Jews is a workable plan—OK then, are you doing anything to make that more than a thought experiment, as the Zionists did a century ago with their survival plan? Have even I done more to implement your plan than you have, by causing one Israeli (my wife) to move to the US?

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Suppose you say it’s not your job to give me a survival plan for Israel’s Jews. Suppose you say the request is offensive, an attempt to distract from the suffering of the Palestinians, so you change the subject.

In that case, fine, but you can now take off your cloak of righteousness, your pretense of standing above me and judging me from the end of history. Your refusal to answer the question amounts to a confession that, for you, the goal of “a free Palestine from the river to the sea” doesn’t actually require the physical survival of Israel’s Jews.

Which means, we’ve now established what you are. I won’t give you the satisfaction of calling you a Nazi or an antisemite. Thousands of years before those concepts existed, Jews already had terms for you. The terms tended toward a liturgical register, as in “those who rise up in every generation to destroy us.” The whole point of all the best-known Jewish holidays, like Purim yesterday, is to talk about those wicked would-be destroyers in the past tense, with the very presence of live Jews attesting to what the outcome was.

(Yesterday, I took my kids to a Purim carnival in Austin. Unlike in previous years, there were armed police everywhere. It felt almost like … visiting Israel.)

If you won’t answer the question, then it wasn’t Zionist Jews who told you that their choices are either to (1) oppose you or else (2) go up in black smoke like their grandparents did. You just told them that yourself.

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Many will ask: why don’t I likewise have an obligation to give you my Palestinian survival plan?

I do. But the nice thing about my position is that I can tell you my Palestinian survival plan cheerfully, immediately, with zero equivocating or changing the subject. It’s broadly the same plan that David Ben-Gurion and Yitzchak Rabin and Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton and the UN put on the table over and over and over, only for the Palestinians’ leaders to sweep it off.

I want the Palestinians to have a state, comprising the West Bank and Gaza, with a capital in East Jerusalem. I want Israel to uproot all West Bank settlements that prevent such a state. I want this to happen the instant there arises a Palestinian leadership genuinely committed to peace—one that embraces liberal values and rejects martyr values, in everything from textbooks to street names.

And I want more. I want the new Palestinian state to be as prosperous and free and educated as modern Germany and Japan are. I want it to embrace women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights and the rest of the modern package, so that “Queers for Palestine” would no longer be a sick joke. I want the new Palestine to be as intertwined with Israel, culturally and economically, as the US and Canada are.

Ironically, if this ever became a reality, then Israel-as-a-Jewish-state would no longer be needed—but it’s certainly needed in the meantime.

Anti-Zionists on Twitter: can you be equally explicit about what you want?

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I come, finally, to what many anti-Zionists regard as their ultimate trump card. Look at all the anti-Zionist Jews and Israelis who agree with us, they say. Jewish Voice for Peace. IfNotNow. Noam Chomsky. Norman Finkelstein. The Neturei Karta.

Intellectually, of course, the fact of anti-Zionist Jews makes not the slightest difference to anything. My question for them remains exactly the same as for anti-Zionist Gentiles: what is your Jewish survival plan, for the day after we dismantle the racist supremacist apartheid state that’s currently the only thing standing between half the world’s remaining Jews and their slaughter by their neighbors? Feel free to choose from any of the four options above, or suggest a fifth.

But in the event that Jewish anti-Zionists evade that conversation, or change the subject from it, maybe some special words are in order. You know the famous Golda Meir line, “If we have to choose between being dead and pitied and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image”?

It seems to me that many anti-Zionist Jews considered Golda Meir’s question carefully and honestly, and simply decided it the other way, in favor of Jews being dead and pitied.

Bear with me here: I won’t treat this as a reductio ad absurdum of their position. Not even if the anti-Zionist Jews themselves wish to remain safely ensconced in Berkeley or New Haven, while the Israelis fulfill the “dead and pitied” part for them.

In fact, I’ll go further. Again and again in life I’ve been seized by a dark thought: if half the world’s Jews can only be kept alive, today, via a militarized ethnostate that constantly needs to defend its existence with machine guns and missiles, racking up civilian deaths and destabilizing the world’s geopolitics—if, to put a fine point on it, there are 16 million Jews in the world, but at least a half billion antisemites who wake up every morning and go to sleep every night desperately wishing those Jews dead—then, from a crude utilitarian standpoint, might it not be better for the world if we Jews vanished after all?

Remember, I’m someone who spent a decade asking myself whether the rapacious, predatory nature of men’s sexual desire for women, which I experienced as a curse and an affliction, meant that the only moral course for me was to spend my life as a celibate mathematical monk. But I kept stumbling over one point: why should such a moral obligation fall on me alone? Why doesn’t it fall on other straight men, particularly the ones who presume to lecture me on my failings?

And also: supposing I did take the celibate monk route, would even that satisfy my haters? Would they come after me anyway for glancing at a woman too long or making an inappropriate joke? And also: would the haters soon say I shouldn’t have my scientific career either, since I’ve stolen my coveted academic position from the underprivileged? Where exactly does my self-sacrifice end?

When I did, finally, start approaching women and asking them out on dates, I worked up the courage partly by telling myself: I am now going to do the Zionist thing. I said: if other nerdy Jews can risk death in war, then this nerdy Jew can risk ridicule and contemptuous stares. You can accept that half the world will denounce you as a monster for living your life, so long as your own conscience (and, hopefully, the people you respect the most) continue to assure you that you’re nothing of the kind.

This took more than a decade of internal struggle, but it’s where I ended up. And today, if anyone tells me I had no business ever forming any romantic attachments, I have two beautiful children as my reply. I can say: forget about me, you’re asking for my children never to have existed—that’s why I’m confident you’re wrong.

Likewise with the anti-Zionists. When the Twitter-warriors share their memes of hook-nosed Jews strangling the planet, innocent Palestinian blood dripping from their knives, when the global protests shut down schools and universities and bridges and parliament buildings, there’s a part of me that feels eager to commit suicide if only it would appease the mob, if only it would expiate all the cosmic guilt they’ve loaded onto my shoulders.

But then I remember that this isn’t just about me. It’s about Einstein and Spinoza and Feynman and Erdös and von Neumann and Weinberg and Landau and Michelson and Rabi and Tarski and Asimov and Sagan and Salk and Noether and Meitner, and Irving Berlin and Stan Lee and Rodney Dangerfield and Steven Spielberg. Even if I didn’t happen to be born Jewish—if I had anything like my current values, I’d still think that so much of what’s worth preserving in human civilization, so much of math and science and Enlightenment and democracy and humor, would seem oddly bound up with the continued survival of this tiny people. And conversely, I’d think that so much of what’s hateful in civilization would seem oddly bound up with the quest to exterminate this tiny people, or to deny it any means to defend itself from extermination.

So that’s my answer, both to anti-Zionist Gentiles and to anti-Zionist Jews. The problem of Jewish survival, on a planet much of which yearns for the Jews’ annihilation and much of the rest of which is indifferent, is both hard and important, like P versus NP. And so a radical solution was called for. The solution arrived at a century ago, at once brand-new and older than Homer and Hesiod, was called the State of Israel. If you can’t stomach that solution—if, in particular, you can’t stomach the violence needed to preserve it, so long as Israel’s neighbors retain their annihilationist dream—then your response ought to be to propose a better solution. I promise to consider your solution in good faith—asking, just like with P vs. NP provers, how you overcome the problems that doomed all previous attempts. But if you throw my demand for a better solution back in my face, then you might as well be pushing my kids into a gas chamber yourself, for all the moral authority that I now recognize you to have over me.

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Possibly the last thing Einstein wrote was a speech celebrating Israel’s 7th Independence Day, which he died a week before he was to deliver. So let’s turn the floor over to Mr. Albert, the leftist pacifist internationalist:

This is the seventh anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel. The establishment of this State was internationally approved and recognised largely for the purpose of rescuing the remnant of the Jewish people from unspeakable horrors of persecution and oppression.

Thus, the establishment of Israel is an event which actively engages the conscience of this generation. It is, therefore, a bitter paradox to find that a State which was destined to be a shelter for a martyred people is itself threatened by grave dangers to its own security. The universal conscience cannot be indifferent to such peril.

It is anomalous that world opinion should only criticize Israel’s response to hostility and should not actively seek to bring an end to the Arab hostility which is the root cause of the tension.

I love Einstein’s use of “anomalous,” as if this were a physics problem. From the standpoint of history, what’s anomalous about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not, as the Twitterers claim, the brutality of the Israelis—if you think that’s anomalous, you really haven’t studied history—but something different. In other times and places, an entity like Palestine, which launches a war of total annihilation against a much stronger neighbor, and then another and another, would soon disappear from the annals of history. Israel, however, is held to a different standard. Again and again, bowing to international pressure and pressure from its own left flank, the Israelis have let their would-be exterminators off the hook, bruised but mostly still alive and completely unrepentant, to have another go at finishing the Holocaust in a few years. And after every bout, sadly but understandably, Israeli culture drifts more to the right, becomes 10% more like the other side always was.

I don’t want Israel to drift to the right. I find the values of Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion to be almost as good as any human values have ever been, and I’d like Israel to keep them. Of course, Israel will need to continue defending itself from genocidal neighbors, until the day that a leader arises among the Palestinians with the moral courage of Egypt’s Anwar Sadat or Jordan’s King Hussein: a leader who not only talks peace but means it. Then there can be peace, and an end of settlements in the West Bank, and an independent Palestinian state. And however much like dark comedy that seems right now, I’m actually optimistic that it will someday happen, conceivably even soon depending on what happens in the current war. Unless nuclear war or climate change or AI apocalypse makes the whole question moot.

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Anyway, thanks for reading—a lot built up these past months that I needed to get off my chest. When I told a friend that I was working on this post, he replied “I agree with you about Israel, of course, but I choose not to die on that hill in public.” I answered that I’ve already died on that hill and on several other hills, yet am somehow still alive!

Meanwhile, I was gratified that other friends, even ones who strongly disagree with me about Israel, told me that I should not disengage, but continue to tell it like I see it, trying civilly to change minds while being open to having my own mind changed.

And now, maybe, I can at last go back to happier topics, like how to prevent the destruction of the world by AI.

Cheers,
Scott

In fact, don’t try to take kids to Washington DC if you can possibly avoid it.

This is my public service announcement. This is the value I feel I can add to the world today.

Dana and I decided to take the kids to DC for spring break. The trip, alas, has been hell—a constant struggle against logistical failures. The first days were mostly spent sitting in traffic or searching for phantom parking spaces that didn’t exist. (So then we switched to the Metro, and promptly got lost, and had our metro cards rejected by the machines.) Or, at crowded cafes, I spent the time searching for a table so my starving kids could eat—and then when I finally found a table, a woman, smug and sure-faced, evicted us from the table because she was “going to” sit there, and my kids had to see that their dad could not provide for their basic needs, and that woman will never face any consequence for what she did.

Anyway, this afternoon, utterly frazzled and stressed and defeated, we entered “Planet Word,” a museum about language. Sounds pretty good, right? Except my soon-to-be 7-year-old son got bored by numerous exhibits that weren’t for him. So I told him he could lead the way and find any exhibit he liked.

Finally my son found an exhibit that fascinated him, one where he could weigh plastic fruits on a balancing scale. He was engrossed by it, he was learning, he was asking questions, I reflected that maybe the trip wasn’t a total loss … and that’s when a museum employee pointed at us, and screamed at us to leave the room, because “this exhibit was sold out.”

The room was actually almost empty (!). No one had stopped us from entering the room. No one else was waiting to use the balancing scale. There was no sign to warn us we were doing anything wrong. I would’ve paid them hundreds of dollars in that moment if only we could stay. My son didn’t understand why he was suddenly treated as a delinquent. He then wanted to leave the whole museum, and so did I. The day was ruined for us.

Mustering my courage to do something uncharacteristic for me, I complained at the front desk. They sneered and snickered at me, basically told me to go to hell. Looking deeply into their dumb, blank expressions, I realized that I had as much chance of any comprehension or sympathy as I’d have from a warthog. It’s true that, on the scale of all the injustices in the history of the world, this one surely didn’t crack the top quadrillion. But for me, in that moment, it came to stand for all the others. Which has always been my main weakness as a person, that injustice affects me in that way.

Speaking of which, there was one part of DC trip that went exactly like it was supposed to. That was our visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Why? Because I feel like that museum, unlike all the rest, tells me the truth about the nature of the world that I was born into—and seeing the truth is perversely comforting. I was born into a world that right now, every day, is filled with protesters screaming for my death, for my family’s death—and this is accepted as normal, and those protesters sleep soundly at night, congratulating themselves for their progressivism and enlightenment. And thinking about those protesters, and their predecessors 80 years ago who perpetrated the Holocaust or who stood by and let it happen, is the only thing that really puts blankfaced museum employees into perspective for me. Like, of course a world with the former is also going to have the latter—and I should count myself immeasurably lucky if the latter is all I have to deal with, if the empty-skulled and the soul-dead can only ruin my vacation and lack the power to murder my family.

And to anyone who reached the end of this post and who feels like it was an unwelcome imposition on their time: I’m sorry. But the truth is, posts like this are why I started this blog and why I continue it. If I’ve ever imparted any interesting information or ideas, that’s a byproduct that I’m thrilled about. But I’m cursed to be someone who wakes up every morning, walks around every day, and goes to sleep every night crushed by the weight of the world’s injustice, and outside of technical subjects, the only thing that’s ever motivated me to write is that words are the only justice available to me.

Update (Dec. 17): Some of you might enjoy a 3-hour podcast I recently did with Lawrence Krauss, which was uploaded to YouTube just yesterday. The first hour is about my life and especially childhood (!); the second hour’s about quantum computing; the third hour’s about computational complexity, computability, and AI safety.

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I’m being attacked on Twitter for … no, none of the things you think. This time it’s some rationalist AI doomers, ridiculing me for a podcast I did with Eliezer Yudkowsky way back in 2009, one that I knew even then was a piss-poor performance on my part. The rationalists are reminding the world that I said back then that, while I knew of no principle to rule out superhuman AI, I was radically uncertain of how long it would take—my “uncertainty was in the exponent,” as I put it—and that for all I knew, it was plausibly thousands of years. When Eliezer expressed incredulity, I doubled down on the statement.

I was wrong, of course, not to contemplate more seriously the prospect that AI might enter a civilization-altering trajectory, not merely eventually but within the next decade. In this case, I don’t need to be reminded about my wrongness. I go over it every day, asking myself what I should have done differently.

If I were to mount a defense of my past self, it would look something like this:

1. Eliezer himself didn’t believe that staggering advances in AI were going to happen the way they did, by pure scaling of neural networks. He seems to have thought someone was going to discover a revolutionary “key” to AI. That didn’t happen; you might say I was right to be skeptical of it. On the other hand, the scaling of neural networks led to better and better capabilities in a way that neither of us expected.
2. For that matter, hardly anyone predicted the staggering, civilization-altering trajectory of neural network performance from roughly 2012 onwards. Not even most AI experts predicted it (and having taken a bunch of AI courses between 1998 and 2003, I was well aware of that). The few who did predict what ended up happening, notably Ray Kurzweil, made lots of other confident predictions (e.g., the Singularity around 2045) that seemed so absurdly precise as to rule out the possibility that they were using any sound methodology.
3. Even with hindsight, I don’t know of any principle by which I should’ve predicted what happened. Indeed, we still don’t understand why deep learning works, in any way that would let us predict which capabilities will emerge at which scale. The progress has been almost entirely empirical.
4. Once I saw the empirical case that a generative AI revolution was imminent—sometime during the pandemic—I updated, hard. I accepted what’s turned into a two-year position at OpenAI, thinking about what theoretical computer science can do for AI safety. I endured people, on this blog and elsewhere, confidently ridiculing me for not understanding that GPT-3 was just a stochastic parrot, no different from ELIZA in the 1960s, and that nothing of interest had changed. I didn’t try to invent convoluted reasons why it didn’t matter or count, or why my earlier skepticism had been right all along.
5. It’s still not clear where things are headed. Many of my academic colleagues express confidence that large language models, for all their impressiveness, will soon hit a plateau as we run out of Internet to use as training data. Sure, LLMs might automate most white-collar work, saying more about the drudgery of such work than about the power of AI, but they’ll never touch the highest reaches of human creativity, which generate ideas that are fundamentally new rather than throwing the old ideas into a statistical blender. Are these colleagues right? I don’t know.
6. (Added) In 2014, I was seized by the thought that it should now be possible to build a vastly better chatbot than “Eugene Goostman” (which was basically another ELIZA), by training the chatbot on all the text on the Internet. I wondered why the experts weren’t already trying that, and figured there was probably some good reason that I didn’t know.

Having failed to foresee the generative AI revolution a decade ago, how should I fix myself? Emotionally, I want to become even more radically uncertain. If fate is a terrifying monster, which will leap at me with bared fangs the instant I venture any guess, perhaps I should curl into a ball and say nothing about the future, except that the laws of math and physics will probably continue to hold, there will still be war between Israel and Palestine, and people online will still be angry at each other and at me.

But here’s the problem: in saying “for all I know, human-level AI might take thousands of years,” I thought I was being radically uncertain already. I was explaining that there was no trend you could knowably, reliably project into the future such that you’d end up with human-level AI by roughly such-and-such time. And in a sense, I was right. The trouble, with hindsight, was that I placed the burden of proof only on those saying a dramatic change would happen, not on those saying it wouldn’t. Note that this is the same mistake most of the world made with COVID in early 2020.

I would sum up the lesson thus: one must never use radical ignorance as an excuse to default, in practice, to the guess that everything will stay basically the same. Live long enough, and you see that year to year and decade to decade, everything doesn’t stay the same, even though most days and weeks it seems to.

The hard part is that, as soon as you venture a particular way in which the world might radically change—for example, that a bat virus spreading in Wuhan might shut down civilization, or Hamas might attempt a second Holocaust while the vaunted IDF is missing in action and half the world cheers Hamas, or a gangster-like TV personality might threaten American democracy more severely than did the Civil War, or a neural network trained on all the text on the Internet might straightaway start conversing more intelligently than most humans—say that all the prerequisites for one of these events seem to be in place, and you’ll face, not merely disagreement, but ridicule. You’ll face serenely self-confident people who call the entire existing order of the world as witness to your wrongness. That’s the part that stings.

Perhaps the wisest course for me would be to admit that I’m not and have never been a prognosticator, Bayesian or otherwise—and then stay consistent in my refusal, rather than constantly getting talked into making predictions that I’ll later regret. I should say: I’m just someone who likes to draw conclusions validly from premises, and explore ideas, and clarify possible scenarios, and rage against obvious injustices, and not have people hate me (although I usually fail at the last).

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The rationalist AI doomers also dislike that, in their understanding, I recently expressed a “p(doom)” (i.e., a probability of superintelligent AI destroying all humans) of “merely” 2%. The doomers’ probabilities, by contrast, tend to range between 10% and 95%—that’s why they’re called “doomers”!

In case you’re wondering, I arrived at my 2% figure via a rigorous Bayesian methodology, of taking the geometric mean of what my rationalist friends might consider to be sane (~50%) and what all my other friends might consider to be sane (~0.1% if you got them to entertain the question at all?), thereby ensuring that both camps would sneer at me equally.

If you read my post, though, the main thing that interested me was not to give a number, but just to unsettle people’s confidence that they even understand what should count as “AI doom.” As I put it last week on the other Scott’s blog:

To set the record straight: I once gave a ~2% probability for the classic AGI-doom paperclip-maximizer-like scenario. I have a much higher probability for an existential catastrophe in which AI is causally involved in one way or another — there are many possible existential catastrophes (nuclear war, pandemics, runaway climate change…), and many bad people who would cause or fail to prevent them, and I expect AI will soon be involved in just about everything people do! But making a firm prediction would require hashing out what it means for AI to play a “critical causal role” in the catastrophe — for example, did Facebook play a “critical causal role” in Trump’s victory in 2016? I’d say it’s still not obvious, but in any case, Facebook was far from the only factor.

This is not a minor point. That AI will be a central force shaping our lives now seems certain. Our new, changed world will have many dangers, among them that all humans might die. Then again, human extinction has already been on the table since at least 1945, and outside the “paperclip maximizer”—which strikes me as just one class of scenario among many—AI will presumably be far from the only force shaping the world, and chains of historical causation will still presumably be complicated even when they pass through AIs.

I have a dark vision of humanity’s final day, with the Internet (or whatever succeeds it) full of thinkpieces like:

• Yes, We’re All About to Die. But Don’t Blame AI, Blame Capitalism
• Who Decided to Launch the Missiles: Was It President Boebert, Kim Jong Un, or AdvisorBot-4?
• Why Slowing Down AI Development Wouldn’t Have Helped

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Here’s what I want to know in the comments section. Did you foresee the current generative AI boom, say back in 2010? If you did, what was your secret? If you didn’t, how (if at all) do you now feel you should’ve been thinking differently? Feel free also to give your p(doom), under any definition of the concept, so long as you clarify which one.