Shtetl-Optimized

I’m thankful to the thousands of readers of this blog.  Well, not the few who submit troll comments from multiple pseudonymous handles, but the 99.9% who don’t. I’m thankful that they’ve stayed here even when events (as they do more and more often) send me into a spiral of doomscrolling and just subsisting hour-to-hour—when I’m left literally without words for weeks.

I’m thankful for Thanksgiving itself.  As I often try to explain to non-Americans (and to my Israeli-born wife), it’s not primarily about the turkey but rather about the sides: the stuffing, the mashed sweet potatoes with melted marshmallows, the cranberry jello mold.  The pumpkin pie is good too.

I’m thankful that we seem to be on the threshold of getting to see the birth of fault-tolerant quantum computing, nearly thirty years after it was first theorized.

I’m thankful that there’s now an explicit construction of pseudorandom unitaries — and that, with further improvement, this would lead to a Razborov-Rudich natural proofs barrier for the quantum circuit complexity of unitaries, explaining for the first time why we don’t have superpolynomial lower bounds for that quantity.

I’m thankful that there’s been recent progress on QMA versus QCMA (that is, quantum versus classical proofs), with a full classical oracle separation now possibly in sight.

I’m thankful that, of the problems I cared about 25 years ago — the maximum gap between classical and quantum query complexities of total Boolean functions, relativized BQP versus the polynomial hierarchy, the collision problem, making quantum computations classically verifiable — there’s now been progress if not a full solution for almost all of them. And yet I’m thankful as well that lots of great problems remain open.

I’m thankful that the presidential election wasn’t all that close (by contemporary US standards, it was a ““landslide,”” 50%-48.4%).  Had it been a nail-biter, not only would I fear violence and the total breakdown of our constitutional order, I’d kick myself that I hadn’t done more to change the outcome.  As it is, there’s no denying that a plurality of Americans actually chose this, and now they’re going to get it good and hard.

I’m thankful that, while I absolutely do see Trump’s return as a disaster for the country and for civilization, it’s not a 100% unmitigated disaster.  The lying chaos monster will occasionally rage for things I support rather than things I oppose.  And if he actually plunges the country into another Great Depression through tariffs, mass deportations, and the like, hopefully that will make it easier to repudiate his legacy in 2028.

I’m thankful that, whatever Jews around the world have had to endure over the past year — both the physical attacks and the moral gaslighting that it’s all our fault — we’ve already endured much worse on both fronts, not once but countless times over 3000 years, and this is excellent Bayesian evidence that we’ll survive the latest onslaught as well.

I’m thankful that my family remains together, and healthy. I’m thankful to have an 11-year-old who’s a striking wavy-haired blonde who dances and does gymnastics (how did that happen?) and wants to be an astrophysicist, as well as a 7-year-old who now often beats me in chess and loves to solve systems of two linear equations in two unknowns.

I’m thankful that, compared to what I imagined my life would be as an 11-year-old, my life is probably in the 50th percentile or higher.  I haven’t saved the world, but I haven’t flamed out either.  Even if I do nothing else from this point, I have a stack of writings and results that I’m proud of. And I fully intend to do something else from this point.

I’m thankful that the still-most-powerful nation on earth, the one where I live, is … well, more aligned with good than any other global superpower in the miserable pageant of human history has been.  I’m thankful to live in the first superpower in history that has some error-correction machinery built in, some ability to repudiate its past sins (and hopefully its present sins, in the future).  I’m thankful to live in the first superpower that has toleration of Jews and other religious minorities built in as a basic principle, with the possible exception of the Persian Empire under Cyrus.

I’m thankful that all eight of my great-grandparents came to the US in 1905, back when Jewish mass immigration was still allowed.  Of course there’s a selection effect here: if they hadn’t made it, I wouldn’t be here to ponder it.  Still, it seems appropriate to express gratitude for the fact of existing, whatever metaphysical difficulties might inhere in that act.

I’m thankful that there’s now a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon that Israel’s government saw fit to agree to.  While I fear that this will go the way of all previous ceasefires — Hezbollah “obeys” until it feels ready to strike again, so then Israel invades Lebanon again, then more civilians die, then there’s another ceasefire, rinse and repeat, etc. — the possibility always remains that this time will be the charm, for all people on both sides who want peace.

I’m thankful that our laws of physics are so constructed that G, c, and ℏ, three constants that are relatively easy to measure, can be combined to tell us the fundamental units of length and time, even though those units — the Planck time, 10^-43 seconds, and the Planck length, 10^-33 centimeters — are themselves below the reach of any foreseeable technology, and to atoms as atoms are to the solar system.

I’m thankful that, almost thirty years after I could have and should have, I’ve now finally learned the proof of the irrationality of π.

I’m thankful that, if I could go back in time to my 14-year-old self, I could tell him firstly, that female heterosexual attraction to men is a real phenomenon in the world, and secondly, that it would sometimes fixate on him (the future him, that is) in particular.

I’m thankful for red grapefruit, golden mangos, seedless watermelons, young coconuts (meat and water), mangosteen, figs, dates, and even prunes.  Basically, fruit is awesome, the more so after whatever selective breeding and genetic engineering humans have done to it.

I’m thankful for Futurama, and for the ability to stream every episode of it in order, as Dana, the kids, and I have been doing together all fall.  I’m thankful that both of my kids love it as much as I do—in which case, how far from my values and worldview could they possibly be? Even if civilization is destroyed, it will have created 100 episodes of something this far out on the Pareto frontier of lowbrow humor, serious intellectual content, and emotional depth for a future civilization to discover.  In short: “good news, everyone!”

Election Day Update: For anyone who’s still undecided (?!?), I can’t beat this from Sam Harris.

When I think of Harris winning the presidency this week, it’s like watching a film of a car crash run in reverse: the windshield unshatters; stray objects and bits of metal converge; and defenseless human bodies are hurled into states of perfect repose. Normalcy descends out of chaos.

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Important Announcement: I don’t in any way endorse voting for Jill Stein, or any other third-party candidate. But if you are a Green Party supporter who lives in a swing state, then please at least vote for Harris, and use SwapYourVote.org to arrange for two (!) people in safe states to vote for Jill Stein on your behalf. Thanks so much to friend-of-the-blog Linchuan Zhang for pointing me to this resource.

Added on Election Day: And, if you swing that way, click here to arrange to have your vote for Kamala in a swing state traded for two votes for libertarian candidate Chase Oliver in safe states. In any case, if you’re in a swing state and you haven’t yet voted (for Kamala Harris and for the norms of civilization), do!

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For weeks I’d been wondering what I could say right before the election, at this momentous branch-point in the wavefunction, that could possibly do any good. Then, the other day, a Jewish voter in Pennsylvania and Shtetl-Optimized fan emailed me to ask my advice. He said that he’d read my Never-Trump From Here to Eternity FAQ and saw the problems with Trump’s autocratic tendencies, but that his Israeli friends and family wanted him to vote Trump anyway, believing him better on the narrow question of “Israel’s continued existence.” I started responding, and then realized that my response was the election-eve post I’d been looking for. So without further ado…

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Thanks for writing.  Of course this is ultimately between you and your conscience (and your empirical beliefs), but I can tell you what my Israeli-American wife and I did.  We voted for Kamala, without the slightest doubt or hesitation.  We’d do it again a thousand quadrillion times.  We would’ve done the same in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where I grew up (actually in Bucks, one of the crucial swing counties).

And later this week, along with tens of millions of others, I’ll refresh the news with heart palpitations, looking for movement toward blue in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  I’ll be joyous and relieved if Kamala wins.  I’ll be ashen-faced if she doesn’t.  (Or if there’s a power struggle that makes the 2021 insurrection look like a dress rehearsal.)  And I’ll bet anyone, at 100:1 odds, that at the end of my life I’ll continue to believe that voting Kamala was the right decision.

I, too, have pro-Israel friends who urged me to switch to Trump, on the ground that if Kamala wins, then (they say) the Jews of Israel are all but doomed to a second Holocaust.  For, they claim, the American Hamasniks will then successfully prevail on Kamala to prevent Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear sites, or will leave Israel to fend for itself if it does.  And therefore, Iran will finish and test nuclear weapons in the next couple years, and then it will rebuild the battered Hamas and Hezbollah under its nuclear umbrella, and then it will fulfill its stated goal since 1979, of annihilating the State of Israel, by slaughtering all the Jews who aren’t able to flee.  And, just to twist the knife, the UN diplomats and NGO officials and journalists and college students and Wikipedia editors who claimed such a slaughter was a paranoid fantasy, they’ll all cheer it when it happens, calling it “justice” and “resistance” and “intifada.”

And that, my friends say, will finally show me the liberal moral evolution of humanity since 1945, in which I’ve placed so much stock.  “See, even while they did virtually nothing to stop the first Holocaust, the American and British cultural elites didn’t literally cheer the Holocaust as it happened.  This time around, they’ll cheer.”

My friends’ argument is that, if I’m serious about “Never Again” as a moral lodestar of my life, then the one issue of Israel and Iran needs to override everything else I’ve always believed, all my moral and intellectual repugnance at Trump and everything he represents, all my knowledge of his lies, his evil, his venality, all the former generals and Republican officials who say that he’s unfit to serve and an imminent danger to the Republic.  I need to vote for this madman, this pathological liar, this bullying autocrat, because at least he’ll stand between the Jewish people and the darkness that would devour them, as it devoured them in my grandparents’ time.

My friends add that it doesn’t matter that Kamala’s husband is Jewish, that she’s mouthed all the words a thousand times about Israel’s right to defend itself, that Biden and Harris have indeed continued to ship weapons to Israel with barely a wag of their fingers (even as they’ve endured vituperation over it from their left, even as Kamala might lose the whole election over it).  Nor does it matter that a commanding majority of American Jews will vote for Kamala, or that … not most Israelis, but most of the Israelis in academia and tech who I know, would vote for Kamala if they could.  They could all be mistaken about their own interests.  But you and I, say my right-wing friends, realize that what actually matters is Iran, and what the next president will do about Iran.  Trump would unshackle Israel to do whatever it takes to prevent nuclear-armed Ayatollahs.  Kamala wouldn’t.

Anyway, I’ve considered this line of thinking.  I reject it with extreme prejudice.

To start with the obvious, I’m not a one-issue voter.  Presumably you aren’t either.  Being Jewish is a fundamental part of my humanity—if I didn’t know that before I’d witnessed the world’s reaction to October 7, then I certainly know now.  But only in the fantasies of antisemites would I vote entirely on the basis of “is this good for the Jews?”  The parts of me that care about the peaceful transfer of power, about truth, about standing up to Putin, about the basic sanity of the Commander-in-Chief in an emergency, about climate change and green energy and manufacturing, about not destroying the US economy through idiotic tariffs, about talented foreign scientists getting green cards, about the right to abortion, about RFK and his brainworm not being placed in charge of American healthcare, even about AI safety … all those parts of me are obviously for Kamala.

More interestingly, though, the Jewish part of me is also for Kamala—if possible, even more adamantly than other parts.  It’s for Kamala because…

Well, after these nine surreal years, how does one even spell out the Enlightenment case against Trump?  How does one say what hasn’t already been said a trillion times?  Now that the frog is thoroughly boiled, how does one remind people of the norms that used to prevail in America—even after Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin and the rest had degraded them—and how those norms were what stood between us and savagery … and how laughably unthinkable is the whole concept of Trump as president, the instant you judge him according to those norms?

Kamala, whatever her faults, is basically a normal politician.  She lies, but only as normal politicians lie.  She dodges questions, changes her stances, says different things to different audiences, but only as normal politicians do.  Trump is something else entirely.  He’s one of the great flimflam artists of human history.  He believes (though “belief” isn’t quite the right word) that truth is not something external to himself, but something he creates by speaking it.  He is the ultimate postmodernist.  He’s effectively created a new religion, one of grievance and lies and vengeance against outsiders, and converted a quarter of Americans to his religion, while another quarter might vote it into power because of what they think is in it for them.

And this cult of lies … this is what you ask if Jewish people should enter into a strategic alliance with?  Do you imagine this cult is a trustworthy partner, one likely to keep its promises?

For centuries, Jews have done consistently well under cosmopolitan liberal democracies, and consistently poorly—when they remained alive at all—under nativist tyrants.  Do you expect whatever autocratic regime follows Trump, a regime of JD Vance and Tucker Carlson and the like, to be the first exception to this pattern in history?

For I take it as obvious that a second Trump term, and whatever follows it, will make the first Trump term look like a mere practice run, a Beer Hall Putsch.  Trump I was restrained by John Kelly, by thousands of civil service bureaucrats and judges, by the generals, and in the last instance, by Mike Pence.  But Trump II will be out for the blood of his enemies—he says so himself at his rallies—and will have nothing to restrain him, not even any threat of criminal prosecution.  Do you imagine this goes well for the Jews, or for pretty much anyone?

It doesn’t matter if Trump has no personal animus against Jews—excepting, of course, the majority who vote against him.  Did the idealistic Marxist intellectuals of Russia in 1917 want Stalin?  Did the idealistic Iranian students of Iran in 1979 want Khomeini?  It doesn’t matter: what matters is what they enabled.  Turn over the rock of civilization, and everything that was wriggling underneath is suddenly loosed on the world.

How much time have you spent looking at pro-Israel people on Twitter (Hen Mazzig, Haviv Rettig Gur, etc.), and then—crucially—reading their replies?  I spend at least an hour or two per day on that, angry and depressed though it makes me, perhaps because of an instinct to stare into the heart of darkness, not to look away from a genocidal evil arrayed against my family.  

Many replies are the usual: “Shut the fuck up, Zio, and stop murdering babies.”  “Two-state solution?  I have a different solution: that all you land-thieves pack your bags and go back to Poland.” But then, every time, you reach tweets like “you Jews have been hated and expelled from all the world’s countries for thousands of years, yet you never consider that the common factor is you.”  “Your Talmud commands you to kill goyim children, so that’s why you’re doing it.”  “Even while you maintain apartheid in Palestine, you cynically import millions of third-world savages to White countries, in order to destroy them.”  None of this is the way leftists talk, not even the most crazed leftists.  We’ve now gone all the way around the horseshoe.  Or, we might say, we’re no longer selecting on the left or right of politics at all, but simply on the bottom.

And then you see that these bottom-feeders often have millions of followers each.  They command armies.  The bottom-feeders—left, right, Islamic fundamentalist, and unclassifiably paranoid—are emboldened as never before.  They’re united by a common enemy, which turns out to be the same enemy they’ve always had.

Which brings us to Elon Musk.  I personally believe that Musk, like Trump, has nothing against the Jews, and is if anything a philosemite.  But it’s no longer a question of feelings.  Through his changes to Twitter, Musk has helped his new ally Trump flip over the boulder, and now all the demons that were wriggling beneath are loosed on civilization.

Should we, as Jews, tolerate the demons in exchange for Trump’s tough-guy act on Iran?  Just like the evangelicals previously turned a blind eye to Trump’s philandering, his sexual assaults, his gleeful cruelty, his spitting on everything Christianity was ever supposed to stand for, simply because he promised them the Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade?  Faced with a man who’s never had a human relationship in his life that wasn’t entirely transactional, should we be transactional ourselves?

I’m not convinced that even if we did, we’d be getting a good bargain.  Iran is no longer alone, but part of an axis that includes China, Russia, and North Korea.  These countries prop up each other’s economies and militaries; they survive only because of each other.  As others have pointed out, the new Axis is actually more tightly integrated than the Axis powers ever were in WWII.  The new Axis has already invaded Ukraine and perhaps soon Taiwan and South Korea.  It credibly threatens to end the Pax Americana.  And to face Hamas or Hezbollah is to face Iran is to face the entire new Axis.

Now Kamala is not Winston Churchill.  But at least she doesn’t consider the tyrants of Russia, China, and North Korea to be her personal friends, trustworthy because they flatter her.  At least she, unlike Trump, realizes that the current governments of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran do indeed form a new axis of evil, and she has the glimmers of consciousness that the founders of the United States stood for something different from what those tyrannies stand for, and that this other thing that our founders stood for was good.  If war does come, at least she’ll listen to the advice of generals, rather than clowns and lackeys.  And if Israel or America do end up in wars of survival, from the bottom of my heart she’s the one I’d rather have in charge.  For if she’s in charge, then through her, the government of the United States is still in charge.  Our ripped and tattered flag yet waves.  If Trump is in charge, who or what is at the wheel besides his own unhinged will, or that of whichever sordid fellow-gangster currently has his ear?

So, yes, as a human being and also as a Jew, this is why I voted early for Kamala, and why I hope you’ll vote for her too. If you disagree with her policies, start fighting those policies once she’s inaugurated on January 20, 2025. At least there will still be a republic, with damaged but functioning error-correcting machinery, in which you can fight.

All the best,
Scott

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More Resources: Be sure to check out Scott Alexander’s election-eve post, which (just like in 2016) endorses any listed candidate other than Trump, but specifically makes the case to voters put off (as Scott is) by Democrats’ wokeness. Also check out Garry Kasparov’s epic tweet-thread on why he supports Kamala, and his essay The United States Cannot Descend Into Authoritarianism.

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?

For weeks I agonized over what, if anything, this post should say. How does one commemorate a tragedy that isn’t over for millions of innocents on either side? How do I add to what friend-of-the-blog Boaz Barak and countless others have already written?

Do I review the grisly details of Black Shabbat, tell the stories of those murdered or still held hostage? Do I rage about the shocking intelligence and operational failures that allowed it to happen? Talk about the orders-of-magnitude spikes in antisemitic incidents all over the world in the past year, which finally answered the question of whether I was going to deal with “the burden of having been born Jewish” as a central concern of my life, rather than only a matter for holidays and history books and museums? Mourn the friends I’ve lost—not, interestingly, my Iranian friends (who were the first to ask after the safety of my Israeli family after October 7) or my other Gentile friends, but mostly my far-left Jewish former friends, the ones who now ludicrously argue that worldwide violence against Jews is justified, and will stop if only we give in and dismantle Israel? I wrote many drafts only to delete them.

The core problem was that there seemed to be nothing I could say that would move the needle, that wouldn’t just be a waste of electrons. From the many times I’d already waded into this minefield of minefields since October 7, 2023, I already knew exactly how it would play out:

1. Those who support Israel’s continued existence (Jews and non-Jews) would applaud what I said—but they wouldn’t need to hear it anyway.
2. Those who oppose Israel’s continued existence would send me hate mail, spam my comment section with threats and attacks under invented identities, and otherwise do what they could to make my life miserable.
3. Everyone else would ignore my post, waiting for me to get back to quantum computing or AI.

What could I do to break through? What could I say to all the people who call themselves “anti-Israel but not antisemitic” that would actually move the conversation forward?

Finally I came up with something. Look: you say you despise Zionism, and consider October 7 to have been perfectly understandable (if somewhat distasteful) resistance by the oppressed? Fine, then.

I urge you to lobby your country to pass a law granting automatic refugee status and citizenship to any current citizen of Israel—as an ultimate insurance policy to incentivize Israel to take greater risks for peace, even with neighbors who openly proclaim the Jews’ extermination as their goal.

When the Jews of Europe faced annihilation in my grandparents’ time, not one country offered to rescue them in more than token numbers. That’s a central reason why, in 1947, the newly-formed UN voted to partition the former British Mandate for Palestine and give the Jews a piece of it: not only because of Jews’ historic connection to the land, predating the Islamic conquest of the Middle East by thousands of years, but also, crucially, because the survivors literally had nowhere else on earth to go.

So, you say you want the hated “settler-colonialists” to leave Palestine. Very well then: give them a place to go. All of them, not just the minority who are dual citizens or otherwise have options.

If the US or UK or Australia or France or Germany or any other country actually passed such an immigration law—well, I can’t determine how the Israelis would respond. I expect that tens of thousands of Israelis would quickly take your country up on its offer, while the majority wouldn’t. I expect that some Jewish and Israeli institutions would criticize you, seeing a desire for Israel’s end in your offer even if you were careful never to say as much.

But I can tell you how I’d respond, and I don’t think I’d be alone in this. I would move to the left on Israel/Palestine. For the first time, the Israeli Jews would plausibly no longer be in an existential struggle, a struggle not to be exterminated by neighbors who tried to exterminate them at every opportunity from 1929 to 1948 to 1967 to 1973 to 2002 to 2023. For the first time there’d be a viable backup plan.

As a direct consequence, I’d advocate that the Israelis take bigger gambles for peace: for example, that they unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank to allow a Palestinian state there, even at the risk that the West Bank turns into a much bigger Gaza, another Hamas staging-ground from which to invade Israel and destroy it. At least there’d be an insurance policy if that happened.

Many will ask: shouldn’t the Palestinians also be offered refuge in other lands? I say, by all means! But crucially, that’s not for me to advocate: if I did, I’d be accused of secretly plotting ethnic cleansing and Israeli expansionism. This is between the Palestinian people and all the other nations, in the Middle East and elsewhere, that for generations could’ve offered refuge to displaced Palestinians (as Israel offered refuge to the displaced Jews from Arab lands) but that chose not to.

And what of all the world’s other oppressed peoples? I promise to praise and honor any nation that saves anyone from oppression or genocide by offering them refuge. But, particularly since last October, the left is obsessed with Israel, which it considers uniquely evil among all nations to have ever existed—so that’s the conflict about which I’m proposing a positive step.

And if the anti-Israel people throw the proposal back in my face, tell me it’s not their job to resettle the hated settlers: then at least we know where we stand. They’ve then told me, not merely that they want half the world’s Jews evicted from their homes, but that they’re totally unconcerned with what happens to them afterward—fully aware that last time, the answer was pits full of corpses, piles of ash, plumes of black smoke.

And that’s the exact point where we reach the end of discussion and argument, such as can happen on blogs. The remaining disagreement can (alas) only be settled on the battlefield. For whatever it’s worth, the Jews famously outlasted the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Seleucids, Romans, Soviets, Nazis, and other continent-spanning empires that tried to destroy us. Whether we need missiles, planes, ground invasions, or (yes) exploding pagers, I predict that we’ll survive this latest existential war too, against the Ayatollah regime and its proxies and its millions of Western dupes. Or at least, I predict that we’ll win in the physical world, even while our enemies continue to dominate Facebook and Twitter and the comments section of the Washington Post, where they’ll continue ordering Israelis to “GO BACK TO POLAND,” totally uninterested in the question of whether Poland will take them. I can probably teach myself to live with that. At any rate, better offline victory and online defeat than the other way around.

Many of you will have seen the news that Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed SB 1047, the groundbreaking AI safety bill that overwhelmingly passed the California legislature. Newsom gave a disingenuous explanation (which no one on either side of the debate took seriously), that he vetoed the bill only because it didn’t go far enough (!!) in regulating the misuses of small models. While sad, this doesn’t come as a huge shock, as Newsom had given clear prior indications that he was likely to veto the bill, and many observers had warned to expect him to do whatever he thought would most further his political ambitions and/or satisfy his strongest lobbyists. In any case, I’m reluctantly forced to the conclusion that either Governor Newsom doesn’t read Shtetl-Optimized, or else he somehow wasn’t persuaded by my post last month in support of SB 1047.

Many of you will also have seen the news that OpenAI will change its structure to be a fully for-profit company, abandoning any pretense of being controlled by a nonprofit, and that (possibly relatedly) almost no one now remains from OpenAI’s founding team other than Sam Altman himself. It now looks to many people like the previous board has been 100% vindicated in its fear that Sam did, indeed, plan to move OpenAI far away from the nonprofit mission with which it was founded. It’s a shame the board didn’t manage to explain its concerns clearly at the time, to OpenAI’s employees or to the wider world. Of course, whether you see the new developments as good or bad is up to you. Me, I kinda liked the previous mission, as well as the expressed beliefs of the previous Sam Altman!

Anyway, certainly you would’ve known all this if you read Zvi Mowshowitz. Broadly speaking, there’s nothing I can possibly say about AI safety policy that Zvi hasn’t already said in 100x more detail, anticipating and responding to every conceivable counterargument. I have no clue how he does it, but if you have any interest in these matters and you aren’t already reading Zvi, start.

Regardless of any setbacks, the work of AI safety continues. I am not and have never been a Yudkowskyan … but still, given the empirical shock of the past four years, I’m now firmly, 100% in the camp that we need to approach AI with humility for the magnitude of civilizational transition that’s about to occur, and for our massive error bars about what exactly that transition will entail. We can’t just “leave it to the free market” any more than we could’ve left the development of thermonuclear weapons to the free market.

And yes, whether in academia or working with AI companies, I’ll continue to think about what theoretical computer science can do for technical AI safety. Speaking of which, I’d love to hire a postdoc to work on AI alignment and safety, and I already have interested candidates. Would any person of means who reads this blog like to fund such a postdoc for me? If so, shoot me an email!

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.

Dan Faggella recorded an unusual podcast with me that’s now online. He introduces me as a “quantum physicist,” which is something that I never call myself (I’m a theoretical computer scientist) but have sort of given up on not being called by others. But the ensuing 85-minute conversation has virtually nothing to do with physics, or anything technical at all.

Instead, Dan pretty much exclusively wants to talk about moral philosophy: my views about what kind of AI, if any, would be a “worthy successor to humanity,” and how AIs should treat humans and vice versa, and whether there’s any objective morality at all, and (at the very end) what principles ought to guide government regulation of AI.

So, I inveigh against “meat chauvinism,” and expand on the view that locates human specialness (such as it is) in what might be the unclonability, unpredictability, and unrewindability of our minds, and plead for comity among the warring camps of AI safetyists.

The central point of disagreement between me and Dan ended up centering around moral realism: Dan kept wanting to say that a future AGI’s moral values would probably be as incomprehensible to us as are ours to a sea snail, and that we need to make peace with that. I replied that, firstly, things like the Golden Rule strike me as plausible candidates for moral universals, which all thriving civilizations (however primitive or advanced) will agree about in the same way they agree about 5 being a prime number. And secondly, that if that isn’t true—if the morality of our AI or cyborg descendants really will be utterly alien to us—then I find it hard to have any preferences at all about the future they’ll inhabit, and just want to enjoy life while I can! That which (by assumption) I can’t understand, I’m not going to issue moral judgments about either.

Anyway, rewatching the episode, I was unpleasantly surprised by my many verbal infelicities, my constant rocking side-to-side in my chair, my sometimes talking over Dan in my enthusiasm, etc. etc., but also pleasantly surprised by the content of what I said, all of which I still stand by despite the terrifying moral minefields into which Dan invited me. I strongly recommend watching at 2x speed, which will minimize the infelicities and make me sound smarter. Thanks so much to Dan for making this happen, and let me know what you think!

Added: See here for other podcasts in the same series and on the same set of questions, including with Nick Bostrom, Ben Goertzel, Dan Hendrycks, Anders Sandberg, and Richard Sutton.

I’ve finished my two-year leave at OpenAI, and returned to being just a normal (normal?) professor, quantum complexity theorist, and blogger. Despite the huge drama at OpenAI that coincided with my time there, including the departures of most of the people I worked with in the former Superalignment team, I’m incredibly grateful to OpenAI for giving me an opportunity to learn and witness history, and even to contribute here and there, though I wish I could’ve done more.

Over the next few months, I plan to blog my thoughts and reflections about the current moment in AI safety, inspired by my OpenAI experience. You can be certain that I’ll be doing this only as myself, not as a representative of any organization. Unlike some former OpenAI folks, I was never offered equity in the company or asked to sign any non-disparagement agreement. OpenAI retains no power over me, at least as long as I don’t share confidential information (which of course I won’t, not that I know much!).

I’m going to kick off this blog series, today, by defending a position that differs from the official position of my former employer. Namely, I’m offering my strong support for California’s SB 1047, a first-of-its-kind AI safety regulation written by California State Senator Scott Wiener, then extensively revised through consultations with pretty much every faction of the AI community. AI leaders like Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Stuart Russell are for the bill, as is Elon Musk (for whatever that’s worth), and Anthropic now says that the bill’s “benefits likely outweigh its costs.” Meanwhile, Facebook, OpenAI, and basically the entire VC industry are against the bill, while California Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Zoe Lofgren have also come out against it for whatever reasons.

The bill has passed the California State Assembly by a margin of 48-16, having previously passed the State Senate by 32-1. It’s now on Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk, and it’s basically up to him whether it becomes law or not. I understand that supporters and opponents are both lobbying him hard.

People much more engaged than me have already laid out, accessibly and in immense detail, exactly what the current bill does and the arguments for and against. Try for example:

• For a very basic explainer, this in TechCrunch
• This by Kelsey Piper, and this by Kelsey Piper, Sigal Samuel, and Dylan Matthews in Vox
• This by Zvi Mowshowitz (Zvi has also written a great deal else about SB 1047, strongly in support)

Briefly: given the ferocity of the debate about it, SB 1047 does remarkably little. It says that if you spend more than $100 million to train a model, you need to notify the government and submit a safety plan. It establishes whistleblower protections for people at AI companies to raise safety concerns. And, if a company failed to take reasonable precautions and its AI then causes catastrophic harm, it says that the company can be sued (which was presumably already true, but the bill makes it extra clear). And … unless I’m badly mistaken, those are the main things in it!

While the bill is mild, opponents are on a full scare campaign saying that it will strangle the AI revolution in its crib, put American AI development under the control of Luddite bureaucrats, and force companies out of California. They say that it will discourage startups, even though the whole point of the $100 million provision is to target only the big players (like Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic) while leaving small startups free to innovate.

The only steelman that makes sense to me, for why many tech leaders are against the bill, is the idea that it’s a stalking horse. On this view, the bill’s actual contents are irrelevant. What matters is simply that, once you’ve granted the principle that people worried about AI-caused catastrophes get a seat at the table, any legislative acknowledgment of the validity of their concerns—then they’re going to take a mile rather than an inch, and kill the whole AI industry.

Notice that the exact same slippery-slope argument could be deployed against any AI regulation whatsoever. In other words, if someone opposes SB 1047 on these grounds, then they’d presumably oppose any attempt to regulate AI—either because they reject the whole premise that creating entities with humanlike intelligence is a risky endeavor, and/or because they’re hardcore libertarians who never want government to intervene in the market for any reason, not even if the literal fate of the planet was at stake.

Having said that, there’s one specific objection that needs to be dealt with. OpenAI, and Sam Altman in particular, say that they oppose SB 1047 simply because AI regulation should be handled at the federal rather than the state level. The supporters’ response is simply: yeah, everyone agrees that’s what should happen, but given the dysfunction in Congress, there’s essentially no chance of it anytime soon. And California suffices, since Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and virtually every other AI company is either based in California or does many things subject to California law. So, some California legislators decided to do something. On this issue as on others, it seems to me that anyone who’s serious about a problem doesn’t get to reject a positive step that’s on offer, in favor of a utopian solution that isn’t on offer.

I should also stress that, in order to support SB 1047, you don’t need to be a Yudkowskyan doomer, primarily worried about hard AGI takeoffs and recursive self-improvement and the like. For that matter, if you are such a doomer, SB 1047 might seem basically irrelevant to you (apart from its unknowable second- and third-order effects): a piece of tissue paper in the path of an approaching tank. The world where AI regulation like SB 1047 makes the most difference is the world where the dangers of AI creep up on humans gradually, so that there’s enough time for governments to respond incrementally, as they did with previous technologies.

If you agree with this, it wouldn’t hurt to contact Governor Newsom’s office. For all its nerdy and abstruse trappings, this is, in the end, a kind of battle that ought to be familiar and comfortable for any Democrat: the kind with, on one side, most of the public (according to polls) and also hundreds of the top scientific experts, and on the other side, individuals and companies who all coincidentally have strong financial stakes in being left unregulated. This seems to me like a hinge of history where small interventions could have outsized effects.

Pedro Domingos is a computer scientist at the University of Washington.  I’ve known him for years as a guy who’d confidently explain to me why I was wrong about everything from physics to CS to politics … but then, for some reason, ask to meet with me again.  Over the past 6 or 7 years, Pedro has become notorious in the CS world as a right-wing bomb-thrower on what I still call Twitter—one who, fortunately for Pedro, is protected by his tenure at UW. He’s also known for a popular book on machine learning called The Master Algorithm, which I probably should’ve read but didn’t.

Now Pedro has released a short satirical novel, entitled 2040.  The novel centers around a presidential election between:

• The Democratic candidate, “Chief Raging Bull,” an angry activist with 1/1024 Native American ancestry (as proven by a DNA test, the Chief proudly boasts) who wants to dissolve the United States and return it to its Native inhabitants, and

• The Republican candidate, “PresiBot,” a chatbot with a frequently-malfunctioning robotic “body.” While this premise would’ve come off as comic science fiction five years ago, PresiBot now seems like it could plausibly be built using existing LLMs.

This is all in a near-future whose economy has been transformed (and to some extent hollowed out) by AI, and whose populace is controlled and manipulated by “Happinet,” a giant San Francisco tech company that parodies Google and/or Meta.

I should clarify that the protagonists, the ones we’re supposed to root for, are the founders of the startup company that built PresiBot—that is, people who are trying to put the US under the control of a frequently-glitching piece of software that’s also a Republican. For some readers, this alone might be a dealbreaker. But as I already knew Pedro’s ideological convictions, I felt like I had fair warning.

As I read the first couple chapters, my main worry was that I was about to endure an entire novel constructed out of tweet-like witticisms. But my appreciation for what Pedro was doing grew the more I read.

[Warning: Spoilers follow]

To my mind, the emotional core of the novel comes near the end, after PresiBot creator Ethan Burnswagger gets cancelled for a remark that’s judged racially insensitive. Exiled and fired from his own company, Ethan wanders around 2040 San Francisco, and meets working-class and homeless people who are doing their best to cope with the changes AI has wrought on civilization. This gives him the crucial idea to upgrade PresiBot into a crowdsourced entity that continuously channels the American popular will. Citizens watching PresiBot will register their second-by-second opinions on what it should say or do, and PresiBot will use its vast AI powers to make decisions incorporating their feedback. (How will the bot, once elected, handle classified intelligence briefings? One of many questions left unanswered here.) Pedro is at his best when, rather than taking potshots at the libs, he’s honestly trying to contemplate how AI is going to change regular people’s lives in the coming decades.

As for the novel’s politics? I mean, you might complain that Pedro stacks the deck too far in the AI candidate’s favor, thereby spoiling the novel’s central thought experiment, by making the AI’s opponent a human who literally wants to end the United States, killing or expelling most of its inhabitants. Worse, the Republican party that actually exists in our reality—i.e., the one dominated by Trump and his conspiratorial revenge fantasies—is simply dissolved by authorial fiat and replaced by a moderate, centrist party of Pedro’s dreams, a party so open-minded it would even nominate an AI.

Having said all that: I confess I enjoyed “2040.” The plot is tightly constructed, the dialogue crackles (certainly for a CS professor writing a first novel), the satire at least provokes chuckles, and at just 215 pages, the action moves.

This morning I was pondering one of the anti-Israel protesters’ favorite phrases—I promise, out of broad philosophical curiosity rather than just parochial concern for my extended family’s survival.

“We’re on the right side of history. Don’t put yourself on the wrong side by opposing us.”

Why do the protesters believe they shouldn’t face legal or academic sanction for having blockaded university campuses, barricaded themselves in buildings, shut down traffic, or vandalized Jewish institutions? Because, just like the abolitionists and Civil Rights marchers and South African anti-apartheid heroes, they’re on the right side of history. Surely the rules and regulations of the present are of little concern next to the vindication of future generations?

The main purpose of this post is not to adjudicate whether their claim is true or false, but to grapple with something much more basic: what kind of claim are they even making, and who is its intended audience?

One reading of “we’re on the right of history” is that it’s just a fancy way to say “we’re right and you’re wrong.” In which case, fair enough! Few people passionately believe themselves to be wrong.

But there’s a difficulty: if you truly believe your side to be right, then you should believe it’s right win or lose. For example, an anti-Zionist should say that, even if Israel continues existing, and even if everyone else on the planet comes to support it, still eliminating Israel would’ve been the right choice. Conversely, a Zionist should say that if Israel is destroyed and the whole rest of the world celebrates its destruction forevermore—well then, the whole world is wrong. (That, famously, is more-or-less what the Jews did say, each time Israel and Judah were crushed in antiquity.)

OK, but if the added clause “of history” is doing anything in the phrase “the right side of history,” that extra thing would appear to be an empirical prediction. The protesters are saying: “just like the entire world looks back with disgust at John Calhoun, Bull Connor, and other defenders of slavery and then segregation, so too will the world look back with disgust at anyone who defends Israel now.”

Maybe this is paired with a theory about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice: “we’ll win the future and then look back with disgust on you, and we’ll be correct to do so, because morality inherently progresses over time.” Or maybe it has merely the character of a social threat: “we’ll win the future and then look back with disgust on you, so regardless of whether we’ll be right or wrong, you’d better switch to our side if you know what’s good for you.”

Either way, the claim of winning the future is now the kind of thing that could be wagered about in a prediction market. And, in essence, the Right-Side-of-History people are claiming to be able to improve on today’s consensus estimate: to have a hot morality tip that beats the odds. But this means that they face the same problem as anyone who claims it’s knowable that, let’s say, a certain stock will increase a thousandfold. Namely: if it’s so certain, then why hasn’t the price shot up already?

The protesters and their supporters have several possible answers. Many boil down to saying that most people—because they need to hold down a job, earn a living, etc.—make all sorts of craven compromises, preventing them from saying what they know in their hearts to be true. But idealistic college students, who are free from such burdens, are virtually always right.

Does that sound like a strawman? Then recall the comedian Sarah Silverman’s famous question from eight years ago:

PLEASE tell me which times throughout history protests from college campuses got it wrong. List them for me

Crucially, lots of people happily took Silverman up on her challenge. They pointed out that, in the Sixties and Seventies, thousands of college students, with the enthusiastic support of many of their professors, marched for Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Castro, Che Guevara, Pol Pot, and every other murderous left-wing tyrant to sport a green uniform and rifle. Few today would claim that these students correctly identified the Right Side of History, despite the students’ certainty that they’d done so.

(There were also, of course, moderate protesters, who merely opposed America’s war conduct—just like there are moderate protesters now who merely want Israel to end its Gaza campaign rather than its existence. But then as now, the revolutionaries sucked up much of the oxygen, and the moderates rarely disowned them.)

What’s really going on, we might say, is reference class tennis. Implicitly or explicitly, the anti-Israel protesters are aligning themselves with Gandhi and MLK and Nelson Mandela and every other celebrated resister of colonialism and apartheid throughout history. They ask: what are the chances that all those heroes were right, and we’re the first ones to be wrong?

The trouble is that someone else could just as well ask: what are the chances that Hamas is the first group in history to be morally justified in burning Jews alive in their homes … even though the Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, Crusaders, Inquisitors, Cossacks, Nazis, and every other group that did similar things to the Jews over 3000 years is now acknowledged by nearly every educated person to have perpetrated an unimaginable evil? What are the chances that, with Israel’s establishment in 1948, this millennia-old moral arc of Western civilization suddenly reversed its polarity?

We should admit from the outset that such a reversal is possible. No one, no matter how much cruelty they’ve endured, deserves a free pass, and there are certainly many cases where victims turned into victimizers. Still, one could ask: shouldn’t the burden be on those who claim that today‘s campaign against Jewish self-determination is history’s first justified one?

It’s like, if I were a different person, born to different parents in a different part of the world, maybe I’d chant for Israel’s destruction with the best of them. Even then, though, I feel like the above considerations would keep me awake at night, would terrify me that maybe I’d picked the wrong side, or at least that the truth was more complicated. The certainty implied by the “right side of history” claim is the one part I don’t understand, as far as I try to stretch my sympathetic imagination.

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For all that, I, too, have been moved by rhetorical appeals to “stand on the right side of history”—say, for the cause of Ukraine, or slowing down climate change, or saving endangered species, or defeating Trump. Thinking it over, this has happened when I felt sure of which side was right (and would ultimately be seen to be right), but inertia or laziness or inattention or whatever else prevented me from taking action.

When does this happen for me? As far as I can tell, the principles of the Enlightenment, of reason and liberty and progress and the flourishing of sentient life, have been on the right side of every conflict in human history. My abstract commitment to those principles doesn’t always tell me which side of the controversy du jour is correct, but whenever it does, that’s all I ever need cognitively; the rest is “just” motivation and emotion.

(Amusingly, I expect some people to say that my “reason and Enlightenment” heuristic is vacuous, that it works only because I define those ideals to be the ones that pick the right side. Meanwhile, I expect others to say that the heuristic is wrong and to offer counterexamples.)

Anyway, maybe this generalizes. Sure, a call to “stand on the right side of history” could do nontrivial work, but only in the same way that a call to buy Bitcoin in 2011 could—namely, for those who’ve already concluded that buying Bitcoin is a golden opportunity, but haven’t yet gotten around to buying it. Such a call does nothing for anyone who’s already considered the question and come down on the opposite side of it. The abuse of “arc of the moral universe” rhetoric—i.e., the calling down of history’s judgment in favor of X, even though you know full well that your listeners see themselves as having consulted history’s judgment just as earnestly as you did, and gotten back not(X) instead—yeah, that’s risen to be one of my biggest pet peeves. If I ever slip up and indulge in it, please tell me and I’ll stop.