My most rage-inducing beliefs
A friend and I were discussing whether there’s anything I could possibly say, on this blog, in 2025, that wouldn’t provoke an outraged reaction from my commenters. So I started jotting down ideas. Let’s see how I did.
- Pancakes are a delicious breakfast, especially with blueberries and maple syrup.
- Since it’s now Passover, and no pancakes for me this week, let me add: I think matzoh has been somewhat unfairly maligned. Of course it tastes like cardboard if you eat it plain, but it’s pretty tasty with butter, fruit preserves, tuna salad, egg salad, or chopped liver.
- Central Texas is actually really nice in the springtime, with lush foliage and good weather for being outside.
- Kittens are cute. So are puppies, although I’d go for kittens given the choice.
- Hamilton is a great musical—so much so that it’s become hard to think about the American Founding except as Lin-Manuel Miranda reimagined it, with rap battles in Washington’s cabinet and so forth. I’m glad I got to take my kids to see it last week, when it was in Austin (I hadn’t seen it since it its pre-Broadway previews a decade ago). Two-hundred fifty years on, I hope America remembers its founding promise, and that Hamilton doesn’t turn out to be America’s eulogy.
- The Simpsons and Futurama are hilarious.
- Young Sheldon and The Big Bang Theory are unjustly maligned. They were about as good as any sitcoms can possibly be.
- For the most part, people should be free to live lives of their choosing, as long as they’re not harming others.
- The rapid progress of AI might be the most important thing that’s happened in my lifetime. There’s a huge range of plausible outcomes, from “merely another technological transformation like computing or the Internet” to “biggest thing since the appearance of multicellular life,” but in any case, we ought to proceed with caution and with the wider interests of humanity foremost in our minds.
- Research into curing cancer is great and should continue to be supported.
- The discoveries of NP-completeness, public-key encryption, zero-knowledge and probabilistically checkable proofs, and quantum computational speedups were milestones in the history of theoretical computer science, worthy of celebration.
- Katalin Karikó, who pioneered mRNA vaccines, is a heroine of humanity. We should figure out how to create more Katalin Karikós.
- Scientists spend too much of their time writing grant proposals, and not enough doing actual science. We should experiment with new institutions to fix this.
- I wish California could build high-speed rail from LA to San Francisco. If California’s Democrats could show they could do this, it would be an electoral boon to Democrats nationally.
- I wish the US could build clean energy, including wind, solar, and nuclear. Actually, more generally, we should do everything recommended in Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s phenomenal new book Abundance, which I just finished.
- The great questions of philosophy—why does the universe exist? how does consciousness relate to the physical world? what grounds morality?—are worthy of respect, as primary drivers of human curiosity for millennia. Scientists and engineers should never sneer at these questions. All the same, I personally couldn’t spend my life on such questions: I also need small problems, ones where I can make definite progress.
- Quantum physics, which turns 100 this year, is arguably the most metaphysical of all empirical discoveries. It’s worthy of returning to again and again in life, asking: but how could the world be that way? Is there a different angle that we missed?
- If I knew for sure that I could achieve Enlightenment, but only by meditating on a mountaintop for a decade, a further question would arise: is it worth it? Or would I rather spend that decade engaged with the world, with scientific problems and with other people?
- I, too, vote for political parties, and have sectarian allegiances. But I’m most moved by human creative effort, in science or literature or anything else, that transcends time and place and circumstance and speaks to the eternal.
- As I was writing this post, a bird died by flying straight into the window of my home office. As little sense as it might make from a utilitarian standpoint, I am sad for that bird.
Follow
Comment #1 April 14th, 2025 at 11:58 am
I am OUTRAGED that you mistakenly called it Broadview and not Broadway.
Comment #2 April 14th, 2025 at 11:59 am
I am also sad for that bird.
Comment #3 April 14th, 2025 at 12:24 pm
This was oddly relaxing and wonderful to read.
Comment #4 April 14th, 2025 at 12:25 pm
Concerning 17, World Quantum Day may not be the best day to say it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but “Yes, I think there is a different angle.” It’s not that we missed empiricism, but in recent years I think we have sidelined empiricism too much.
Both classical and quantum physics attempt to model and explain the datasets we obtain from experiments, but there are no-go theorems that say that Classical Mechanics is not able to do so: I think CM is *computationally* incomplete relative to those no-go theorems. It’s not that QM is incomplete, it’s CM that needs something more. What can we do to make CM more complete? The answer I’ve been suggesting for the last five years, since it was published in Annals of Physics 2020 as “An algebraic approach to Koopman classical mechanics”, is that we can use the Poisson bracket in a new way to introduce noncommutativity and contextuality into classical physics, giving us a Hilbert space formalism that can be as complete as but not the same as quantum physics. It’s more than CM, so I call it CM+. Instead of quantization and the correspondence principle as a flawed relationship between CM and QM, we can construct isomorphisms between CM+ and QM, which extends to isomorphisms between classical generalized random fields and QFT. The clarity seems helpful to me, but it’s different enough that people are not sure how to use it.
To return to empiricism, however, the 1920s took particle properties to be obvious, whereas I suggest we should take *datasets* to be empirically obvious, with particle properties as sometimes a very useful intuitive guide to experiments — but sometimes they are misleading. The generalization of the idea of a particle, a ‘system’, should be welcome as a derived concept, but it ought not to be in the axioms of QM.
The Website link is to my YouTube channel, where there are various talks to academic audiences, which I hope are gradually becoming clearer.
Happy World Quantum Day, Scott, and to all who see this:-)
Comment #5 April 14th, 2025 at 12:43 pm
We’ll see whether belief 2 lasts the week. Some years ago during Passover, I saw a Jewish colleague had some Matzoh in his office, and since I was raised Jewish and had memories of it, I asked if I could have some. Of course, he said, and he talked about how good they were. Then, after Passover ended, I saw he still had a little Matzoh in his office, and I asked if I could have some more. Take it all he said, I wouldn’t feed that junk to a dog.
Comment #6 April 14th, 2025 at 1:06 pm
No outraged response from me. But I can offer you my thoughts/opinions on your list:
Point #1: I agree — pancakes are a delicious breakfast (or brunch or lunch) with maple syrup (blueberries are optional).
Point #3: Can’t really argue here, based on testimony from a friend-of-a-friend who lives in Austin.
Point #4: As a cat-lover, completely agree.
Point #6: Completely agree with you.
Point #7: Was “The Big Bang Theory” really that maligned? It’s not my cup of tea, but I certainly knew a lot of people who really liked that show.
Completely agree with Points #8-#13 on your list.
Point #14: While I’m generally sympathetic to building high-speed rail, I’m not entirely certain about the feasibility of building a specific high-speed rail between San Francisco and LA from either a cost or economic perspective. There is a similar debate currently taking place in Canada about the prospect of building a high-speed rail between Toronto & Montreal.
Point #15: I agree with you, with the caveat that the US already have clean energy (wind, solar, nuclear). The issue as I see it is about scaling this energy nationwide.
Point #16: I both agree/disagree with you. I agree that the great questions of philosophy are worthy of respect. At the same time, these questions have fostered much pseudoscientific beliefs, and thus see a critical need to be skeptical and vigilant.
Comment #7 April 14th, 2025 at 1:22 pm
Noah Motion #1: Fixed, so you can be outraged that you have nothing left to be outraged about. 😀
Comment #8 April 14th, 2025 at 1:22 pm
The Simpsons used to be hilarious, but it’s been a shadow of its former self since somewhere around season 10.
Comment #9 April 14th, 2025 at 1:25 pm
matt #5: Of course one gets sick of matzo after a week, but is that different from how one would get sick of anything after a week?
FWIW, I do sometimes eat it at other times of year (and not just in the form of matzo balls or fried matzo), although probably not for a couple months after Passover.
Comment #10 April 14th, 2025 at 1:38 pm
1. Blueberries can quickly become mealy and ruin anything they’re in, beware!
7. Young Sheldon actually got decent reviews. Big Bang Theory is justly maligned, IMO, but then again I think all sitcoms are bad.
14. In today’s information environment, Democrats doing anything positive, such as building high speed rail in California, would be instantly turned into a huge democratic failure. Such a narrative would not need to actually make sense to be successful at changing public opinion. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done for other reasons, though!
18. Depends on what it means to be enlightened, of course! And if you tell me that you can’t know unless you first become enlightened then I say phooey!
Comment #11 April 14th, 2025 at 1:50 pm
Chag sameach.
Not adding any of my own outrage-inducing opinions, just want to chime in that “what is your most conservative opinion and what is your most liberal or progressive opinion” is a fun game that (sample size of 1) got people discussing controversial ideas quite calmly and respectfully at a Shabbat dinner table.
Comment #12 April 14th, 2025 at 1:53 pm
Regarding
5) I just rewatched Spielberg’s LINCOLN (2012). It was really great to see that even though just as many people in those days were crazy lunatics, they were all somewhat agreeing on what the rules of the game were and following them.
Scott,
I have the perfect movie recommendation for you and your kids – the 2009 anime SUMMER WARS. It has references to Shor’s algorithm, encryption, Mathematics Olympiads, AI alignment… (it’s available on Amazon streaming)
https://youtu.be/IsLwVoZqEjk
Comment #13 April 14th, 2025 at 1:54 pm
Whoa, you take it from worldly pleasures, scientific glory, slowly all the way to philosophy, metaphysical, transcending time and speaking to the eternal …and just when we are floating, come crashing back to reality along with the bird. We humans have found a way to escape the banality of life 🙂
Comment #14 April 14th, 2025 at 2:20 pm
Regarding 16) and 18), I recommend the (short) book from Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969) called
“Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects”
She was one of the very first Westerners to be admitted into Lahsa (Tibet) in the 1920s, when it was still closed to foreigners.
Comment #15 April 14th, 2025 at 2:52 pm
You can make birds less likely to do that by attaching opaque stickers to the inside of the window. Some people cut out silhouettes of birds and tape them up. It’s a great way to work together as a family.
Comment #16 April 14th, 2025 at 2:56 pm
“how does consciousness relate to the physical world” as a philosophical problem is solved by panpsychism – when you talk about (mysterious properties of) consciousness you talk about existence.
Comment #17 April 14th, 2025 at 3:15 pm
7. RAAAAGE
10. Yes. I have a personal reason for agreeing with this. Treatment is going well so far.
12. Yes again, and the reason I write this comment in the first place. This is my favorite post on the topic, which some readers here might enjoy too: https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/the-weird-nerd-comes-with-trade-offs
We could start by other faculty NOT THREATENING TO DEPORT PEOPLE LIKE HER (note, this was well before the current administration), and creating a career path for people who want to do science, not faculty politics.
We might also have more luck if we got rid of the stupid parts of DEI, but not in the way it’s being done now that hits sensible and stupid ideas alike. This is probably one of my own most rage-inducing beliefs.
13. See 12.
Comment #18 April 14th, 2025 at 4:03 pm
Regarding point 8: add “and with respect to the natural environment”. There are *not* too many people on this planet, but, we are also not respecting our environment enough, which ultimately will lead to a collapse of our population. Curiously, animals in the wild also seem not to care about their environment, but their numbers are much more constrained by the environment. Our species seems to be the one that is least constrained by their natural environment, but in the end, we all still need clean-enough water, clean-enough air, and healthy-enough food. All these three are guaranteed by a giant machine called nature, and we are damaging this machine too much.
Comment #19 April 14th, 2025 at 5:19 pm
Signer #16
”when you talk about (mysterious properties of) consciousness you talk about existence”
exactly – great talk from Alan Watts about this
https://youtu.be/qeUQokDwEvk
Comment #20 April 14th, 2025 at 5:27 pm
Concerning 17, today I watched/read Basic ZX-calculus for students and professionals. I wanted to understand how Bob Coecke encoded both classical and quantum information in the same diagram-calculus, by using doubled diagrams for one of them. But I didn’t want to have to read his 900+ pages book Picturing Quantum Processes.
Why? Both non-deterministic computation and quantum computation give rise to a compact closed category. But how can you interpret a compact closed category? For non-deterministic computation, it is basically a collection of equations, local ones, or rather locally verifiable ones, where “local” can take on many meanings, depending on context. Obviously, such equations don’t have a preferred time-direction, and also no preferred “causality direction”.
For the quantum computation case, one also gets randomness into the mix (which has its own interpretation challenges), but overall the computational complexity is rather smaller compared to non-deterministic computation.
Those thoughts left me with the feeling that I don’t actually understand quantum information, but in a very concrete way. And that it may be possible that some category theorists already do understand quantum information, in that specific concrete way. So I decided that it would be a good idea to try to understand where Bob Coecke arrived at with his stuff. I think I understand it better now, but I still don’t understand quantum information.
Comment #21 April 14th, 2025 at 7:18 pm
3. I would kill for central Texas weather in the spring year round. Unfortunately, I do think harsh cold has a long-term positive impact for the societies that have to deal with it.
7. I certainly thought that BBT was entertaining enough to have on in the background (or to watch in reels) but I think the humor is exceedingly repetitive (this is not helped by the laugh-track) and the characters are very weak. Young Sheldon is, to me, much better. The non-Sheldon characters are interesting and compelling and seeing the development of the main character is I think compelling to a certain kind of person. I generally think that they got better at writing sit-coms in the second go at it.
9. I think this is possible (very likely even) but I am still taking seriously the possibility that we accidentally wipe ourselves out as the biggest event of (the epsilon ball around (since I would be dead)) my lifetime. If progress stalls at the lower-end, the possible end of the post-WWII order could end up being more signficant.
13. Yeah, this is largely fair. It certainly seems like depending on the unexpectedly fragile government support for this purpose (especially when so much economic value and productivity is tied to this) is doomed to fail. Corporations have their problems too and kind of setup we had with OpenAI seems to have failed very close to its inception (only a decade or so). Maybe, we can replicate some of what the economists accomplished with a very independent government agency?
14. Indeed. But frankly the failure of getting truly high-speed rail in the Northeast corridor seems to me like an even greater failure. Every other developed country has figured this out better than the US and seen huge dividends. Tying back to the last point, it really seems like the ability to just have cogent experts make non-particularly-partisan decisions is a serious systems design failure in the design of the government. Of course, such systems have their own disadvantages but they mostly seem fixable.
15. Seconded
16. Totally agreed. Part of the reasons I think its regrettable that philosophy people are not exposed to say real-proof based math in their education. Similarly, I wish STEM people had to take rigorous philosophy classes which in part detail why their fields even exist in the first place.
17. Good ground for this one. I frankly think that the unreasonable effectiveness of thought vectors for language models is very mind-blowing in terms of how we as conscious beings are situated in the physical world. I definitely thought the reasonable thing was “You can’t cram the meaning of a whole %&!$ing sentence into a single $&!*ing vector!” and the fact that it seems like you can is extremely surprising.
18. What would it mean to achieve Enlightenment? That would certainly affect the calculation. I would have reorient the whole way I think because I find myself having the same thoughts and I would have to judge it as irrational.
Comment #22 April 14th, 2025 at 8:54 pm
On #18, I am reminded of a quote from the little-known Franklin Merrell-Wolff. After studying mathematics and philosophy at Stanford and Harvard (and then briefly teaching math at Stanford), he left academia and purportedly attained enlightenment in the mountains. He had this to say on the issue:
> My final word on this particular subject is: I sought a Goal the existence of which I had become convinced was highly probable. I succeeded in finding this Goal, and now I KNOW, and can also say to all others: “IT IS ABSOLUTELY WORTH ANYTHING THAT IT MAY COST, AND IMMEASURABLY MORE.”
Comment #23 April 14th, 2025 at 9:23 pm
AP #22: Do we have anything other than his say-so to go on? Any new mathematical or philosophical insights that others could evaluate, without needing to go into the mountains themselves?
Comment #24 April 14th, 2025 at 11:06 pm
Nico #21 on point 16:
Do “rigorous” philosophy classes exist? What do they consist of?
A few philosophical questions, like Zeno Paradox #1 (Achilles and the tortoise), can be rigorously treated (finite sum for an infinite series). Good topic for everyone.
But how about topics like existance, consciousness, morality, etc? To my (admittedly shallow) knowledge, the world’s philosophers have expended huge energy on this stuff and made zero progress so far, perhaps because there no answers exist to be found. How can you treat this stuff rigorously?
I think a lot of the STEM world is not impressed with philsophy because they regard it as mostly arguing about questions with no answers.
Comment #25 April 14th, 2025 at 11:14 pm
7. The sequel to Young Sheldon (Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage) is also quite good so far! Definitely recommend it if you haven’t checked it out yet.
18. One might argue that your observation itself indicates enlightenment ;). There was an article in the Guardian a few months ago about Grothendieck’s later life with some details that were new to me (https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/aug/31/alexander-grothendieck
-huawei-ai-artificial-intelligence). It does not seem like his foray into spiritual matters was particularly fruitful or enviable.
Comment #26 April 15th, 2025 at 12:23 am
Raoul Ohio #24.
Ignoring first off the fact that analytic philosophy is a thing which can be treated mathematically and rigorously, I think there’s great value in even treating the stuff with no conclusion well. While we cannot expect mathematical rigor perse, you can definitely make a philosophy class with words more rigorous by looking at where arguments breakdown and exposing faults and possible problems.
I found some of the best classes I took at the University of Chicago to be the SOSC classes where you had to read works of historical signficance in the evolution of thought. If I had my way, I would make every scientist read Popper, Kuhn, and Shapin at the very least (and I fucking hate Kuhn). A lot of the arguments against say String Theory are built on Popperian grounds and I think its especially important for scientists in the making to learn about philosophical grounds for their fields. I would’ve also heavily appreciated (and I did when it was the case) if my professors who veered into philosophy had done a proof in their life (or as Ian Hacking described in one of my more memorable readings: “People who have never experienced a mathematical proof (the feeling of, as Wittgenstein put it, ‘‘the hardness of the logical must’’) seldom grasp what Platonistic mathematicians are on about.”)
Comment #27 April 15th, 2025 at 1:17 am
scott writes:
“A friend and I were discussing whether there’s anything I could possibly say, on this blog, in 2025, that wouldn’t provoke an outraged reaction from my commenters. ”
based on the comments on the blog entry, the answer appears to be no.
btw – maple syrup tastes awful.
Comment #28 April 15th, 2025 at 4:03 am
Nico #26: Thanks, that gives me a better understanding of the concept. Arguements against string theory are a good example of the role of philosophy.
For an advanced philosophy exercise in a similar vein, anyone up for arguements for and against inflation theory?
For those who came in late, here is inflation theory in a nutshell: One must deal with the fact that all guesses about how the universe started fail to evolve to what we see now. How about a big fudge factor (how big? dunno — million, billion, trillion, …, whatever you want to make things work) to magically take “that” to “this” in infinitesimal time?
This scheme was run up the flagpole, and a lot of prople saluted, This is as it should be — however implausible, it is a cool idea that might have some bearing on reality, worth considering, at least as a trivial solution. And one can debate if inflation ties up more loose ends than it creates — what fun!
I find it bizarre that such a “this changes everything” theory was instantly accepted as a settled fact. A few cries of “wait a minute — WTF?” are heard in the wilderness, but inflation has become mainstream wisdom in cosmology.
Any philosophers up for considering this chapter in physics?
Comment #29 April 15th, 2025 at 4:38 am
20: We had a similar problem at work in a long (50m+) glass corridor. There are now stickers of raptors on several of the windows. Anecdotally it works. And it has two side effects: folks see birds when walking to meetings, and think we are doing one small thing to make the world a better place.
17: Can we please add the Church-Turing thesis, arguably the most physically impactful of all theoretical discoveries? And why the overlap of computability and quantum physics?
Do you remember in the days of the the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Program interest in using Combinators as machine language for functional and logic languages? (Alice – the Imperial one, not the CERN ALICE – and the GMD machine). I keep wondering about the implications of a quantum virtual machine using an extension of lambda calculus. ZX Calculus and its friends look interesting.
Comment #30 April 15th, 2025 at 7:33 am
Raoul Ohio #24
Long-time lurker, first time poster here. Also, for what it’s worth, I teach philosophy at a top US program. I’m genuinely struck by the comments people sometimes make about philosophy on this blog (and others like it). It’s as if the the public conception of philosophy is stuck in the 19th century, and the work of people like David Lewis, Saul Kripke, or Robert Stalnaker (among others), doesn’t exist. And this despite the fact that each of those people made significant contributions—*technical* contributions—that have spilled over into the natural and social sciences. (Lewis, for instance, invented the concept of a signalling game, which is now a mainstay in game theory.)
In any case, I can recommend no better antidote for this sort of take on philosophy than Tim Williamson’s recent review of Phil Kitcher’s book,
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BTPlCPQ5FmAGCARgbT0yC6MVU_iqirbx/view?pli=1
or alternatively, his essay “Must Do Better”:
https://media.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/assets/pdf_file/0012/1317/Must_Do_Better.pdf
Along similar lines, Nico #21 and Nico #26: It’s just wrong to say that “philosophy people are not exposed to say real-proof based math in their education”. *Every* self-respecting graduate program in philosophy includes at least one proof-based math course (usually mathematical logic), which even history-of-philosophy people are expected to take. (How much they grasp is another question.) Moreover, students working in more “theoretical” areas of philosophy are these days often required to take many additional proof-based courses. In the areas I work in, for example, a real analysis course is a minimum first step. Moreover, I actually *teach* a mixed undergrad/grad formal methods course regularly, in which we cover basic ideas in formal semantics, modal logic, probability theory, and decision and game theory, with an eye to learning proof-techniques along the way.
What’s more, even a cursory look at work being done by *current* philosophers, in a variety of areas, reveals the level of mathematical sophisticiation that’s now expected. For example, Jake Nebel in ethics:
https://jakenebel.com/
Richard Pettigrew in formal epistemology:
https://richardpettigrew.com/research/papers-year-abstract/
Or Andrew Bacon in metaphysics:
https://andrew-bacon.github.io/
Indeed, Scott’s own UT colleague, Harvey Lederman, is making important technical contributions in a variety of these areas:
https://www.harveylederman.com/
OK, rant over…
Comment #31 April 15th, 2025 at 8:34 am
“how does consciousness relate to the physical world?”
I’m so fascinated with the hard problem of consciousness and all its associated concepts (qualia, materialism, panpsychism, mind-body problem…) that I would love to see a (long) post of yours about your views. If you could add your thoughts about AI into this, I wouldn’t ask for anything else.
Comment #32 April 15th, 2025 at 9:01 am
Wow, this guy hates gefilte fish sliced thick and layered between a couple matzot with so much horseradish your mother tells you it’s going to be too spicy for you. I’m outraged.
Comment #33 April 15th, 2025 at 10:56 am
2. Can confirm, matzah + butter + a sprinkling of salt is good enough for eating year-round, or at least until you run out of leftover matzah.
Regarding no pancakes this week; I’m kind of new here—I didn’t realize you’re religious to some extent?
Comment #34 April 15th, 2025 at 11:14 am
CM #30
Very fair. Even good undergrad departments force some proof-based logic (though indeed I have found that this often does not sink in very deep). I certainly never thought that the cutting-edge work in analytic philosophy was not mathematically sophisticated.
I guess my problem comes more from historians of philosophy/related fields which draw heavily upon philosophy. In my time here I came across two history and philosophy of science people who were studying North Whitehead and Wittgenstein while having never done any proof-based math in their lives. To be clear, I thought they were both great academics but I can’t help but having wished that they had more experience with the value of axiomatic systems for reasoning.
Comment #35 April 15th, 2025 at 11:15 am
4- Indeed.
7- TBB Theor is the BEST! (Sheldon forever)
8- %100
9- My hope is that SupremeAI will one day write itself into atoms and transfer into the entire universe and the next cycle of the universe, becoming the most magnificent God. But after seeing the Evil in the functioning of the current universe, I couldn’t ignore the possibility that it might have been done by an Evil AI. That’s why I had ChatGPT translate this—I didn’t trust GROK that much.
10- Pro Research for Immortality!
12- Pro Katalin because Aaronson is.
13- Well then, that means Sabine Hossenfelder is right to be angry… so, pro-Sabine it is.
15- Read Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s phenomenal new book Abundance,
16- Keep following her blog; Aaronson may say otherwise, but he’ll definitely write posts about those questions.
18,19- Yeap, this is why you love this guy.
Comment #36 April 15th, 2025 at 11:23 am
Pterodactyl #33: I participate in Jewish culture. It has only the most tenuous connection to my scientific and philosophical views (such as I have) about the origin of the universe.
Comment #37 April 15th, 2025 at 11:25 am
HasH #35: Yes, Sabine is right that there are serious problems with the way science is funded.
Alas, as recent events powerfully remind us, the fact that someone correctly recognizes the existence of a problem, doesn’t imply that they have any solutions better than “burn it all down and hope something better magically emerges from the ashes.”
Comment #38 April 15th, 2025 at 11:40 am
Regarding birds and windows, you can put some deflectors on the glass so birds don’t mistake the reflections from the glass as an open space where they can fly.
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
No need to retire to a mountaintop.
Comment #39 April 15th, 2025 at 11:56 am
Scott #36: Yeah, that was my impression. I just would’ve thought participating in that way would usually look like yes eating matzah, but not not eating pancakes (besides for, like, during the seder). But I don’t actually know what people commonly do.
Comment #40 April 15th, 2025 at 12:56 pm
Nico # 34. You say: “I guess my problem comes more from historians of philosophy/related fields which draw heavily upon philosophy. In my time here I came across two history and philosophy of science people who were studying North Whitehead and Wittgenstein while having never done any proof-based math in their lives. To be clear, I thought they were both great academics but I can’t help but having wished that they had more experience with the value of axiomatic systems for reasoning.”
Now that is something I can sympathize with!
Comment #41 April 15th, 2025 at 2:17 pm
Raoul Ohio #28: Apart from its empirical value in explaining how to get a homogeneous universe on large scales, another reason that inflation was adopted, is that it doesn’t involve any new laws. Inflation is just what you get in general relativity, when you have a scalar field rolling towards a minimum value. In my opinion the most elegant synthesis would be “Higgs inflation” – the Higgs field is also the inflaton. One might even suppose a relationship between the mystery of the Higgs boson’s fine-tuning to a metastable vacuum state, and what I believe is called the “eta problem” of how an inflaton could remain light at very high energies… Anyway, one is allowed to doubt, but there really is plenty to like about inflation.
Comment #42 April 15th, 2025 at 2:33 pm
Dear Peter #4 ,
1. I went through the latest video at your YouTube channel, viz., a presentation of your ideas to PG students (rather than to other researchers). [BTW, your maths background is pretty much evident from this video.]
Even earlier, I had tried to follow what your ideas were about, which was, ummm… may be… some 2 — 3 years ago. This was subsequent to your comments at Dr. Roger Schlafly’s personal blog. I didn’t have much success in getting a sense of your ideas, back then.
However, talking of your latest video, I must say that your ideas certainly did begin to make sense to me, at least in a (very) broad way.
2. Of course, there are certain theoretical issues which I noticed, even while watching your video right in the midst of many other ongoing things. [I had to take two pauses.] These issues are, of course, best left for private communication (should you wish to enter into any).
3. All in all, however, it is my definite judgment that, for the purposes of deposition of your papers at arXiv, your latest two papers therein do fit in the [quant-ph] category.
Best and all,
–Ajit
Comment #43 April 16th, 2025 at 5:00 am
Here is some outraged reaction regarding Thompson & Klein’s book you mention: I am furious at Ezra Klein for perpetuating the myth that Biden was too old to be president.
Biden was a good president, a nice decent dignified thoughtful intelligent person with a life-long stutter/disability who had unimaginable horrible personal family tragedy several times. Most of us can not fathom such things in our personal lives. Despite that, he continued working as a public servant. Whenever friends of mine would claim he was too old, I would do all I could to convince them otherwise. Biden somehow got us out of the pandemic, helped people with the American rescue plan (people say it created inflation but without this stimulus it arguably would have been much worse, a nuance almost never considered, not to mention that inflation was international), supported workers and unions, got us out of the GWBush Afghanistan disaster finally after 20 years (and there was no good way to get out of that, Biden took such a hit for that), put effort into chips and technology (important for the future economy), helped to invest in clean energy attempting to delay, if not thwart (albeit unfortunately not eliminate) climate change. He also faced an unsolvable problem dealing with the Gaza war, trying to straddle a volumeless middle ground between two extreme extremes, and despite that so many anti-Israel individuals lobbed the ludicrous “genocide” accusation at him. Yet he remained dignified, calm, and composed, he never took offense, and he kept trying to build bridges over the roughest of waters. I could go on, you can look up the many online sources of Biden’s accomplishments, all of which were obvious in the early days of 2024.
Enter Ezra Klein, someone who as early as Feb 2024 greatly perpetuated the “too-old” meme, and gave soft intellectual cover and credence to those who thought he was too old. He provided a pide-piper like pathway to those who have natural curiosity, but who were lead down the path to absurdity. Klein, along with his NYTs perch, has enormous influence considering both his direct readership and the writers who read him and indirectly reflect him. Klein never deeply considered that Biden’s replacement would not win. The debate you say? Have you ever tried reading that debate rather than watching it? If not, try it, and see who sounds totally incoherent. Why not perpetuate that? Even now, Klein continues to badmouth Biden (consider his recent April 13th piece in the NYTs, about “Biden’s Team Wishes They’d Moved So Much Faster”). Has he not anything better to say? Abundance? While I have not read the book, I listened to a few of the podcasts, and to me it sounds like soft Republicanism. Regardless, Biden is gone now, and we have the present disaster, the greatest threat to organized human existence ever (to quote Chomsky), something for which neither Klein, nor the NYTs, has ever acknowledged being even the tiniest bit responsible for.
Comment #44 April 16th, 2025 at 5:52 am
Nobody Important #43: I agree that Biden had many admirable qualities, should have won on the merits (of course!), and doesn’t receive sufficient credit for reviving the economy after the pandemic (an economy that Trump, who ran on this, is ironically about to destroy with tariffs). Still, he left the race only after it became obvious that he was not going to win. And had he left earlier and given time for an open primary, the Democrats’ chances would surely have been better. I don’t see how any of this is Ezra Klein’s fault. And even if it was, it wouldn’t make his book less good. And what you call “soft Republican,” is what others would call “mainstream Democrat” (and certainly, what should be mainstream Democrat if Democrats want to win elections).
Comment #45 April 16th, 2025 at 5:30 pm
2. reminds me of this love letter on Serious Eats: https://www.seriouseats.com/a-love-letter-to-matzo-8636284
Comment #46 April 17th, 2025 at 8:13 am
20: Why do you feel sad for the bird that died, but not sad for the animals that you kill for food? (as per #2).
Comment #47 April 17th, 2025 at 8:43 am
TS #46: Now you understand why I said “as little sense as it might make from a utilitarian standpoint.”
Comment #48 April 17th, 2025 at 11:33 am
You may be knowledgeable in these, given your Indian acquaintances, nevertheless-
#16: You may need to check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccidananda (Sat + Chit + Ananda). Turns out the three questions perhaps have the same answer.
@18: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma_yoga, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Yogas. (Or, your assumption about the exclusivity of mountaintops is false.)
Comment #49 April 17th, 2025 at 2:11 pm
Scott: On 18, fwiw, this is what the Buddha had to say about whether enlightenment is worth it: suppose some one made you an offer where you get stabbed by 100 spears morning, noon and night daily for a 100 years, but at the end you are guaranteed to be enlightened – the Buddha said wise person should immediately take up that offer.
Comment #50 April 17th, 2025 at 8:44 pm
Dissecting outrage mechanics makes you an accomplice in the very system you critique—your awareness doesn’t exempt you from participation.
Comment #51 April 18th, 2025 at 4:18 am
Commenting on 16, I think it is important to note that questions such as “how does consciousness relate to the physical world” are inherently vague, since the concept of consciousness is not precisely delineated. To proceed in inquiry, it would be necessary to provide a more precise formulation of the problem. Now some people (e.g. Dan Dennett) offer formulations that enable actual scientific progress, but most philosophers (think of the venerable John Searle) like to use these concepts in a way which if followed any kind of scientific progress will be blocked (see the last minutes of this debate.). Or in the case of ethics one could say that to understand the nature of ethics you have to do two things: First, understand the human nature and second, understand the history of ethics. This is something some people (e.g. Phillip Kitcher) do, but most philosophers don’t like to do it in this way. I believe the sneer of most scientists at these questions may actually come from the particular way philosophers approach them and not the questions themselves.
Comment #52 April 18th, 2025 at 11:14 am
A wise person once said:
“As far as I can tell, [the mind-body problem is] outside the scope of science—in the specific sense that even if someone were hypothetically to solve it, there’d be no way to communicate the solution to anyone else.”
Enlightenment is about “solving” (or at least resolving) the mind-body problem in a satisfying way; albeit one that cannot be communicated. So the very fact that you cannot objectively verify it might be evidence that it is authentic!
FMW himself says:
“How do you communicate the truth… when the only tools you have to work with are… ‘lies’?”
I realize this is not much to go on, but that is the nature of this beast. In fact, the closer one gets to enlightenment, the more obvious it becomes that the very word “enlightenment” is nothing but a token for “that which is most ‘worth it’,” rendering your question tautological.
I’m not sure any of this is helpful, but there you go.
Comment #53 April 19th, 2025 at 1:43 am
(fyi “fred #50” is not me)
There’s never an “it” without a “no-it”, the two can’t exist independently, they’re the two sides of the same coin, get rid of one and the other one disappears.
At the most fundamental level of physics, it’s true about space (often referred to as a void, a nothing) and shape. There’s no space without shapes, and there’s no shapes without space, and one could say that space creates shapes and shapes create space.
Or a spherical mirror reflects the whole universe (from the point of view of the position of the mirror), except for itself and its inaccessible center core, which is a void in the reflection since a void/nothing has no image by definition – imagine that you put such two spherical mirrors next to one another, reflecting the universe from their point of view, including what the other sphere is reflecting.
Consciousness is similar: whatever it is that is doing the “witnessing of the world” is not included in perceptions and we call it the unconscious. The unconscious is the flip side of the conscious, and we think of it as a nothing or a void, but it’s actually the most fundamental thing we are, but an inaccessible mystery.
Comment #54 April 19th, 2025 at 2:23 am
fred #50
“Dissecting outrage mechanics makes you an accomplice in the very system you critique—your awareness doesn’t exempt you from participation.”
Fundamentally, we can never isolate observer from what’s being observed, and since everything in the universe is connected to everything else, everything participates in everything else, and awareness is just one form of participation.
And when a system tries to account for itself, the best we can do is building levels of self-referencing observations:
– outrage mechanics is level 0
– dissecting outrage mechanics is level 1
– your sentence that critiques the dissecting of outrage mechanics is level 2
– my post here is level 3
– your answer will be level 4
– etc
Comment #55 April 22nd, 2025 at 1:38 am
Without getting into the debate about the substance, I don’t think you could possibly claim that number 12 is NOT rage inducing. Surely you concede that there IS a lot of rage against MRNA vaccines. In fact I would suggest there has never been a medicine more divisive in human history.
Literally they caused the Canadian border to be shut down for days because people were so enraged about it. They probably were the main reason Trump got elected due to his endorsement of RFK Jr.
On the other hand, blueberry pancakes are great.
Comment #56 April 22nd, 2025 at 2:15 am
On the topic of blueberry pancakes, I have some suggestions.
First, pancakes are INCREDIBLE with the following sauce: maple syrup and melted butter in roughly equal proportions, mixed with a dash of sea salt to taste. The butter and maple syrup combine to give you a texture similar to the Aunt Jemima processed crap, but with real maple syrup which has a complex and delicious flavor. The sea salt brings out the butter and sweet flavors in a way that is absolutely addictive. (I saw this on a youtube video interviewing a guy who ran a very popular brunch restaurant and this was their secret recipe).
Second, put a nub of lemon curd from Trader Joe’s on the blueberry pancakes and your taste buds will not be disappointed.
Third, a key trick to pancakes batter is to NOT STIR too much. Stir just enough to get every bit moisten and then stop and let the batter sit for five to ten minutes.
Comment #57 April 22nd, 2025 at 11:59 am
About 16 and 17, you’ve probably thought previously about applying ideas from MW to the early universe/inflation/quantum cosmology. Do you think there’s anything promising there beyond what’s already known? In MW, is there any significance to very early branches of the universe’s wavefunction, compared to say the low-weight branches that spawn routinely all around us? Do they all just come equipped with their own spacetimes and never interact again, end of story? I’ve been obsessed with the thought that not only does inflation resemble quantum decoherence, but so does expansion itself.
Comment #58 April 26th, 2025 at 1:44 pm
Dear Scott,
As much as I’m with you on #1, it’s #19 (second sentence) where we line up the most.
And alas I regret to report that it’s also #19 (second sentence) that most risks bringing you the ire of the current world.
Please stay strong w.r.t. daily (and yearly) vicissitudes…
Comment #59 May 1st, 2025 at 9:21 pm
This is in no way numbered in reference to your numbers. It’s numbered sequentially in the order I addressed things that spoke to me or stood out as important.
1. “For the most part, people should be free to live lives of their choosing, as long as they’re not harming others.” …..
“For the most part” is in dire, visceral conflict with the idea of being “free to live pending no harm done to others”. It’s that pesky “for the most part” with which the entirety of human slavery is built upon. The moment you introduce any form of a compromise, you rape and tarnish every last morsal of the purity implied by natural law.
2. “Enlightenment” is not what you think it is. In fact, there’s nothing more painful than true enlightenment. You get to spend every day for the rest of your life knowing exactly what is wrong with people, the simple shift they need to do cognitively in order to exponentially shift the way things have been going and then you realize the pure manic refusal to exhibit any knowledge of self that the average human is shackled to. At this point, you will distract yourself with spreading your message the best you can but all you will get in return is poverty, ridicule, vitriol, hatred and pushback. You will become quite confused and you will realize that sitting in the forest meditating is really the only other thing there is to do (if you don’t want to self-exit, that is.) Most people go insane and end up in jail, drug addiction, schizophrenia or whatever long before this point, though. There’s no bigger joke than the concept of ”enlightenment.”
3. Which brings me to my next point. If you want to start becoming enlightened, you’re going to have to defeat the first level of I Against I. That is this… You exist in an abstraction of reality called “western civilization.” Everything about it is largely a fiction courtesy of Hollywood. There is no left, there is no right… Those things are abstractions of the same exact thing — slavery. Government IS slavery, picking sides IS slavery, compromise and acceptance of the lesser of two evils or lowest common denomination are tools of slavery. And your life is largely controlled through the Hegelian dialectic. There’s a reason the bourgeoise loved Hegel’s ideas. I suggest studying them and then looking around outside.
Ideas are just ideas, there’s nothing wrong with taking a dip in them, so bask in them long enough so as to let the searing rage you feel in the pit of your stomach right now subside.
That’s just the soil that has been seething with pestilence for so long that no truly new ideas are allowed in its biome. Once it’s clean, then try challenging some things you thought you believed. I’ve uprooted and rearranged everything I thought I knew about the world about 100 times and will likely do it 100 more. Everything is in constant flux, so should your perception of reality be.
Intellectuals are in the most insidious of places. Those in academia are in even dire straits. I’ve got a unique perspective as someone who has published in peer review, yet have no organizational associations, no funding, no masters. What I see, sadly, looks quite like a cult. As the pile of ___ paper your blog is referencing shows, it’s not hard to get published when you’re able to give the password. But, for someone like me, I’ve found it quite oppressive and bewildering trying to engage in legitimate science. It seems all they want to do is write about psychobabble, it’ infected every journal rather than sequestering its self to just the journal of psychobabble. If I have to feel bad for being a white person one more fogsmothering time, I’m going to change my name to the ”N” word in protest. (We must joke, when left no chpice.)
That’s just some genuine feedback from someone with no dog in any fight, no pony at any show and, for damn sure, no horse in any race. Do with it what you may, I hope it causes a positive feedback loop and your mindloop skips to a new rhythm because that’s more glorious than enlightenment.
Cest La Vie. Off to the library. =P
Comment #60 August 4th, 2025 at 3:12 am
Getting here quite late, but I’ll get outraged in the wrong direction – the matzoh is cardboard because you’re eating bad matzoh!
The problem is that the good stuff is the expensive handmade matzoh, which can sell for $25+/lb, and which you can’t easily buy outside of either Israel, or the NY area. The good stuff comes in airtight silver ziplock bags, and is very crunchy and thin – and breaks into tons of pieces when shipped, so it’s not worth ordering. For example, for bulk sales of some of the good US brands, see: https://matzah.biz/ (Not sure how they ship it, but it seems silly to me.)
And to be fair, growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, I was also completely unaware of this until I got married and my wife introduced me to actually good matzoh; she grew up eating “Pupa Tzeilim” matzah, which was hand-delivered by her family from Brooklyn to Silver Spring, MD. And the first year we were married, we flew to Atlanta and she brought a box from NYC to my parents’ place, and even holding it carefully the whole time as a carry-on, only about half the matzoh stayed in one piece – but it ruined my ability to eat the cheap matzah.