Shtetl-Optimized

If I’m being honest, the most exciting recent development in my life is this: a little over a month ago, I stopped checking “SneerClub” (a place I’d previously resolved not even to name here, but I think an exception is warranted now). Permanently, cold turkey. I won’t even visit to read their sneers about this post. I’ve made progress cutting down on other self-destructive social media fixations as well. Many friends suggested this course to me, and I thank them all, though I ultimately had to follow my own path to the obvious.

Ironically, the SneerClubbers themselves begged me to stop reading them (!), so presumably for once they’ll be okay with something I did (but if not, I don’t care). If any of them still have something to say to me, they can come to this blog, or email me, or if they pass through Austin, set up a time to hash it out over chips and queso (my treat). What I’ll no longer do is spend hours every week binge-reading a forum of people who’ve adopted nastiness and bad faith as their explicit principles. I’ll no longer toss and turn at night wondering how it came about that two thousand Redditors hate Scott Aaronson so much, and what I could say or do (short of total self-abnegation) that would make them hate me less. I plan to spend the freed-up time being Scott Aaronson.

Resolving to ignore one particular online hate pit—and then sticking to the resolution, as so far I have—has been a pure, unmitigated improvement to my quality of life. If you don’t believe me, ask my wife and kids. I recommend this course to anyone.

You could sensibly ask: why did I ever spend time worrying about an anti-nerds-like-me forum that’s so poisonous for its targets and participants alike? After long introspection, I think the answer is: there’s a part of me, perhaps a gift from the childhood bullies, that’s so obsessed with “society’s hatred of STEM nerds,” that it constantly seeks out evidence to confirm that its fears are justified—evidence that it can then wave in front of the rest of my brain to say “you see?? what did I always tell you?” And alas, whenever that part of my brain seeks such evidence, the world dutifully supplies mountains of it. It’s never once disappointed.

Now the SneerClubbers—who are perceptive and talented in their cruelty, if in nothing else—notice this about me, and gleefully ridicule me for it. But they’re oblivious to the central irony: that unlike the vast majority of humankind, or even the vast majority of social justice activists, they (the SneerClubbers) really do hate everyone like me. They’re precisely what the paranoid part of my brain wrongly fears that everyone else I meet is secretly like. They’re like someone who lectures you about your hilariously overblown fear of muggers, while simultaneously mugging you.

But at least they’re not the contented and self-confident bullies of my childhood nightmares, kicking dirt down at nerds from atop their pinnacle of wokeness and social adeptness. If you spend enough time studying them, they themselves come across as angry, depressed, pathetic. So for example: here’s one of my most persistent attackers, popping up on a math thread commemorating Michael Atiyah (one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century), just to insult Atiyah—randomly, gratuitously, and a few days after Atiyah had died. Almost everything posted all over Reddit by this individual—who uses the accurate tagline “unpleasantly radical”—has the same flavor. Somehow seeing this made it click for me: wait a second, these are the folks are lecturing me about my self-centeredness and arrogance and terrible social skills? Like, at least I try to be nice.

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Scott Alexander, who writes the world’s best blog and is a more central target of SneerClub than I’ve been, recently announced that he asked the moderators of r/ssc to close its notorious “Culture War” thread, and they’ve done so—moving the thread to a new home on Reddit called “TheMotte.”

For those who don’t know: r/ssc is the place on Reddit to discuss Scott’s SlateStarCodex blog, though Scott himself was never too involved as more than a figurehead.  The Culture War thread was the place within r/ssc to discuss race, gender, immigration, and other hot-button topics.  The thread, which filled up with a bewildering thousands of comments per week (!), attracted the, err … full range of political views, including leftists, libertarians, and moderates but also alt-righters, neoreactionaries, and white nationalists. Predictably, SneerClub treated the thread as a gift from heaven: a constant source of inflammatory material that they could use to smear Scott personally (even if most of the time, Scott hadn’t even seen the offending content, let alone endorsing it).

Four months ago, I was one of the apparently many friends who told Scott that I felt he should dissociate the Culture War thread from his brand. So I congratulate him on his decision, which (despite his eloquently-expressed misgivings) I feel confident was the right one. Think about it this way: nobody’s freedom of speech has been curtailed—the thread continues full steam at TheMotte, for anyone who enjoys it—but meanwhile, the sneerers have been deprived of a golden weapon with which to slime Scott. Meanwhile, while the sneerers themselves might never change their minds about anything, Scott has demonstrated to third parties that he’s open and reasonable and ready to compromise, like the debater who happily switches to his opponent’s terminology. What’s not to like?

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A couple weeks ago, while in Albuquerque for the SQuInT conference, I visited the excellent National Museum of Nuclear Science and History.  It was depressing, as it should have been, to tour the detailed exhibits about the murderous events surrounding the birth of the nuclear era: the Holocaust, the Rape of Nanking, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was depressing in a different way to tour the exhibits about the early Atomic Age, and see the boundless optimism that ‘unleashing the power of the atom’ would finally usher in a near-utopia of space travel and clean energy—and then to compare that vision to where we are now, with climate change ravaging the planet and (in a world-historic irony) the people who care most about the environment having denounced and marginalized the most reliable source of carbon-free energy, the one that probably had the best chance to avert our planet’s terrifying future.

But on the bright side: how wonderful to have born into a time and place when, for the most part, those who hate you have only the power to destroy your life that you yourself grant them. How wonderful when one can blunt their knives by simply refusing to open a browser tab.

A few weeks ago, I was at QIP’2019 in Boulder, CO. This week I was at SQuInT’2019 in Albuquerque, NM. There were lots of amazing talks—feel free to ask in the comments section.

There’s an interview with me at the website “GigaOm,” conducted by Byron Reese and entitled Quantum Computing: Capabilities and Limits. I didn’t proofread the transcript and it has some errors in it, but hopefully the meaning comes through. In other interview news, if you were interested in my podcast with Adam Ford in Melbourne but don’t like YouTube, Adam has helpfully prepared transcripts of the two longest segments: The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine and The Winding Road to Quantum Supremacy.

The New York Times ran an article entitled The Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting Into Class, about the surge in computer science majors all over the US, and the shortage of professors to teach them. The article’s go-to example of a university where this is happening is UT Austin, and there’s extensive commentary from my department chair, Don Fussell.

The STOC’2019 accepted papers list is finally out. Lots of cool stuff!

I’ve of course been following the recent public debate about whether to build a circular collider to succeed the LHC—notably including Sabine Hossenfelder’s New York Times column arguing that we shouldn’t.  (See also the responses by Jeremy Bernstein and Lisa Randall, and the discussion on Peter Woit’s blog, and Daniel Harlow’s Facebook thread, and this Vox piece by Kelsey Piper.)  Let me blog about this as a way of cracking my knuckles or tuning my violin, just getting back into blog-shape after a long hiatus for travel and family and the beginning of the semester.

Regardless of whether this opinion is widely shared among my colleagues, I like Sabine.  I’ve often found her blogging funny and insightful, and I wish more non-Lubos physicists would articulate their thoughts for the public the way she does, rather than just standing on the sidelines and criticizing the ones who do. I find it unfortunate that some of the replies to Sabine’s arguments dwelled on her competence and “standing” in physics (even if we set aside—as we should—Lubos’s misogynistic rants, whose predictability could be used to calibrate atomic clocks). It’s like this: if high-energy physics had reached a pathological state of building bigger and bigger colliders for no good reason, then we’d expect that it would take a semi-outsider to say so in public, so then it wouldn’t be a further surprise to find precisely such a person doing it.

Not for the first time, though, I find myself coming down on the opposite side as Sabine. Basically, if civilization could get its act together and find the money, I think it would be pretty awesome to build a new collider to push forward the energy frontier in our understanding of the universe.

Note that I’m not making the much stronger claim that this is the best possible use of $20 billion for science. Plausibly a thousand $20-million projects could be found that would advance our understanding of reality by more than a new collider would. But it’s also important to realize that that’s not the question at stake here. When, for example, the US Congress cancelled the Superconducting Supercollider midway through construction—partly, it’s believed, on the basis of opposition from eminent physicists in other subfields, who argued that they could do equally important science for much cheaper—none of the SSC budget, as in 0% of it, ever did end up redirected to those other subfields. In practice, then, the question of “whether a new collider is worth it” is probably best considered in absolute terms, rather than relative to other science projects.

What I found most puzzling, in Sabine’s writings on this subject, was the leap in logic from

1. many theorists expected that superpartners, or other new particles besides the Higgs boson, had a good chance of being discovered at the LHC, based on statistical arguments about “natural” parameter values, and
2. the basic soundness of naturalness arguments was always open to doubt, and indeed the LHC results to date offer zero support for them, and
3. many of the same theorists now want an even bigger collider, and continue to expect new particles to be found, and haven’t sufficiently reckoned with their previous failed predictions, to …
4. therefore we shouldn’t build the bigger collider.

How do we get from 1-3 to 4: is the idea that we should punish the errant theorists, by withholding an experiment that they want, in order to deter future wrong predictions? After step 3, it seems to me that Sabine could equally well have gone to: and therefore it’s all the more important that we do build a new collider, in order to establish all the more conclusively that there’s just an energy desert up there—and that I, Sabine, was right to emphasize that possibility, and those other theorists were wrong to downplay it!

Like, I gather that there are independently motivated scenarios where there would be only the Higgs at the LHC scale, and then new stuff at the next energy scale beyond it. And as an unqualified outsider who enjoys talking to friends in particle physics and binge-reading about it, I’d find it hard to assign the totality of those scenarios less than ~20% credence or more than ~80%—certainly if the actual experts don’t either.

And crucially, it’s not as if raising the collision energy is just one arbitrary direction in which to look for new fundamental physics, among a hundred a-priori equally promising directions. Basically, there’s raising the collision energy and then there’s everything else. By raising the energy, you’re not testing one specific idea for physics beyond Standard Model, but a hundred or a thousand ideas in one swoop.

The situation reminds me a little of the quantum computing skeptics who say: scalable QC can never work, in practice and probably even in principle; the mainstream physics community only thinks it can work because of groupthink and hype; therefore, we shouldn’t waste more funds trying to make it work. With the sole, very interesting exception of Gil Kalai, none of the skeptics ever seem to draw what strikes me as an equally logical conclusion: whoa, let’s go full speed ahead with trying to build a scalable QC, because there’s an epochal revolution in physics to be had here—once the experimenters finally see that I was right and the mainstream was wrong, and they start to unravel the reasons why!

Of course, $20 billion is a significant chunk of change, by the standards of science even if not by the standards of random government wastages (like our recent $11 billion shutdown). And ultimately, decisions do need to be made about which experiments are most interesting to pursue with limited resources. And if a future circular collider were built, and if it indeed just found a desert, I think the balance would tilt pretty strongly toward Sabine’s position—that is, toward declining to build an even bigger and more expensive collider after that. If the Patriots drearily won every Superbowl 13-3, year after year after year, eventually no one would watch anymore and the Superbowl would get cancelled (well, maybe that will happen for other reasons…).

But it’s worth remembering that—correct me if I’m wrong—so far there have been no cases in the history of particle physics of massively expanding the energy frontier and finding absolutely nothing new there (i.e., nothing that at least conveyed multiple bits of information, as the Higgs mass did). And while my opinion should count for less than a neutrino mass, just thinking it over a-priori, I keep coming back to the question: before we close the energy frontier for good, shouldn’t there have been at least one unmitigated null result, rather than zero?