Shtetl-Optimized

I hereby precommit that this will be my last post, for a long time, around the twin themes of (1) the horribleness in the United States and the world, and (2) my desperate attempts to reason with various online commenters who hold me personally complicit in all this horribleness. I should really focus my creativity more on actually fixing the world’s horribleness, than on seeking out every random social-media mudslinger who blames me for it, shouldn’t I? Still, though, isn’t undue obsession with the latter a pretty ordinary human failing, a pretty understandable one?

So anyway, if you’re one of the thousands of readers who come here simply to learn more about quantum computing and computational complexity, rather than to try to provoke me into mounting a public defense of my own existence (which defense will then, ironically but inevitably, stimulate even more attacks that need to be defended against) … well, either scroll down to the very end of this post, or wait for the next post.

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Thanks so much to all my readers who donated to Fund Texas Choice. As promised, I’ve personally given them a total of $4,106.28, to match the donations that came in by the deadline. I’d encourage people to continue donating anyway, while for my part I’ll probably run some more charity matching campaigns soon. These things are addictive, like pulling the lever of a slot machine, but where the rewards go to making the world an infinitesimal amount more consistent with your values.

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Of course, now there’s a brand-new atrocity to shame my adopted state of Texas before the world. While the Texas government will go to extraordinary lengths to protect unborn children, the world has now witnessed 19 of itsborn children consigned to gruesome deaths, as the “good guys with guns”—waited outside and prevented parents from entering the classrooms where their children were being shot. I have nothing original to add to the global outpourings of rage and grief. Forget about the statistical frequency of these events: I know perfectly well that the risk from car crashes and home accidents is orders-of-magnitude greater. Think about it this way: the United States is now known to the world as “the country that can’t or won’t do anything to stop its children from semi-regularly being gunned down in classrooms,” not even measures that virtually every other comparable country on earth has successfully taken. It’s become the symbol of national decline, dysfunction, and failure. If so, then the stakes here could fairly be called existential ones—not because of its direct effects on child life expectancy or GDP or any other index of collective well-being that you can define and measure, but rather, because a country that lacks the will to solve this will be judged by the world, and probably accurately, as lacking the will to solve anything else.

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In return for the untold thousands of hours I’ve poured into this blog, which has never once had advertising or asked for subscriptions, my reward has been years of vilification by sneerers and trolls. Some of the haters even compare me to Elliot Rodger and other aggrieved mass shooters. And I mean: yes, it’s true that I was bullied and miserable for years. It’s true that Elliot Rodger, Salvador Ramos (the Uvalde shooter), and most other mass shooters were also bullied and miserable for years. But, Scott-haters, if we’re being intellectually honest about this, we might say that the similarities between the mass shooter story and the Scott Aaronson story end at a certain point not very long after that. We might say: it’s not just that Aaronson didn’t respond by hurting anybody—rather, it’s that his response loudly affirmed the values of the Enlightenment, meaning like, the whole package, from individual autonomy to science and reason to the rejection of sexism and racism to everything in between. Affirmed it in a manner that’s not secretly about popularity (demonstrably so, because it doesn’t get popularity), affirmed it via self-questioning methods intellectually honest enough that they’d probably still have converged on the right answer even in situations where it’s now obvious that almost everyone you around would’ve been converging on the wrong answer, like (say) Nazi Germany or the antebellum South.

I’ve been to the valley of darkness. While there, I decided that the only “revenge” against the bullies that was possible or desirable was to do something with my life, to achieve something in science that at least some bullies might envy, while also starting a loving family and giving more than most to help strangers on the Internet and whatever good cause comes to his attention and so on. And after 25 years of effort, some people might say I’ve sort of achieved the “revenge” as I’d then defined it. And they might further say: if you could get every school shooter to redefine “revenge” as “becoming another Scott Aaronson,” that would be, you know, like, a step upwards. An improvement.

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And let this be the final word on the matter that I ever utter in all my days, to the thousands of SneerClubbers and Twitter randos who pursue this particular line of attack against Scott Aaronson (yes, we do mean the thousands—which means, it both feels to its recipient like the entire earth yet actually is less than 0.01% of the earth).

We see what Scott did with his life, when subjected for a decade to forms of psychological pressure that are infamous for causing young males to lash out violently. What would you have done with your life?

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A couple weeks ago, when the trolling attacks were arriving minute by minute, I toyed with the idea of permanently shutting down this blog. What’s the point? I asked myself. Back in 2005, the open Internet was fun; now it’s a charred battle zone. Why not restrict conversation to my academic colleagues and friends? Haven’t I done enough for a public that gives me so much grief? I was dissuaded by many messages of support from loyal readers. Thank you so much.

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If anyone needs something to cheer them up, you should really watch Prehistoric Planet, narrated by an excellent, 96-year-old David Attenborough. Maybe 35 years from now, people will believe dinosaurs looked or acted somewhat differently from these portrayals, just like they believe somewhat differently now from when I was a kid. On the other hand, if you literally took a time machine to the Late Cretaceous and starting filming, you couldn’t get a result that seemed more realistic, let’s say to a documentary-watching child, than these CGI dinosaurs on their CGI planet seem. So, in the sense of passing that child’s Turing Test, you might argue, the problem of bringing back the dinosaurs has now been solved.

If you … err … really want to be cheered up, you can follow up with Dinosaur Apocalypse, also narrated by Attenborough, where you can (again, as if you were there) watch the dinosaurs being drowned and burned alive in their billions when the asteroid hits. We’d still be scurrying under rocks, were it not for that lucky event that only a monster could’ve called lucky at the time.

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Several people asked me to comment on the recent savage investor review against the quantum computing startup IonQ. The review amusingly mixed together every imaginable line of criticism, with every imaginable degree of reasonableness from 0% to 100%. Like, quantum computing is impossible even in theory, and (in the very next sentence) other companies are much closer to realizing quantum computing than IonQ is. And IonQ’s response to the criticism, and see also this by the indefatigable Gil Kalai.

Is it, err, OK if I sit this one out for now? There’s probably, like, actually an already-existing machine learning model where, if you trained it on all of my previous quantum computing posts, it would know exactly what to say about this.

So, I’d been planning a fun post for today about the DALL-E image-generating AI model, and in particular, a brief new preprint about DALL-E’s capabilities by Ernest Davis, Gary Marcus, and myself. We wrote this preprint as a sort of “adversarial collaboration”: Ernie and Gary started out deeply skeptical of DALL-E, while I was impressed bordering on awestruck. I was pleasantly surprised that we nevertheless managed to produce a text that we all agreed on.

Not for the first time, though, world events have derailed my plans. The most important part of today’s post is this:

For the next week, I, Scott Aaronson, will personally match all reader donations to Fund Texas Choice—a group that helps women in Texas travel to out-of-state health clinics, for reasons that are neither your business nor mine—up to a total of $5,000.

To show my seriousness, I’ve already donated $1,000. Just let me know how much you’ve donated in the comments section!

The first reason for this donation drive is that, perhaps like many of you, I stayed up hours last night reading Alito’s leaked decision in a state of abject terror. I saw how the logic of the decision, consistent and impeccable on its own terms, is one by which the Supreme Court’s five theocrats could now proceed to unravel the whole of modernity. I saw how this court, unchecked by our broken democratic system, can now permanently enshrine the will of a radical minority, perhaps unless and until the United States is plunged into a second Civil War.

Anyway, that’s the first reason for the donation drive. The second reason is to thank Shtetl-Optimized‘s commenters for their … err, consistently generous and thought-provoking contributions. Let’s take, for example, this comment on last week’s admittedly rather silly post, from an anonymous individual who calls herself “Feminist Bitch,” and who was enraged that it took me a full day to process one of the great political cataclysms of our lifetimes and publicly react to it:

OF COURSE. Not a word about Roe v. Wade being overturned, but we get a pseudo-intellectual rationalist-tier rant about whatever’s bumping around Scott’s mind right now. Women’s most basic reproductive rights are being curtailed AS WE SPEAK and not a peep from Scott, eh? Even though in our state (Texas) there are already laws ON THE BOOKS that will criminalize abortion as soon as the alt-right fascists in our Supreme Court give the go-ahead. If you cared one lick about your female students and colleagues, Scott, you’d be posting about the Supreme Court and helping feminist causes, not posting your “memes.” But we all know Scott doesn’t give a shit about women. He’d rather stand up for creepy nerdbros and their right to harass women than women’s right to control their own fucking bodies. Typical Scott.

If you want, you can read all of Feminist Bitch’s further thoughts about my failings, with my every attempt to explain and justify myself met with further contempt. No doubt my well-meaning friends of both sexes would counsel me to ignore her. Alas, from my infamous ordeal of late 2014, I know that with her every word, Feminist Bitch speaks for thousands, and the knowledge eats at me day and night.

It’s often said that “the right looks for converts, while the left looks only for heretics.” Has Feminist Bitch ever stopped to think about how our civilization reached its current terrifying predicament—how Trump won in 2016, how the Supreme Court got packed with extremists who represent a mere 25% of the country, how Putin and Erdogan and Orban and Bolsonaro and all the rest consolidated their power? Does she think it happened because wokeists like herself reached out too much, made too many inroads among fellow citizens who share some but not all of their values? Would Feminist Bitch say that, if the Democrats want to capitalize on the coming tsunami of outrage about the death of Roe and the shameless lies that enabled it, if they want to sweep to victory in the midterms and enshrine abortion rights into federal law … then their best strategy would be to double down on their condemnations of gross, creepy, smelly, white male nerdbros who all the girls, like, totally hate?

(until, thank God, some of them don’t)

I continue to think that the majority of my readers, of all races and sexes and backgrounds, are reasonable and sane. I continue to think the majority of you recoil against hatred and dehumanization of anyone—whether that means women seeking abortions, gays, trans folks, or (gasp!) even white male techbros. In this sad twilight for the United States and for liberal democracy around the world, we the reasonable and sane, we the fans of the Enlightenment, we the Party of Psychological Complexity, have decades of work cut out for us. For now I’ll simply say: I don’t hear from you nearly enough in the comments.