Shtetl-Optimized

To start on a somber note: those of us at UT Austin are in mourning this week for Savitha Shan, an undergrad double major here in economics and information systems, who was murdered over the weekend by an Islamist terrorist who started randomly shooting people on Sixth Street, apparently angry about the war in Iran. Two other innocents were also killed.

As it happens, these murders happened just a few hours after the end of my daughter’s bat mitzvah, and in walking distance from the venue. The bat mitzvah itself was an incredibly joyful and successful event that consumed most of my time lately, and which I might or might not say more about—the nastier the online trolls get, the more I need to think about my family’s privacy.

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Of all the many quantum computing podcasts/interviews I’ve done recently, I’m probably happiest with this one, with Yuval Boger of QuEra. It covers all the main points about where the hardware currently is, the threat to public-key cryptography, my decades-long battle against quantum applications hype, etc. etc., and there’s even an AI-created transcript that eliminates my verbal infelicities!

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A month ago, I blogged about “The Time I Didn’t Meet Jeffrey Epstein” (basically, because my mom warned me not to). Now the story has been written up in Science magazine, under the clickbaity headline “Meet Three Scientists Who Said No to Epstein.” (Besides yours truly, the other two scientists are friend-of-the-blog Sean Carroll, whose not-meeting-Epstein story I’d already heard directly from him, and David Agus, whose story I hadn’t heard.)

To be clear: as I explained in my post, I never actually said “no” to Epstein. Instead, based on my mom’s advice, I simply failed to follow up with his emissary, to the point where no meeting ever happened.

Anyway, ever since Science ran this story and it started making the rounds on social media, my mom has been getting congratulatory messages from friends of hers who saw it!

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I’ve been a huge fan of the philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein ever since I read her celebrated debut work, The Mind-Body Problem, back in 2005. Getting to know Rebecca and her husband, Steven Pinker, was a highlight of my last years at MIT. So I’m thrilled that Rebecca will be visiting UT Austin next week to give a talk on Spinoza, related to her latest book The Mattering Instinct (which I’m reading right now), and hosted by me and my colleague Galen Strawson in UT’s philosophy department. More info is in the poster below. If you’re in Austin, I hope to see you there!

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The 88-year-old Donald Knuth has published a 5-page document about how Claude was able to solve a tricky graph theory problem that arose while he was working on the latest volume of The Art of Computer Programming—a series that Knuth is still writing after half a century. As you’d expect from Knuth, the document is almost entirely about the graph theory problem itself and Claude’s solution to it, eschewing broader questions about the nature of machine intelligence and how LLMs are changing life on Earth. To anyone who’s been following AI-for-math lately, the fact that Claude now can help with this sort of problem won’t come as a great shock. The virality is presumably because Knuth is such a legend that to watch him interact productively with an LLM is sort of like watching Leibniz, Babbage, or Turing do the same.

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John Baez is a brilliant mathematical physicist and writer, who was blogging about science before the concept of “blogging” even existed, and from whom I’ve learned an enormous amount. But regarding John’s quest for the past 15 years — namely, to use category theory to help solve the climate crisis (!) — I always felt like the Cookie Monster would, with equal intellectual justification, say that the key to arresting climate change was for him to eat more Oreos. Then I read this Quanta article on the details of Baez’s project, and … uh … I confess it failed to change my view. Maybe someday I’ll understand why it’s better to say using category theory what I would’ve said in a 100x simpler way without category theory, but I fear that day is not today.

I don’t have time to write a full post right now, but hopefully this is self-explanatory.

Regardless of their broader views on the AI industry, the eventual risks from AI, or American politics, right every person of conscience needs to stand behind Anthropic, as they stand up for their right to [checks notes] not be effectively nationalized by the Trump administration and forced to build murderbots and to help surveil American citizens. No, I wouldn’t have believed this either in a science-fiction movie, but it’s now just the straightforward reality of our world, years ahead of schedule. In particular, I call on all other AI companies, in the strongest possible terms, to do the right thing and stand behind Anthropic, in this make-or-break moment for the AI industry and the entire world.

The following are prepared remarks that I delivered by Zoom to a student group at my old stomping-grounds of MIT, and which I thought might interest others (even though much of it will be familiar to Shtetl-Optimized regulars). The students asked me to share my “optimistic vision” for the year 2050, so I did my best to oblige. A freewheeling discussion then followed, as a different freewheeling discussion can now follow in the comments section.

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I was asked to share my optimistic vision for the future. The trouble is, optimistic visions for the future are not really my shtick!

It’s not that I’m a miserable, depressed person—I only sometimes am! It’s just that, on a local level, I try to solve the problems in front of me, which have often been problems in computational complexity or quantum computing theory.

And then, on a global level, I worry about the terrifying problems of the world, such as climate change, nuclear war, and of course the resurgence of populist, authoritarian strongmen who’ve turned their backs on the Enlightenment and appeal to the basest instincts of humanity. I won’t name any names.

So then my optimistic vision is simply that we survive all this—“we” meaning the human race, but also meaning communities that I personally care about, like Americans, academics, scientists, and my extended family. We survive all of it so that we can reach the next crisis, the one where we don’t even know what it is yet.

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But I get the sense that you wanted more optimism than that! Since I’ve spent 27 years working in quantum computing, the easiest thing for me to do would be to spin an optimistic story about how QC is going to make our lives so much better in 2050, by, I dunno, solving machine learning and optimization problems much faster, curing cancer, fixing global warming, whatever.

The good news is that there has been spectacular progress over the past couple years toward actually building a scalable QC. We now have two-qubit gates with 99.9% accuracy, close to the threshold where quantum error-correction becomes a net win. We can now do condensed-matter physics simulations that give us numbers that we don’t know how to get classically. I think it’s fair to say that all the key ideas and hardware building blocks for a fault-tolerant quantum computer are now in place, and what remains is “merely” the staggeringly hard engineering problem, which might take a few years, or a decade or more, but should eventually be solved.

The trouble for the optimistic vision is that the applications, where quantum algorithms outperform classical ones, have stubbornly remained pretty specialized. In fact, the two biggest ones remain the two that we knew about in the 1990s:

1. simulation of quantum physics and chemistry themselves, and
2. breaking existing public-key encryption.

Quantum simulation could help with designing better batteries, or solar cells, or high-temperature superconductors, or other materials, but the road from improved understanding to practical value is long and uncertain. Meanwhile, breaking public-key cryptography could help various spy agencies and hackers and criminal syndicates, but it doesn’t obviously help the world.

The quantum speedups that we know outside those two categories—for example, for optimization and machine learning—tend to be either modest or specialized or speculative.

Honestly, the application of QC that excites me the most, by far, is just disproving all the people who said QC was impossible!

So much for QC then.

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And so we come to the elephant in the room—the elephant in pretty much every room nowadays—which is AI. AI has now reached a place that exceeds the imaginations of many of the science-fiction writers of generations past—excelling not only at writing code and solving math competition problems but at depth of emotional understanding. Many of my friends are terrified of where this is leading us—and not in some remote future but in 5 or 10 or 20 years. I think they’re probably correct to be terrified. There’s an enormous range of possible outcomes on the table, including ones where the new superintelligences that we bring into being treat humans basically as humans treated the dodo bird, or the earlier hominids that used to share the earth with us.

But, within this range of outcomes, I think there are also some extremely good ones. Look, for millennia, people have prayed to God or gods for help, life, health, longevity, freedom, justice—and for millennia, God has famously been pretty slow to answer their prayers. A superintelligence that was aligned with human values would be nothing less than a God who did answer, who did deliver all those things, because we had created it to do so. Or for religious people, perhaps such an AI would be the means by which the old God was finally able to deliver all those things into the temporal world. These are the stakes here.

To switch metaphors, people sometimes describe the positive AI-enabled future as “luxury space communism.” AI would take care of all of our material needs, leaving us to seek value in our lives through family, friendships, competition, hobbies, humor, art, entertainment, or exploration. The super-AI would give us the freedom to pursue all those things, but would not give us the freedom to harm each other, to curtail each others’ freedoms, or to build a bad AI capable of overthrowing it. The super-AI would be a singleton, a monotheistic God or its emissary on earth.

Many people say that something would still be missing from this future. After all, we humans would no longer really be needed for anything—for building or advancing or defending civilization. To put a personal fine point on it, my students and colleagues and I wouldn’t needed any more to discover new scientific truths or to write about them. That would all be the AI’s job.

I agree that something would be lost here. But on the other hand, what fraction of us are needed right now for these things? Most humans already derive the meaning in their lives from family and community and enjoying art and music and food and things like that. So maybe the remaining fraction of us should just get over ourselves! On the whole, while this might not be the best future imaginable, I would accept it in a heartbeat given the realistic alternatives on offer. Thanks for listening.

This is just a quick announcement that I’ll be hosting Nate Soares—who coauthored the self-explanatorily titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies with Eliezer Yudkowsky—tomorrow (Tuesday) at 5PM at UT Austin, for a brief talk followed by what I’m sure will be an extremely lively Q&A about his book. Anyone in the Austin area is welcome to join us.

The following guest post was written by a Shtetl-Optimized fan in Iran, who’s choosing to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. I’m in awe of the courage of this individual and the millions of other Iranians who’ve risked or, tragically, sacrificed their lives these past few weeks, to stand for something about as unequivocally good and against something about as unequivocally evil as has ever existed on earth. I’m enraged at the relative indifference of the world, and of the US in particular, to these brave Iranians’ plight. There’s still time for the US to fulfill its promise to the protesters and do the right thing—something that I’ll support even if it endangers my friends and family living in Israel. I check the news from Iran every day, and pray that my friends and colleagues there stay safe—and that they, and the world, will soon be free from the Ayatollahs, who now stand fully unmasked before the world as the murderous thugs they always were. –SA

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Guest Post from an Iranian

The protests began in Tehran on 28 December 2025, triggered by economic instability and high inflation, and spread to other provinces. People, tired of the regime and aware that every president is just a puppet with no real power, began targeting the source of authority by chanting directly against Khamenei. After government forces killed several protesters, Trump said on 3 January that if they shoot, then U.S. will come to rescue. Protests continued, and on 6 January, Reza Pahlavi called for demonstrations at 8 PM on January 8 and 9. At first, all the regime supporters mocked this and said nobody will come. On these days, they shared videos of empty streets on the news to claim that nobody had shown up. But actually, many people joined the protests. Right around 8 PM on January 8, the government shut down the internet. Only Iran’s internal network remained active, meaning local apps and websites that use Iranian servers work, but the rest of the world was completely cut off.

The regime fears the internet so much that it has officially announced that anyone using Starlink is considered a spy for foreign countries, especially Mossad, and will be punished. As a result, Starlink owners are extremely cautious and rarely let others know they have it.

I know many students who missed deadlines or interviews because of internet shutdown. Some students were forced to travel near Iran’s borders and use Afghanistan’s or Iraq’s internet just to check their email. I personally missed the deadlines for two universities. Just before the internet shutdown, a professor sent me a problem sheet that was part of the application process, and I could not even inform him about the situation. For the past four years since completing my undergraduate studies, my only dream has been to pursue a PhD. I come from a low-income family, and I did everything in my power to reach this stage. I tried to control every variable that might disrupt my four-year plan. Yet now it seems I have failed, and I face an uncertain future.

At the same time, U.S. sanctions have significantly limited Iranian opportunities to study at universities worldwide. With Trump’s travel ban on all Iranians, along with some European countries following U.S. sanctions by rejecting Iranian applicants solely based on nationality, our options have become limited (for example, see the “Evaluation criteria” section). The recent internet shutdown has worsened the situation and left us with even fewer opportunities. While the regime shuts down our internet and takes away our opportunities, the very people responsible for this suppression are ensuring their own children never face such obstacles (I will return to this at the end of the post).

On January 8, my sister and I participated. We were inside our car when Special Units and Basij thugs shot at civilians on the pedestrian path using a shotgun, exactly two meters away from us. I was so shocked that I could not even respond. My sister pushed my head under the car’s dashboard to prevent me from getting shot. I come from a very small town, and this was the level of suppression we witnessed there. Now imagine the scale of suppression in major cities like Tehran, and suddenly the number of protesters reported killed in the news begin to make sense.

We now see tweets on X that not only deny the killings but openly mock them. Is it really possible to deny the body bags in Kahrizak? If a government shuts down the internet across an entire country for three weeks to prevent information from leaking out, do you believe it when it claims the sky is blue? (Check NetBlocks.org and this on Mastodon.)

After January 8, many of the regime’s puppets, who are funded to spread its propaganda in Western media, began whitewashing events on U.S. and European TV, claiming that nobody was killed or that it was a terrorist attack and the government had to act. Some even claim that the protesters are violent rioters and the government has the right to shoot them with war ammunition. Iranians call these puppets “bloodwashers.”

These bloodwashers forget that since 1979, people have tried every possible way to express their opinions and demands, and all of it was ridiculed by the regime and its supporters. Every attempt was suppressed without even being heard. So how do you think things will turn out? Clearly, people become more aggressive in each wave of protests, a pattern you can see in every uprising since 2009. This is also accompanied by worsening poverty. Ordinary people suffer from hunger because some radicals refuse to talk with the U.S., while regime supporters enjoy unlimited access to money and privileges.

Out of the four presidential elections held after 2009, people elected three presidents who promised to pursue a deal with U.S, the so-called Reformist party. People were desperate for change because they knew their situation could only improve if the regime talks with U.S. Many called the voters naïve, arguing that presidents cannot truly make a difference and lack real power, often saying, “Khamenei would never allow that.” I believe many of the voters knew that deep down. They knew that each time a president speaks about negotiating with the U.S., Khamenei suddenly gathers all his supporters and states “No, I am not okay with talking with the U.S.”. Still, people felt they had no real alternative but elections. After the 2015 Nuclear deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), people thought they can finally live normal lives and have normal relations with other countries (See how people celebrated the deal on the night it was finalized). At the time, I was even planning to assemble a new PC and thought it might be better to wait and buy parts from Amazon! We didn’t yet know what the IRGC had planned for us over the next ten years. Now, all their actions and stubbornness have led them to this point where they have to surrender completely (the deal Trump is talking about, which essentially takes away everything that makes Islamic Republic the Islamic Republic), or force another war on our people, and then surrender disgracefully. People are now saying that “Come on, the U.S. you wanted to destroy so badly has come. Take all your supporters and go fight it. Or perhaps you are only brave against ordinary unarmed people” This was an inevitable outcome after October 7 attacks, that their time will come one day, but they still did not want to listen. I often see debates about whether U.S. involvement in other countries is good or whether it should isolate itself as it is not its people’s business. I believe decisions regarding Iran were made weeks ago, and we now have no choice but to wait and see what happens. I just hope that the situation turns out better for the people.

As I mentioned earlier, Islamic regime officials chant “death to the U.S. and the West,” yet they send their children to Western countries. These children use funds and opportunities that could have gone to far more deserving people, while living comfortably and anonymously in the very societies their parents want to destroy.

They flee the country their parents made and climb the social ladder of western societies, while ordinary students cannot even afford a simple TOEFL exam and survive on as little as five dollars a month.

When ordinary Iranian students apply for visas, especially for the U.S. and Canada, they are forced to provide every detail of their lives to prove they are not terrorists and that they will return to Iran. Sometimes, they may have to explain to the embassy officer the topics of their professors’ papers, the health condition of their father, and whether they own houses, which the last two indirectly indicate whether they will return or not. If they are lucky enough not to be rejected within ten minutes, they may enter a clearance process that takes at least a year. Only then might they receive a visa. But how is it that when it comes to the children of regime’s officials, they freely enter and live there without issue.

There are countless examples. Mohammad Reza Aref, a Stanford graduate and current Vice President who has repeatedly worn IRGC uniforms in public support, has sons who earned PhDs from EPFL and the University of Florida, and one publicly attributed this success to “good genes”. Ali Larijani, an IRGC officer, had a daughter working at Emory University until last week. Masoumeh Ebtekar, who climbed the wall of the U.S. Embassy during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, has a son, Eissa Hashemi, who is an adjunct faculty member at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology.

Many Iranians are now actively raising awareness through petitions and protests at these individuals’ workplaces. One example is the petition regarding Eissa Hashemi. Protests at Emory University have reportedly led to Fatemeh Larijani’s recent unemployment. (Larijani family hold critical roles in the regime, and in fact, many members of the family have studied or currently live in Western countries. There is even a saying that while people were forced to fight the U.S., the Larijanis were filling out university application forms.)

When these individuals occupy seats in your labs or use your tax-funded resources, it directly affects the integrity of your institutions and the opportunities available to those who actually share your values. You do not even need to spend time investigating these people yourself. Iranians will protest outside offices or send emails about your colleagues with this condition. All I ask is that the next time you receive multiple emails about a particular Iranian colleague, or hear about protests near your workplace, you spend just five minutes considering what is being said.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to read this. I know it is long, and I know it is heavy. I wrote it because silence and denial only help suppression survive, and because attention, however brief, matters.
I hope that better and freer days come.

Those of us who tried to stop Trump from ever coming to power—and who then tried to stop his return to power—were accused of hysterics, of Trump Derangement Syndrome, when we talked about authoritarianism and the death of liberal democracy. Yet masked government agents summarily executing protesters in the street, under the orders and protection of the president, is now the reality and even the defining image of the United States—or at least the defining image of Minnesota, and the model will soon be exported nationally if it isn’t stopped right now by coast-to-coast revulsion and defiance. Let all those who denied what was happening, or who justified it, including in the comments section of this blog, hang their heads in shame forever.

People will say: but Scott, just recently you wanted Trump to overthrow the gangster regime in Venezuela! You want him, even now, to overthrow the bloodthirsty murderers in Iran! That makes you practically a Trumper yourself! How can you now turn around and condemn him?

Difficult as this might be for many to understand, my position has always been that I’m consistently against all empowered thugs everywhere on earth. If I’m against Trump’s personal thug army executing (so far) two peaceful protesters, then certainly I should be against Ayatollah Khamenei’s thug army executing 20,000 protesters, and Putin’s thug army executing however many it has. I’m also aware that, for Trump and his henchmen like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, Khamenei and Putin and the like are models and inspirations. No one can doubt at this point that Miller and Noem would gladly execute ten thousand or ten million peacefully protesting Americans if they expected to get away with it.

When two thugs fight each other, I favor whichever outcome will lead to fewer of the world’s people under thug rule. Or if one thug can still be defeated in an election and the other thug can be defeated only in war, then I favor electoral defeat where it’s possible and military overthrow where it isn’t.

This is a stance, I’ve learned, that will lose you friends. People will say: “I get why you’re against their thugs, but how can you also be against our thugs?” I’m writing this post in the hope that, even if people hate me, at least they won’t be confused. I’m also writing, frankly, in the hope that a few days will go by with me having discharged my moral obligation not to be silent, so then maybe I can do some science.

Alas, the dream that I had last night was not the inspiring, MLK kind of dream, even though tomorrow happens to be the great man’s day.  No, I had the literal kind of dream, where everything seems real but then you wake up and remember only the last fragments.

In my case, those last fragments involved a gray-haired bespectacled woman, a fellow CS professor.  She and I were standing in a dimly lit university building.  And she was grabbing me by the shoulders, shaking me.

“Look, Scott,” she was saying, “we’re both computer scientists.  We were both around in the 90s.  You know as well as I do that, if someone claims to have built an AI, but it turns out they just loaded a bunch of known answers, written by humans, into a lookup table, and then they search the table when a question comes … that’s not AI.  It’s slop.  It’s garbage.”

“But…” I interjected.

“Oh of course,” she continued, “so you make the table bigger.  What do you have now?  More slop!  More garbage!  You load the entire Internet into the table.  Now you have an astronomical-sized piece of garbage!”

“I mean,” I said, “there’s an exponential blowup in the number of possible questions, which can only be handled by…”

“Of course,” she said impatiently, “I understand as well as anyone.  You train a neural net to predict a probability distribution over the next token.  In other words, you slice up and statistically recombine your giant lookup table to disguise what’s really going on.  Now what do you get?  You get the biggest piece of garbage the world has ever seen.  You get a hideous monster that’s destroying and zombifying our entire civilization … and that still understands nothing more than the original lookup table did.”

“I mean, you get a tool that hundreds of millions of people now use every day—to write code, to do literature searches…”

By this point, the professor was screaming at me, albeit with a pleading tone in her voice.  “But no one who you respect uses that garbage! Not a single one!  Go ahead and ask them: scientists, mathematicians, artists, creators…”

“I use it,” I replied quietly.  “Most of my friends use it too.”

The professor stared at me with a new, wordless horror.  And that’s when I woke up.

I think I was next going to say something about how I agreed that generative AI might be taking the world down a terrible, dangerous path, but how dismissing the scientific and philosophical immensity of what’s happened, by calling it “slop,” “garbage,” etc., is a bad way to talk about the danger. If so, I suppose I’ll never know how the professor would’ve replied to that. Though, if she was just an unintegrated part of my own consciousness—or a giant lookup table that I can query on demand!—perhaps I could summon her back.

Mostly, I remember being surprised to have had a dream that was this coherent and topical. Normally my dreams just involve wandering around lost in an airport that then transforms itself into my old high school, or something.

This deserves to become one of the iconic images of human history, alongside the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square and so forth.

Here’s Sharifi Zarchi, a computer engineering professor at Sharif University in Tehran, posting on Twitter/X: “Ali Khamenei is not my leader.”

Do you understand the balls of steel this takes? If Professor Zarchi can do this—if hundreds of thousands of young Iranians can take to the streets even while the IRGC and the Basij fire live rounds at them—then I can certainly handle people yelling me on this blog!

I’m in awe of the Iranian people’s courage, and hope I’d have similar courage in their shoes.

I was also enraged this week at the failure of much of the rest of the world to help, to express solidarity, or even to pay much attention to the Iranian’s people plight (though maybe that’s finally changing this weekend).

I’ve actually been working on a CS project with a student in Tehran. Because of the Internet blackout, I haven’t heard from him in days. I pray that he’s safe. I pray that all my friends and colleagues in Iran, and their family members, stay safe and stay strong.

If any Iranian Shtetl-Optimized reader manages to get onto the Internet, and would like to share an update—anonymously if desired, of course—we’d all be obliged.

May the Iranian people be free from tyranny soon.

Update: I’m sick with fear for my many colleagues and friends in Iran and their families. I hope they’re still alive; because of the communications blackout, I have no idea. Perhaps 12,000 have already been machine-gunned in the streets while the unjust world, the hypocrites and cowards who marched against a tiny democracy for defending itself—they invent excuses or explicitly defend the murderous regime in Tehran. WTF is the US waiting for? Trump’s “red line” was crossed days ago. May we give the Ayatollah the martyrdom he preaches, and liberate his millions of captives.

The blog-commenters come at me one by one, a seemingly infinite supply of them, like masked henchmen in an action movie throwing karate chops at Jackie Chan.

“Seriously Scott, do better,” says each henchman when his turn comes, ignoring all the ones before him who said the same. “If you’d have supported American-imposed regime change in Venezuela, like just installing María Machado as the president, then surely you must also support Trump’s cockamamie plan to invade Greenland! For that matter, you logically must also support Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and China’s probable future invasion of Taiwan!”

“No,” I reply to each henchman, “you’re operating on a wildly mistaken model of me. For starters, I’ve just consistently honored the actual democratic choices of the Venezuelans, the Greenlanders, the Ukrainians, and the Taiwanese, regardless of coalitions and power. Those choices are, respectively, to be rid of Maduro, to stay part of Denmark, and to be left alone by Russia and China—in all four cases, as it happens, the choices most consistent with liberalism, common sense, and what nearly any 5-year-old would say was right and good.”

“My preference,” I continue, “is simply that the more pro-Enlightenment, pluralist, liberal-democratic side triumph, and that the more repressive, authoritarian side feel the sting of defeat—always, in every conflict, in every corner of the earth.  Sure, if authoritarians win an election fair and square, I might clench my teeth and watch them take power, for the sake of the long-term survival of the ideals those authoritarians seek to destroy. But if authoritarians lose an election and then arrogate power anyway, what’s there even to feel torn about? So, you can correctly predict my reaction to countless international events by predicting this. It’s like predicting what Tit-for-Tat will do on a given move in the Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma.”

“Even more broadly,” I say, “my rule is simply that I’m in favor of good things, and against bad things.  I’m in favor of truth, and against falsehood. And if anyone says to me: because you supported this country when it did good thing X, you must also support it when does evil thing Y? (Either as a reductio ad absurdum, or because the person actually wants evil thing Y?) Or if they say: because you agreed with this person when she said this true thing, you must also endorse this false thing she said? I reply: good over evil and truth over lies in every instance—if need be, down to the individual subatomic particles of morality and logic.”

The henchmen snarl, “so now it’s laid bare! Now everyone can see just how naive and simplistic Aaronson’s so-called ‘political philosophy’ really is!  Do us all a favor, Scott, and stick to quantum physics! Stick to computer science! Do you not know that philosophers and political scientists have filled libraries debating these weighty matters? Are you an act-utilitarian? A Kantian? A neocon or neoliberal? An America-First interventionist? Pick some package of values, then answer to us for all the commitments that come with that package!”

I say: “No, I don’t subcontract out my soul to any package of values that I can define via any succinct rule. Instead, given any moral dilemma, I simply query my internal Morality Oracle and follow whatever it tells me to do, unless of course my weakness prevents me. Some would simply call the ‘Morality Oracle’ my conscience. But others would hold that, to whatever extent people’s consciences have given similar answers across vast gulfs of time and space and culture, it’s because they tapped into an underlying logic that humans haven’t fully explained, but that they no more invented than the rules of arithmetic. The world’s prophets and sages have tried again and again over the millennia to articulate that logic, with varying admixtures of error and self-interest and culture-dependent cruft. But just like with math and science, the clearest available statements seem to me to have gotten clearer over time.”

The Jackie Chan henchman smirks at this. “So basically, you know the right answers to moral questions because of a magical, private Morality Oracle—like, you know, the burning bush, or Mount Sinai? And yet you dare to call yourself a scientific rationalist, a foe of obscurantism and myticism? Do you have any idea how pathetic this all sounds, as an attempted moral theory?”

“But I’m not pretending to articulate a moral theory,” I reply. “I’m merely describing what I do. I mean, I can gesture toward moral theories and ideas that capture more of my conscience’s judgments than others, like liberalism, the Enlightenment, the Golden Rule, or utilitarianism. But if a rule ever appears to disagree with the verdict of my conscience—if someone says, oh, you like utilitarianism, so you must value the lives of these trillion amoebas above this one human child’s, even torture and kill the child to save the amoebas—I will always go with my conscience and damn the rule.”

“So the meaning of goodness is just ‘whatever seems good to you’?” asks the henchman, between swings of his nunchuk. “Do you not see how tautological your criterion is, how worthless?”

“It might be tautological, but I find it far from worthless!” I offer. “If nothing else, my Oracle lets me assess the morality of people, philosophies, institutions, and movements, by simply asking to what extent their words and deeds seem guided by the same Oracle, or one that’s close enough! And if I find a cluster of millions of people whose consciences agree with mine and each others’ in 95% of cases, then I can point to that cluster, and say, here. This cluster’s collective moral judgment is close to what I mean by goodness. Which is probably the best we can do with countless questions of philosophy.”

“Just like, in the famous Wittgenstein riff, we define ‘game’ not by giving an if-and-only-if, but by starting with poker, basketball, Monopoly, and other paradigm-cases and then counting things as ‘games’ to whatever extent they’re similar—so too we can define ‘morality’ by starting with a cluster of Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, MLK, Vasily Arkhipov, Alan Turing, Katalin Karikó, those who hid Jews during the Holocaust, those who sit in Chinese or Russian or Iranian or Venezuelan torture-prisons for advocating democracy, etc, and then working outward from those paradigm-cases, and whenever in doubt, by seeking reflective equilibrium between that cluster and our own consciences. At any rate, that’s what I do, and it’s what I’ll continue doing even if half the world sneers at me for it, because I don’t know a better approach.”

Applications to the AI alignment problem are left as exercises for the reader.

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Announcement: I’m currently on my way to Seattle, to speak in the CS department at the University of Washington—a place that I love but haven’t visited, I don’t think, since 2011 (!). If you’re around, come say hi. Meanwhile, feel free to karate-chop this post all you want in the comment section, but I’ll probably be slow in replying!

I woke up yesterday morning happy and relieved that the Venezuelan people were finally free of their brutal dictator.

I ended the day angry and depressed that Trump, as it turns out, does not seek to turn over Venezuela to María Corina Machado and her inspiring democracy movement—the pro-Western, Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning, slam-dunk obvious, already electorally-confirmed choice of the Venezuelan people—but instead seeks to cut a deal with the remnants of Maduro’s regime to run Venezuela as a US-controlled petrostate.

I confess that I have trouble understanding people who don’t have either of these two reactions.

On one side of me, of course, are the sneering MAGA bullies who declare that might makes right, that the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must, and that the US should rule Venezuela for the same reason why Russia should rule Ukraine and China should rule Taiwan: namely, because the small countries have the misfortune of being in the large ones’ “spheres of influence.”

But on my other side are those who squeal that toppling a dictator, however odious, is against the rules, because right is whatever “international law” declares it to be—i.e., the “international law” that’s now been degraded by ideologues to the point of meaninglessness, the “international law” that typically sides with whichever terrorists and murderers have the floor of the UN General Assembly and that condemns persecuted minorities for defending themselves.

The trouble is, any given framework of law needs to do at least one of three things to impose its will on me:

1. Compel my obedience, by credibly threatening punishment if I defy it.
2. Win the assent of my conscience, by the force of its moral example.
3. Buy my consent through reciprocity: if this framework will defend my family from being murdered, I therefore ought to defend it.

But “international law,” as it exists today, fails spectacularly on all three of these counts. Ergo, as far as I’m concerned, it can take a long walk off a short pier.

Against these two attempted reductions of right to something that it isn’t, I simply say:

Right is right. Good is good. Evil is evil. Good is liberal democracy and the Enlightenment. Evil is authoritarianism and liars and bullies.

Good, in this case, is Maria Machado and the Venezuelans who went to prison, who took to the streets, who monitored every polling station to prove Edmundo González’s victory. Evil is those who oppose them.

But who gets to decide what’s good and what’s evil? Well, if you’re here asking me, then I decide.

But don’t the evildoers believe themselves to be good? Yes, but they’re wrong.

It’s crucial that I’m not appealing here to anything exotic or esoteric. I’m appealing only to the concepts of good and evil that I suspect every reader of this blog had as a child, that they got from fables and Disney movies and Saturday morning cartoons and the like, before some of them went to college and learned that those concepts were naïve and simplistic and only for stupid people.

Look: I regularly appear, to my amusement and chagrin, in Internet lists of the smartest people on earth, alongside Terry Tao and Garry Kasparov and Ed Witten. I did publish my first paper at 15, and finished my PhD in theoretical computer science at 22, and became an MIT professor soon afterward, yada yada.

And for whatever it’s worth, I’m telling you that I think the “naïve, simplistic” concepts of good and evil of post-WWII liberal democracy were fine all along, and not only for stupid people. In my humble opinion. Of course those concepts can be improved upon—indeed, criticism and improvement and self-correction are crucial parts of them—but they’re infinitely better than the realistic alternatives on offer from left and right, including kleptocracy, authoritarianism, and what we’re now calling “the warmth of collectivism.”

And according to these concepts, María Machado and the other Venezuelans who stand with her for democracy are good, if anything is good. Trump, despite all the evil in his heart and in his past, will do something profoundly good if he reverses himself and lets those Venezuelans have what they’ve fought for. He’ll do evil if he doesn’t.

Happy New Year, everyone. May goodness reign over the earth.