Fight Fiercely
Last week I visited Harvard and MIT, and as advertised in my last post, gave the Yip Lecture at Harvard on the subject “How Much Math Is Knowable?” The visit was hosted by Harvard’s wonderful Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications (CMSA), directed by my former UT Austin colleague Dan Freed. Thanks so much to everyone at CMSA for the visit.
And good news! You can now watch my lecture on YouTube here:
I’m told it was one of my better performances. As always, I strongly recommend watching at 2x speed.
I opened the lecture by saying that, while obviously it would always be an honor to give the Yip Lecture at Harvard, it’s especially an honor right now, as the rest of American academia looks to Harvard to defend the value of our entire enterprise. I urged Harvard to “fight fiercely,” in the words of the Tom Lehrer song.
I wasn’t just fishing for applause; I meant it. It’s crucial for people to understand that, in its total war against universities, MAGA has now lost, not merely the anti-Israel leftists, but also most conservatives, classical liberals, Zionists, etc. with any intellectual scruples whatsoever. To my mind, this opens up the possibility for a broad, nonpartisan response, highlighting everything universities (yes, even Harvard 😂) do for our civilization that’s worth defending.
For three days in my old hometown of Cambridge, MA, I met back-to-back with friends and colleagues old and new. Almost to a person, they were terrified about whether they’ll be able to keep doing science as their funding gets decimated, but especially terrified for anyone who they cared about on visas and green cards. International scholars can now be handcuffed, deported, and even placed in indefinite confinement for pretty much any reason—including long-ago speeding tickets—or no reason at all. The resulting fear has paralyzed, in a matter of months, an American scientific juggernaut that took a century to build.
A few of my colleagues personally knew Rümeysa Öztürk, the Turkish student at Tufts who currently sits in prison for coauthoring an editorial for her student newspaper advocating the boycott of Israel. I of course disagree with what Öztürk wrote … and that is completely irrelevant to my moral demand that she go free. Even supposing the government had much more on her than this one editorial, still the proper response would seem to be a deportation notice—“either contest our evidence in court, or else get on the next flight back to Turkey”—rather than grabbing Öztürk off the street and sending her to indefinite detention in Louisiana. It’s impossible to imagine any university worth attending where the students live in constant fear of imprisonment for the civil expression of opinions.
To help calibrate where things stand right now, here’s the individual you might expect to be most on board with a crackdown on antisemitism at Harvard:
Jason Rubenstein, the executive director of Harvard Hillel, said that the school is in the midst of a long — and long-overdue — reckoning with antisemitism, and that [President] Garber has taken important steps to address the problem. Methodical federal civil rights oversight could play a constructive role in that reform, he said. “But the government’s current, fast-paced assault against Harvard – shuttering apolitical, life-saving research; targeting the university’s tax-exempt status; and threatening all student visas … is neither deliberate nor methodical, and its disregard for the necessities of negotiation and due process threatens the bulwarks of institutional independence and the rule of law that undergird our shared freedoms.”
Meanwhile, as the storm clouds over American academia continue to darken, I’ll just continue to write what I think about everything, because what else can I do?
Last night, alas, I lost yet another left-wing academic friend, the fourth or fifth I’ve lost since October 7. For while I was ready to take a ferocious public stand against the current US government, for the survival and independence of our universities, and for free speech and due process for foreign students, this friend regarded all that as insufficient. He demanded that I also clear the tentifada movement of any charge of antisemitism. For, as he patiently explained to me (while worrying that I wouldn’t grasp the point), while the protesters may have technically violated university rules, disrupted education, created a hostile environment in the sense of Title VI antidiscrimination law in ways that would be obvious were we discussing any other targeted minority, etc. etc., still, the only thing that matters morally is that the protesters represent “the powerless,” whereas Zionist Jews like me represent “the powerful.” So, I told this former friend to go fuck himself. Too harsh? Maybe if he hadn’t been Jewish himself, I could’ve forgiven him for letting the world’s oldest conspiracy theory colonize his brain.
For me, the deep significance of in-person visits, including my recent trip to Harvard, is that they reassure me of the preponderance of sanity within my little world—and thereby of my own sanity. Online, every single day I feel isolated and embattled: pressed in on one side by MAGA forces who claim to care about antisemitism, but then turn out to want the destruction of science, universities, free speech, international exchange, due process of law, and everything else that’s made the modern world less than fully horrible; and on the other side, by leftists who say they stand with me for science and academic freedom and civil rights and everything else that’s good, but then add that the struggle needs to continue until the downfall of the scheming, moneyed Zionists and the liberation of Palestine from river to sea.
When I travel to universities to give talks, though, I meet one sane, reasonable human being after another. Almost to a person, they acknowledge the reality of antisemitism, ideological monoculture, bureaucracy, spiraling costs, and many other problems at universities—and they care about universities enough to want to fix those problems, rather than gleefully nuking the universities from orbit as MAGA is doing. Mostly, though, people just want me to sign Quantum Computing Since Democritus, or tell me how much they like this blog, or ask questions about quantum algorithms or the Busy Beaver function. Which is fine too, and which you can do in the comments.
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Comment #1 April 24th, 2025 at 7:03 am
“He demanded that I also clear the tentifada movement of any charge of antisemitism.”
So the “logic” of his demand is that powerful Jewish people are required to absolve the less powerful of antisemitism even if they actually are antisemitic in thought and action? Yeah, that deserves a pretty harsh response. That or laughter.
Comment #2 April 24th, 2025 at 7:10 am
Hang in there Scott. Our country needs you.
rob
Comment #3 April 24th, 2025 at 8:40 am
[…] encouraged by Scott Aaronson’s latest post, telling Harvard to “Fight Fiercely” against the Trump Administration’s illegal […]
Comment #4 April 24th, 2025 at 8:52 am
I really appreciate what you are doing and the fact that you and others continue to provide an island of sanity in this world gone mad …
Comment #5 April 24th, 2025 at 8:54 am
Everyone be brave and hang in there — Civilization is worth fighting for.
Keep up the good work Scott.
Comment #6 April 24th, 2025 at 10:08 am
Scott, always appreciate your perspective and insight, but in this case I need to respectfully express a dissent on one point. You quote Jason Rubenstein who says, “But the government’s current, fast-paced assault against Harvard … is neither deliberate nor methodical, and its disregard for the necessities of negotiation and due process…”
I agree that it is all that, but I also think this approach is, to some degree, absolutely necessary. Consider the “deliberate, methodical, negotiated” response of how Harvard has dealt with the rampant anti-semitism on their campuses. First we got the circus of their president insisting to Congress on the need for nuance when students call for the genocide of Jews. Then we got a promise for a task force to study the problem. It’s been over a year since then and it still has not produced anything meaningful. And this is just in their assessment of the problem; it’s not even getting into dealing with fixing the problem!
These institutions have overwhelmingly demonstrated that “deliberate, methodical, negotiated” responses are just tactics for them to preserve the status quo that serves their partisan interests. They have sadly squandered their decades long hard-earned credibility in the name of ideology and they deserve to be fully taken to task for the way they’ve betrayed the trust of the public. Some overstepping of the norms is appropriate, because it was their own blatant betrayal of their mandate that created these problems in the first place. You don’t get to flagrantly ignore the rules to serve your interests and then insist on the rules being adhered to when your chickens come home to roost.
Comment #7 April 24th, 2025 at 10:21 am
The Hedyot #6: A “deliberate, methodical” response to campus antisemitism, with a credible threat to withhold funding from universities that failed to take seriously their Title VI obligations, but also clarity that funding would continue for universities that did cooperate … well, the trouble is that that was never tried! We just leapt immediately from letting the tumor of antisemitism grow and fester, to randomly hacking at the patient with a machete, without ever pausing to try a scalpel or radiation or chemotherapy or anything else that might have cured the patient.
Comment #8 April 24th, 2025 at 10:38 am
Are you seriously arguing that after 18 months of stalling and ignoring an obvious problem that puts them in breach of federal regulations, which they are well aware has earned them the ire of the administration, they deserve the equivalent of a parent telling them, “For the last time, I’m telling you kids, if you don’t behave… you’re really going to get it… this time, I’m serious…”
Comment #9 April 24th, 2025 at 10:42 am
Hi Scott,
How about Israel’s treatment of West Bank and the people there? They have not taken up arms, and look at how the Israeli society treats them. Don’t they deserve a nation state and freedom? Should not this be the reason for boycotting Israel? How about boycotting both Hamas and Israel? Should we not treat Israel the same way we treat Russia and used to treat South Africa?
Comment #10 April 24th, 2025 at 11:58 am
The Hedyot #8:
Are you seriously arguing that after 18 months of stalling and ignoring an obvious problem that puts them in breach of federal regulations, which they are well aware has earned them the ire of the administration, they deserve the equivalent of a parent telling them, “For the last time, I’m telling you kids, if you don’t behave… you’re really going to get it… this time, I’m serious…”
Look, after it lost funding, Columbia’s administration quickly agreed to every single action item on the Columbia antisemitism task force’s wish list. For that it was denounced as quislings, sellouts, etc. by Columbia’s left-wing students and faculty. And yet, rather than help show everyone how a cooperative approach could pay dividends, the government decided to say to Columbia, “haha screw you! we have no plans to restore your funding anyway!”
Which allowed the left-wing students and faculty to crow: “YOU SEE?!?!? WE TOLD YOU SO!! This was never about antisemitism at all, only ever about fascism!”
How much more dramatic a demonstration could you possibly ask for that, yes, there was an intermediate approach that was worth trying and left untried?
Comment #11 April 24th, 2025 at 12:17 pm
Place d’Italie #9: What would make you think a discussion of the West Bank could be relevant to a thread about climate and funding at US universities?
In any case, my position has always been clear:
– I want a Palestinian state in the West Bank, as well as a Palestinian state in Gaza. They can either be the same state or separate ones.
– I despise the “Greater Israel” messianic settlers, and the need for a vast IDF force to defend them.
– I still wish I could go back in time and make Arafat accept the Camp David accord, or make Abbas accept any of the later statehood proposals that were on the table. If only they had, there’d be a Palestinian state in the West Bank right now. Arafat’s refusal of the deal, his launching of the Second Intifada instead, was the event that shattered the Israeli left and led to the rise of the execrable Netanyahu.
– There’s still a lot of terrorism against Israel originating from the West Bank, much of it with Iranian funding. Sometimes the Palestinian Authority cracks down on this terrorism, which is both practice for eventual statehood and a demonstration that it can handle statehood. Other times, however, the PA can’t or won’t crack down (or fears an uprising if it does so), which means that the IDF needs to do it.
– Long-term, the only possible path to peace involves a change to education and culture, causing a critical mass of ordinary people (not just the leaders) on both sides to favor two-state coexistence over conquest, expulsion, extermination, and martyrdom.
Comment #12 April 24th, 2025 at 12:21 pm
Place d’Italie #9: It’s just not true that West Bankers haven’t taken up arms. While the PLO has generally renounced terrorism and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades are no longer active, the West Bank is home to the Jenin Brigades, the Lion’s Den, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and so on. The only reason that some Islamists have not taken over is that the Israeli occupation is propping up the sclerotic and useless PA. There is a lot of security cooperation between Israel and the PA though at this point the PA has become so useless that Israel is just going into Jenin to produce more terrorists. Unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank (the PLO doesn’t really accept the two state solution, verbal commitments notwithstanding, see my “website”) would produce another Gaza, and inevitably a huge war which means more dead Israelis and even more dead Palestinians. A Palestinian state, without first having a decades-long process of deradicalization of the whole Palestinian society where they learn to accept Israel’s existence, is a recipe for another Gaza. A disaster for everyone involved. Hard pass.
Comment #13 April 24th, 2025 at 12:44 pm
Scott #10:
I agree that the admin reneging on sincere actions taken to address their criticisms is problematic and only incentivizes further non-cooperation. But that’s a criticism of how the Trump admin is behaving. It doesn’t mean the schools deserve our gracious consideration to be worked with in a deliberate and careful manner. They have flagrantly squandered their credibility, stalling, excusing and ignoring all these problems for over a year, and don’t deserve further time and accommodations to do what they should have been doing from the very beginning. (And would have zealously done if it had been happening to any other minority group.)
Comment #14 April 24th, 2025 at 12:55 pm
It’s good to see this sort of messed-up morality stated explicitly, so that people can see that yes, that really is how these people think! Usually it’s left implicit, and sufficiently conflated with other things that it’s not the only explanation. But sometimes it’s made explicit!
Comment #15 April 24th, 2025 at 1:05 pm
Hard to argue with anyone who blames the Palestinians for not accepting statehood proposals.
Here’s a question I posed to Chatgpt:
Why was 2000 Camp David proposal not accepted by Arafat?
Chatgpt:
Yasser Arafat did not accept the 2000 Camp David proposal primarily because it did not meet core Palestinian demands on several critical issues. Here’s a breakdown of why:
—
1. East Jerusalem
What was offered: Limited Palestinian control over parts of East Jerusalem (mainly Arab neighborhoods), with Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif.
Why Arafat objected: The Palestinians sought sovereignty over all of East Jerusalem, including the Old City and especially the Haram al-Sharif, which they see as the capital of a future Palestinian state. Israeli sovereignty over any part of the Haram was unacceptable.
—
2. Refugees and Right of Return
What was offered: Limited, symbolic return of a small number of Palestinian refugees, with compensation and resettlement elsewhere.
Why Arafat objected: The right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees to homes inside what is now Israel is a central Palestinian demand. Arafat believed accepting the deal would mean abandoning this right, which was politically and symbolically unacceptable.
—
3. Territorial Issues and Borders
What was offered: A Palestinian state on about 91–95% of the West Bank, plus parts of Gaza, with land swaps.
Why Arafat objected:
The proposed state would be non-contiguous, broken into separate cantons surrounded by Israeli-controlled land.
Israel would annex major settlement blocs, often including prime agricultural land and control over water resources.
Palestinians saw the offer as a fragmented state lacking full sovereignty.
—
4. Security Arrangements
What was offered: Israel demanded continued security control over key areas, borders, and airspace.
Why Arafat objected: This meant the proposed Palestinian state would not be fully sovereign—it would be under heavy Israeli surveillance and influence.
—
5. Process Concerns
Arafat felt pressured to accept an incomplete deal.
He believed final-status issues were being rushed without thorough preparation or guarantees.
Palestinians viewed it as a take-it-or-leave-it offer, rather than a negotiated agreement.
—
Arafat’s Perspective
Arafat and the PLO viewed the Camp David offer as falling short of minimum national rights, and feared accepting it would be seen as a historic capitulation. He was also under pressure from within the Palestinian political landscape not to make irreversible concessions.
—
Conclusion
Arafat didn’t reject peace—he rejected that version of it, which he believed left core issues unresolved or compromised. Critics, including President Clinton and Israeli officials, blamed Arafat for walking away without a counteroffer. Supporters argue the offer was generous by Israeli standards but insufficient from a Palestinian standpoint.
Would you like a side-by-side comparison of what each side wanted vs. what was offered?
Comment #16 April 24th, 2025 at 1:36 pm
Scott, Thanks for the video. I look forward to watching, maybe even at 1.5 speed so I have time to reflect on it. 🙂
Comment #17 April 24th, 2025 at 1:40 pm
Place d’Itale #15: Do you even understand that ChatGPT just confirmed the Israeli account of what happened (which was also President Clinton’s account)?
Issues #1, #3, and #4 were all amenable to negotiation—but of course, Arafat never gave Israel a counteroffer, or even promised a counteroffer to come at any later date.
That strongly suggests that the actual sticking point was issue #2, the “right of return,” which is really a reneging on the entire principle of the two-state solution. That principle is: Israelis (including, of course, Israeli Arabs, Bedouins, and Druze!) on this side of the line, and Palestinians (of course, completely Judenrein!) on that side of the line.
If millions of Palestinians got to move into Israel, that means that Israel-as-Jewish-state would no longer exist …
… which means that Hamas would promptly pursue its dream of killing or expelling all the Jews, and the Jews would be dependent on Palestinian leadership to stop them (!), even though it never stopped them before …
… which means that we’d be right back to the question that led to Israel’s creation in the first place, and also to the Holocaust that we commemorate today, of whether Jews have a right to exist anywhere on earth.
Or maybe, as part of any peace deal, Israel should also insist on the “right of return,” for its millions of citizens who are descended from Jews expelled from Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Yemen, and everywhere else in the Muslim world (plus compensation for all their lost property)? No, of course not; that possibility wouldn’t even occur to you. Why would it?
Comment #18 April 24th, 2025 at 1:49 pm
Place d’Itale #15
Try asking ChatGPT how likely are the Palestinians to receive a better offer in the next 50 years.
Comment #19 April 24th, 2025 at 2:06 pm
What do you think of this op-ed: https://archive.ph/cKS2X?
Comment #20 April 24th, 2025 at 2:08 pm
Sniffnoy #14:
It’s good to see this sort of messed-up morality stated explicitly, so that people can see that yes, that really is how these people think! Usually it’s left implicit, and sufficiently conflated with other things that it’s not the only explanation. But sometimes it’s made explicit!
Yes, precisely.
As it happens, the other day I also got an email from a Dutch mathematician, who wanted to engage me in a reasoned discourse about why it wasn’t at all antisemitic of him to believe that Israel should never have been created, and is a murderous terror state that ought to be dismantled now.
Despite that inauspicious beginning, our exchange started out collegially enough. But once I started walking him through the actual history of what happened—a history of which he was gobsmackingly ignorant—he suddenly came out with: even so, regardless of the Holocaust, regardless of the expulsion of the Jews from every Arab country, regardless of the Arab refusal of every partition plan, regardless of the Intifada and October 7, etc. etc. … still, right now you Jews are the ones at the top of the pyramid, therefore you need to sacrifice yourselves for the ones at the bottom of the pyramid, with whom my sympathies necessarily lie.
At moments like that, I almost feel vertigo, as I suddenly become aware that I’m staring across a moral Grand Canyon. There are no facts that I can possibly offer to bridge this canyon, no evidence or arguments. The only hope would seem to be to rewind the clock all the way back to nursery school: to the question of whether one can judge who’s right or wrong by asking “who’s on top of the pyramid.”
The Nazis, of course, made exactly the same privilege-based argument, that they were “punching up” at the successful, cosmopolitan Jews of Weimar Germany, on behalf of those on the bottom.
Anyway, these are the reflections I wanted to share this Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Please click here for a different set of Yom HaShoah reflections from the great Haviv Rettig Gur—about how, among all the early 20th-century Jewish movements, Zionism won because it alone correctly foresaw the cataclysm that was coming, and tried to save as many as it could.
Ironically, I still haven’t fully assimilated the Zionist attitude, which is to stop remonstrating, stop arguing, stop begging for permission to exist from a world half of which is never going to grant it to you. I’m working on it though! 🙂
Comment #21 April 24th, 2025 at 3:15 pm
There are as many Jews in the US as Jews in Israel, about 7.5 million in each.
So it must be somewhat comforting that Jews actually have two places to call home.
Comment #22 April 24th, 2025 at 3:57 pm
Dear Scott,
There are many terrible things Trump does. However, it’s a mistake to automatically devalue the message based on the personality of the messenger. I see so many intelligent people making this mistake; their characterization of Trump demands full of doomsday adjective and void of analysis. I think it would be very beneficial to analyze the demands that Harvard fights so fiercely; perhaps some of them actually make sense. Would you mind if we take a look?
1. A non-specific preamble about leadership.
2. Merit-based hiring; no more racist preferences; screen for plagiarism. What’s wrong with any of that? Do you want less qualified professors with the politically preferential background? Do you want plagiarism?
3. Merit-based admission. What’s wrong with that? Do you want legacy and politically motivated student accepted and the most qualified rejected?
4. Pretty much “don’t admit Hamas operatives who misinform and inflame students.” What’s wrong with that? Do you want the horrible antisemitism of Harvard, Yale, Columbia to persist?
5. Viewpoint diversity. Indeed, social sciences and humanities department turned into echo chambers where academic discourse is effectively suppress. Would it be wrong to stop screening against conservatives and to allow faculty and students express a variety of opinions?
6. Stop antisemitism; report incidents of antisemitism. What’s wrong with that? Do you want the hatred to continue?
7. Get rid of DEI. DEI is one of major reasons for much of the above trouble. DEI is openly racist and contrary to merit-based hiring and admissions.
8. Accountability for misdeeds. Is anybody offended by the proposition that Harvard “forbids the recognition and funding of, or provision of accommodations to, any student group or club that endorses or promotes criminal activity, illegal violence, or illegal
harassment”?
9. Whistleblower protection.
10. Transparency.
What’s so awful in any of these demands that Harvard should “fight fiercely”? Should it fight for the right to plagiarize? Should it fight for the right to reject Asian applicants because of their race? Should it fight to keep bashing Jewish students?
Or is this all about the principle that academia is above the law, that academic institutions can do terrible and illegal things and the State should quietly accept that and keep paying for it?
Comment #23 April 24th, 2025 at 4:12 pm
The Hedyot: what exactly do you think these universities should do that they haven’t done? I’m not sure you’ve been to these places recently, but they’ve been fairly quiet for a good while now (and to the extent that they haven’t been, universities have been cracking down from what I can tell). At this point, students who are not US citizens are naturally worried about being deported for exercising their constitutional rights to speech. But it was pretty quiet even before Trump started deporting.
Comment #24 April 24th, 2025 at 4:20 pm
Scott,
Hope this is relevant.
I’m curious how you feel about the anti-Israel protesters who are doing it, not because they bear any special animus towards Jews or Israel, but just because they want to be “edgy” or transgressive—to piss off their parents or university administrators, and generally just to be a “rebel.”
I think this is a substantial fraction of the young protesters. In particular, many of them have no knowledge of what’s actually going on in Israel or Gaza or any of the history, they just want to rebel against something.
So, would you treat these ones with kid gloves?
Comment #25 April 24th, 2025 at 4:44 pm
Peter #24: If it’s just an edgy phase that they grow out of, then look back on with embarrassment and disgust, then yes, I’m inclined to forgive. But they have to actually do the “growing out of it” part! 🙂
Comment #26 April 24th, 2025 at 4:58 pm
I see. This attitude still sounds a little harsh to me. Shouldn’t college kids be allowed to say stupid stuff when they’re figuring it out? Why should they feel guilty or disgusted about it? I mean, the majority aren’t actually hurting anyone, they’re just saying stupid stuff. Why would they need forgiveness, what have they done to you in this situation?
Comment #27 April 24th, 2025 at 5:05 pm
Peter #26: “Hey dude, can you believe I used to march around campus chanting for ‘intifada’—which means, the gruesome murder of your baby cousins and hundreds of other people who you personally know in a second Holocaust? But don’t worry bro, I never really meant it, I just said that stuff to fit in.”
“Forgiveness” seems to me like, on reflection, the right word.
Comment #28 April 24th, 2025 at 5:19 pm
Scott, honestly, that’s just not what they’re marching about. None of them are chanting “kill Jewish babies, let’s do another holocaust!” Many of them see pictures of dying Gazan babies on the news and it shocks and saddens them and that’s why they’re there. They honestly believe that Israel is comitting a genocide and mass murdering innocent people. Is that actually true? Of course not! It’s stupid! They are misinformed! They don’t know much about history. But that doesn’t mean they want to kill your family. They genuinely believe they are protesting against a genocide or an apartheid regime like south africa.
I was at one of these protests and I met a guy who literally didn’t know that Israel had anything to do with Jews. As in, his knowledge of history was so poor that he didn’t even know that Israel is connected at all with Jewish people. He just thought it was a white country killing people of color. He’s not the only one.
These are young people who don’t know much about history, but want to be on the right side of it. And they see these pictures of babies in rubble, orphaned children, Israeli soldiers shooting kids who were throwing rocks. And it makes sense they would go out and protest.
Honestly, please stop with this refrain that they want to kill your family. They don’t.
Comment #29 April 24th, 2025 at 5:20 pm
Scott #20:
Btw I’ll add that while I can hardly blame you for just telling the guy off, ideally in a public setting it might be better to respond with some thought experiments to really illustrate to onlookers the gap betwen this conception of morality and more usual ones, and challenge the other person to respond to them… maybe in a private setting too! But I’ll admit, it’s hard to know how to respond to assumptions so radically different from one’s own…
(I also can’t help but notice the collectivism in your Dutch colleague’s reply, thinking of peoples rather than persons, but since I’ve only seen that small snippet perhaps it reads differently in context.)
Comment #30 April 24th, 2025 at 5:27 pm
Michael P #22: This piece, by Tarek Masoud and Steven Pinker, explains in detail why no university worthy of the name could possibly function under the sort of regime demanded in the letter. Choice quote:
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the government seeks to impose by fiat beliefs that cannot compete on their own merits in the marketplace of ideas … Will the government-approved commission on viewpoint diversity that the Trump administration wants to erect require that vaccine opponents be appointed to the School of Public Health?
Comment #31 April 24th, 2025 at 5:34 pm
Peter #28: Yes, I understand all that! It’s the reason why forgiveness is appropriate.
Imagine, for comparison, someone who has no idea who Hitler was, who buys and wears a “Heil Hitler” t-shirt because they like the Fraktur font. Despite their lack of evil intentions, shouldn’t this person apologize once they learn better? I would apologize—if nothing else, for stupidity! 🙂
Comment #32 April 24th, 2025 at 5:44 pm
I haven’t watched the whole video yet but the beginning looks good. I have to quibble with the one slide proof of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. The complicated step in a real proof of that theorem is showing that the provability predicate can itself be coded in the theory, which in turn requires and utilizes a certain amount of arithmetic strength from the theory. The one-slide proof simply handwaves that.
For example, suppose that the theory F is Presburger arithmetic (like Peano arithmetic, but with addition only, no multiplication, like the difference between a group and a ring). It’s not so easy to see that the one-slide proof doesn’t work for Presburger arithmetic. But it can’t, because Presburger arithmetic (unlike Peano arithmetic) is decideable.
Comment #33 April 24th, 2025 at 6:30 pm
Scott #30, thank you for the reference. I’d like to review that piece here, if you permit.
After doing that below I’d like to start with a quote (mis)attributed to Aristotle:
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
“list of demands for how the University must run its internal affairs if it is to remain eligible for federal research support.”
That’s the thing: Trump doesn’t demand how H must run its internal affairs, period. He demands how H must un its internal affairs IF it is to be eligible for federal research support. And, unfortunately, there’s nothing unusual in the amount federal support being dependent on the viewpoints expressed by the academics. Some subjects such as certain fields of anthropology are basically dead because the outcome of the studies contradicted the politically correct opinions. This was always happening, although much more quietly and on behest of the Left. Political influence wasn’t limited to research; “internal affairs” were also scrutinized. Affirmative Action; expulsion of falsely accused male students by kangaroo courts; DEI – these were bureaucratically internal affairs.
“If the University were to accede to the Trump administration’s demands, it would be empowering bureaucrats in Washington to impose their own viewpoints on universities for generations to come.”
Again, this is disingenuous. DEI was imposed by the previous administration, and it’s blatantly dictating hiring and admission policies and participates in terrible things. A half of Trump letter is directed against this, against the will of Washington bureaucrats imposed on universities.
“the government seeks to impose by fiat beliefs that cannot compete on their own merits in the marketplace of ideas”
Viewpoint diversity is probably the most controversial of the demands. But again, I’d prefer viewpoint diversity over echo chamber where any viewpoint that differs even slightly from the authoritarian orthodoxy is summarily suppressed and the person who expresses it forced out. This is what VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY means: all opinions can be expressed, and the one that outcompetes wins. Once again, the authors baselessly accuse POTUS of intending to do what leftists were actually doing for decades: imposing beliefs than cannot compete on their own merits.
“Will the government-approved commission on viewpoint diversity that the Trump administration wants to erect require that vaccine opponents be appointed to the School of Public Health?”
Well, the 72 genders have already entered the School of Public Health. More importantly, even vaccine opponents enter the School of Public Health they will be outnumbered and outargued by vaccine advocates. This is what VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY means. You don’t hire exclusively one viewpoint, as H was doing for years; you hire doubt. Isn’t the existence of doubt and open discussion of different viewpoints the driving force of scientific progress?
“acknowledge the relevance and legitimacy of ideas which may have been intellectually discredited”
Such as the idea that COVID-19 originated in a lab has been discredited. This is not the point though; given ALL the ideas the chance to duke it out fairly, without censorship, is how the progress is often made.
“this University has long sought to admit only those of the highest character and intellectual caliber”
This is a blatant lie.
“our Constitution was itself birthed out of vigorous debate and has been criticized by generations of patriots”
Oh, now the authors support viewpoint diversity! Apparently vigorous debate is a good thing only when it’s in the past; trying to return it to academia is “profoundly authoritarian.”
“With the narrowest of exceptions (like incitement of imminent lawless activity), no opinion should be outlawed in a university.”
For crying out loud, how many conservative speakers were kicked out by universities? Leftist hypocrisy once again.
More importantly, neither Harvard nor Columbia nor Yale did anything to curb not only “incitement of imminent lawless activity”, but actual lawless activity, such as blocking Jews from entering Yale campus just yesterday. Since the university is either unable or (more likely) unwilling to prevent or oppose that, maybe the government should be able interfere? Since, according to the recent Harvard’s president, calling for genocide of Jewish people may not be contrary to Harvard policies, maybe the government should be able to remind Harvard what it’s policies should be?
Comment #34 April 24th, 2025 at 6:37 pm
asdf #32: You’re right of course, but by the phrase “meant to capture arithmetic,” I meant that the system had to be a candidate for Hilbert’s dream to capture all of arithmetic—which means that, at the least, it needs to be able to express statements about whether Turing machines halt. Yes, we can explicitly verify that, but a system like Presburger arithmetic that couldn’t do that wouldn’t have been a candidate anyway.
Comment #35 April 24th, 2025 at 9:16 pm
Yeah, things are not looking good. I’ve just read the following tragic story from Harvard:
“Sad: This Guy Spent $500k On Ivy League Education And All He Knows How To Do Is Chant ‘Free Palestine’
CAMBRIDGE, MA — Local man Asher Grayson, who recently graduated from Harvard with a degree in neuroscience, confessed he feels woefully unprepared to join the workforce because the only thing he knows how to do is chant “Free Palestine!”
“I’m starting to think my $500,000 of student debt wasn’t worth it because I don’t know a thing about molecular neuroscience,” said Dr. Grayson, who finally earned his PhD in 2024. “Free Palestine!”
Grayson is just one of several students who feel they’ve been failed by Ivy League universities that spent more time training them to protest Israel than helping them learn about their fields of study. Graduates in mathematics, computer science, and even gender studies reportedly know next to nothing about how to apply their degrees to a career because they only know how to shout “Free Palestine!” over and over again.
History professor Benjamin Lance dismissed concerns that his students are unprepared for a career after taking his course. “I stand by the rigorous Harvard curriculum,” he said. “Maybe my students can’t get jobs because of the Jews. Did you ever think of that?”
The labor market is oversaturated with people who call for a free Palestine while accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing, says economic expert and labor analyst Heather Dove. “They don’t know how to hold even the simplest jobs because they only know how to say ‘free Palestine’ again and again,” she said. “The lucky ones can spin it into a catchy jingle, but most of them just say the same two words repeatedly around the clock.”
“It’s really sad.”
At publishing time, Asher Grayson had updated his CV to include that he also knows how to chant “globalize the intifada.”
”
Source:
https://babylonbee.com/news/sad-this-guy-spent-500k-on-ivy-league-education-and-all-he-knows-how-to-do-is-chant-free-palestine
Comment #36 April 24th, 2025 at 10:33 pm
Theorist Israel #35: As has been pointed out many times, the people whose careers are being destroyed right now are mostly not the ones who “only know how to chant ‘Free Palestine’,” since those people never had grants in the first place. Instead they’re the physicists, mathematicians, biomedical researchers, etc. etc., most of whom hold normal geopolitical views. I realize that’s less amusing to think about.
Comment #37 April 24th, 2025 at 11:04 pm
Nice post!
Please, if you do manage to repel Trump, don’t forget how we got here. How Universities became the embodiment of cancel culture, DEI, politically motivated science, and insane kid-glove treatment of aspiring terrorists.
I know you’ll make some point about how all the professors were just about to give these admins what-for and make science about science again, until Trump became a uniting common enemy. Fair enough. Just, remember that the degradation of science from within is also evil, and also a moral emergency that needs addressing.
And I know I sound presumptuous, telling you what to do. But this is the real problem that Trump’s admin is trying to solve, and you have made it your job to stop them. If you’re going to stop them from doing it, I think that means you’ve assumed responsibility for it.
Comment #38 April 24th, 2025 at 11:44 pm
Scott #36
I don’t know if this helps, but you can think of it as analogous to the Gaza situation: ideally we would like to flood Gaza with humanitarian aid, but Hamas will just steal it, prolonging the conflict. Humanitarian aid ~ grants, stealing ~ overhead, Gaza Hamas ~ Ivy League Hamas.
Comment #39 April 25th, 2025 at 12:42 am
Scott #36: One of the lessons of the Old Testament is that if you live in a place where the people around you are doing evil and you won’t and/or can’t do anything about it, you will eventually get what’s coming to you, even if you don’t think it’s your fault. A lot of people these days want to be collectivists when it benefits them and individualists when they don’t want to take responsibility (e.g. by using Harvard’s brand for personal prestige and to attract research funding, while claiming they have nothing to do with the “kill the Jews” protests), but that’s just not how the world works.
Comment #40 April 25th, 2025 at 12:49 am
#36 Scott
From Wikipedia:
The Babylon Bee is a conservative Christian news satire website that publishes satirical articles on topics including religion, politics, current events, and public figures.
It has been obvious to me for some time that “Theorist Israel” is a right-wing troll. Has it been to you?
I ask because you did not call out his disinformation.
Comment #41 April 25th, 2025 at 12:58 am
My last word on this thread.
One can look at Chatgpt’s answer and also come out thinking that Israel was not serious about a Palestinian state. Indeed it’s continued building of settlements, destruction of Palestinian properties, and control of movements inside the territory shows that it’s not serious about having a Palestinian state.
Comment #42 April 25th, 2025 at 2:01 am
Interesting talk, I wonder if nature sometimes collapses wave functions to reduce the computational challenge of its laws.
For the rest, “fight fight fight fiercely” for what? A legal entity that sues against viewpoint diversity deserves to be called university? To receive public funds? To avoid paying taxes? To me, it looks like a no-vax refusing the medicine.
Comment #43 April 25th, 2025 at 2:35 am
Scott,
I really enjoyed your lecture and keep thinking about your argument on the 1st page; the hyper-computer performing an infinite number of calculations in finite time.
Did anyone try to figure out in some systematic way what such a hyper-computer could and could not do ?
E.g. the distinction between countable and uncountable sets would still be there …
I remember that you did some work on computation in a closed time-like loop, which is somewhat related I guess …
Comment #44 April 25th, 2025 at 4:55 am
20 years ago:
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6
” Granted, the Ivy League admissions process no longer serves its original purpose, possibly because most American Jews have become so assimilated themselves. But today, the enormous preferences given to legacies, athletes, and other students of “character” work very similarly to limit the number of Asians. To which I can only say: huzzah!
[…]
Yes, my “huzzah” was sarcastic. I apologize. People often seem to have trouble telling when I’m being sarcastic.”
Comment #45 April 25th, 2025 at 5:39 am
Declaring that some students have wasted their money and time in college based on their field of studies and/or their beliefs/opinions (when they don’t agree with ours) is a slippery slope towards people like Musk saying that universities, as a whole, are an entire waste of time anyway.
What is true is that there’s literally *nothing* one can learn in college that’s worth the price tag of 500k$… (unless maybe it gets you in an advanced lab to steal some cutting edge research process and setup a competing startup that’s gonna turn you into a billionaire)
Comment #46 April 25th, 2025 at 7:24 am
Scott, I have to ask – during faculty meetings at Harvard, away from media or the mobs, did all these people you are protecting outraged about calls for ethnic cleansing of Jews in the middle east? Did they try to protect their Jewish students (8.6% of Harvard students are Jewish)?
I mean, if the University of Mississippi would allow harassment of black students today, would it be bad to cut their funding?
What if the next Emmy Noether decides that academy is not for her if her own professors can’t be brave enough to protect her in the 21st century?
What about punishment (I mean prison) for faculty who harass their own students? Why is cutting budget the worst thing that can happen to them?
Sorry for being provocative, just trying to figure out the rules here.
Comment #47 April 25th, 2025 at 8:18 am
Not that I agree with either of those two, but I believe they do represent more and more the general non-Jewish normy American (who aren’t politicians) opinion at the moment, after 1 1/5 years of war, from the left and the right, each with their own reasons and viewpoints.
https://youtu.be/Uz-3VHRgkx0
Comment #48 April 25th, 2025 at 9:56 am
Interestingly and unsurprisingly the political discussion overshadows the scientific point in the comments… which begs to ask:
– Can the busy beaver finish ANY task while having to think of its place in society and in relation to the israel palestine conflict…
BUT a more direct scientific question:
– It seems to me like a lot of discussions ‘gravitating’ around provability and ability of humans to prove, we end up making ‘single object argument’ or single machines and also mentioning the energy use after the fact.
I am looking towards distributed cognition and entropy arguments in relation to knowledge from a different angle of reasoning but that made me wondering:
are those energy/entropy (or negentropy) questions are not already / or could be related to impossibility argument? Especially when considering the ability for a machine to experiment physics laws and not just compute with them.
Am i missing an obvious reference in the field to guide me ?
Comment #49 April 25th, 2025 at 11:01 am
Mathieu #48: I don’t entirely understand your question, but indeed — I don’t know how to discuss fundamental limits on what’s computable in our universe without bringing in the concept of energy. We need that concept to determine the Planck scale, beyond which our computer will fit inside its own Schwarzschild radius and collapse to a black hole.
And it’s true that energy is both ubiquitous in physics and slightly mysterious. If we were inventing new laws of physics from first principles, we’d very naturally have the concepts of distance, volume, time, angles, lightcones, entropy — but would we have energy (or its particular manifestation, mass)?
One way to understand energy is that, in our universe, it’s what ensures that anything that varies across space or time — anything that can encode nontrivial information — couples to gravity and is therefore limited in amount. I.e., it’s what prevents arbitrarily large amounts of information from “hiding” in arbitrarily tight spots. For more on this perspective see this post of mine.
Comment #50 April 25th, 2025 at 11:16 am
Y #46: In Title VI law in the US, which was originally meant for situations exactly like the ones you describe, there are rules for how to investigate discrimination and harassment in universities. The rules involve investigations, hearings, and eventually, funding cuts targeted at the specific groups or programs responsible for the discrimination — not the entire university. The trouble with the Trump people is that, rather than aggressively applying those rules — which I would have supported — they leapfrogged over them, ignoring the law, in order to just impose “global suffering” on everyone in elite universities, something they’d been thirsting to do for reasons having nothing to do with antisemitism.
Comment #51 April 25th, 2025 at 11:28 am
a #40: “It has been obvious to me for some time that “Theorist Israel” is a right-wing troll. Has it been to you?”
I have the impression that nasty comments from right-wing trolls on this blog are significantly reduced since Trump won the election. Either Scott got much better at spotting and moderating them, or the trolls decided to leave Scott alone, now that they got what they wanted.
Compared to those trolls, commenters like “Theorist Israel” or “Alessandro Strumia” do feel right-wing, but not really like trolls.
This indicates that Scott indeed got better at spotting what is going on, and how to react appropriately.
Comment #52 April 25th, 2025 at 11:32 am
wb #43: Yes, there’s a whole literature on “hypercomputing” in philosophy, although I dislike that literature because it completely ignores the Bekenstein bound (or anything else to do with the Planck scale), and thereby gives the misleading impression that “hypercomputers” solving the halting problem could actually work according to currently-known laws of physics.
And yes, I actually have two papers about computation with CTCs (a different idea)!
Comment #53 April 25th, 2025 at 11:34 am
Ryan Landay #39, Scott #36,
This is an odd situation indeed. Imagine a situation like this:
1. Prof A of Harvard applies for a grant to resolve a certain problem.
2. At the same time prof B of CSU Long Beach applied for a grant to resolve the same problem.
3. NSF reviews both proposals and issues the grant to prof A over prof B solely because of Harvard reputation.
4. After the revelation that Harvard is morally corrupt and its professors engage in plagiarism Trump issues the demands we are discussing.
5. Harvard rejects all the demands, including the demand to screen for plagiarism.
6. Trump freezes all the funding of Harvard research, including prof A’s grant. Because Harvard rejects the demand to screen for plagiarism, Trump orders NSF to audit similar proposals.
7. The proposals by prof A and prof B come up. Harvard reputation that tilted the scale in prof A’s favor now tilts the scale toward prof B.
8. When the dust settles prof B gets the grant.
9. Unbeknownst to prof A, all his proposals are reviewed with prejudice from now on.
I think something like this is very much possible. Tying one’s reputation to the reputation of an institution makes one’s reputation dependent on the reputation of an institution, perhaps more than you bargained for. Recall the reputation of the scientists of Nazi Germany.
Perhaps, instead of flatly rejecting Trump demands, even though most of them are very reasonable, it would be better to negotiate the most objectionable items and agree with the core? “Yes” for merit-based hiring, merit-based admission, plagiarism screening, preventing antisemitism, elimination of DEI. “No” for intrusive government oversight. “Maybe” on viewpoint diversity. Something like that.
Instead, Harvard flatly rejected everything and refused to negotiate. This righteous insistence not to budge on anything, including the clearly immoral things Harvard did, is likely to upend its reputation completely. And with that, the reputation of the “sane majority” that remained silent for years and now that Harvard doubles down the “sane majority” seems to rally behind it.
Comment #54 April 25th, 2025 at 11:39 am
a #40, fred #45
This was clearly a satirical piece, in case you haven’t realized that by now.
Comment #55 April 25th, 2025 at 12:15 pm
There’s nothing satirical about millions of US students being swamped for life in debt, made even worse by the new regime.
Comment #56 April 25th, 2025 at 12:21 pm
And so it begins
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fbi-director-says-arrested-judge-obstructing-immigration-operation-2025-04-25/
The US Marshals are under the executive branch, judges have no way to actually physically enforce anything.
Comment #57 April 25th, 2025 at 1:09 pm
Going to break from my silent-majoritarianism to say: keep fighting, Scott! I check this website for my semi-weekly dose of hope for the survival of rational political thought in the US, and expect I’m far from the only one 🙂
Comment #58 April 25th, 2025 at 2:41 pm
Anonymous Ocelot #37, Vladimir #38, Ryan Landay #39, others:
It used to be said that “the right looks for converts, while the left looks only for heretics.” And indeed, this is a central part of how we got to where we are right now, with the left purged of the morally impure but also shut out of government and reduced to screaming powerlessly as authoritarian thugs take over the US.
But it’s no longer true! Now the MAGA right, drunk on power, is also looking for heretics to purge rather than ways to expand its coalition.
The current war on universities provides a perfect example of this. So, it seems you’d like to defund and punish, not merely the far-left academics, but also the moderate leftist academics, and also the totally apolitical scientists and scholars, and also even the academics who largely agree with you (!) but who weren’t loud enough about it for your liking?
Tell me: after this glorious MAGA purge is complete, who’s going to be left to staff the research universities, who’s also competent? I can probably name most of the vocally right-wing mathematicians and physicists who’ve done good work; many of them like to comment on this blog. 😀
Look, if you really wanted to isolate the lunatic fringe within academia that goes around chanting “intifada revolution” and “death to all Zionists” and “glory to Sinwar,” the way to do that would be to build a broad coalition, taking every opportunity to reassure the vast majority of academics who don’t do such things that they have nothing to fear from you. Alas, what’s being done right now is (maximally stupidly) the exact opposite: showing even the sympathetic and neutral and apolitical that they have everything to fear. That’s why I have no choice but to fight it.
Comment #59 April 25th, 2025 at 4:45 pm
Everyone: I’ll close this thread soon, since it’s degenerating into the usual circus of ideologues from both sides screaming at me and calling me names, in comments most of which I’m choosing to leave in moderation.
But I want to try one more time to explain to our MAGA friends: for years, progressives offered those of us doing actual productive science a suboptimal but tolerable deal. The deal was:
(1) We’ll fund you, even celebrate everything you accomplish to keep the US at the forefront of civilization, so long as you “bend the knee” to an expansive DEI agenda, which ranges in its content from perfectly fine to annoying and useless to actively against your values. Also, your walk to the office might get blocked by students (not your students) covered in fake blood and screaming about evil Zionists, plausibly in violation of Title VI law.
To win scientists’ everlasting love and support, all a more conservative political movement would need to offer is:
(2) We’ll fund and appreciate you, minus that other stuff.
Instead MAGA is offering:
(3) We’ll freeze your funding, destroy your research, and deport your foreign students to Salvadoran prisons, relishing your screams of anguish.
Is it any wonder that scientists, even completely non-“woke” ones, are desperate to go back to (1)? What would you want in their situation?
Comment #60 April 25th, 2025 at 5:06 pm
Scott #59, of course, I completely agree with what you’re saying. We all want to see true science thrive in the US and around the world. However, I think people may have different views on how best to achieve this goal given the current circumstances.
Comment #61 April 25th, 2025 at 5:57 pm
Scott #59,
Funding research being based on “bending your knee” is unreasonable. If you find it acceptable why don’t you ask Harvard to bend its knee. Being dehumanized by DEI is unreasonable. Being blocked and sometimes assaulted by a pro-terrorist mob is unreasonable.
Yes, defunding legitimate research is also unreasonable. How should Harvard react to that?
Maybe Harvard should say: “Mea culpa. I will correct all the terrible things I did by bending the knee to the previous administration’s woke agenda. We are not going to do this anymore. Please restore the funding for the legitimate scientific, engineering, and medical research, and we’ll go forward together as civilized people.”
Instead, Harvard says: “We are not going to surrender our independence to conservatives (as we did for progressives, BTW). We are going to keep doing the terrible things we were doing because we are above the law. We are suing you so that you would keep paying us.”
I would expect the same behavior from a teenager though: “I can keep smoking if I want you! You are not the boss of me! Where’s my allowance?”
Back to your point, whether this would push the scientists back into their familiar salt mine, where all they had to do was to bend the knee and fudge their results to favor the prevailing ideology. Well, maybe. Or maybe they will grow the spine and tell their universities that they are tired of bending the knee. I think they should do the latter, so that when the funding is restored they would feel like human beings.
Comment #62 April 25th, 2025 at 6:54 pm
Michael P #61: Again, to date there’s not a single example of a university having its funding restored after capitulating to the right-wing government. There are only examples of universities capitulating, or offering to capitulate, and then still not having their funding restored—the “thanks” being merely never-ending new demands!
With the “progressive Deep State,” at least they actually funded the research once you bent the knee!
So, supposing your #1 priority is the survival of science, what alternative have you been given except to fight MAGA, and hope for the return of the progressive Deep State with all its flaws?
Comment #63 April 25th, 2025 at 8:26 pm
Scott #62,
I don’t really have the answer, but let’s speculate.
Trump is a businessman rather than a public servant. Benevolence is not his most striking trait, but he understands the word “contract”. Perhaps it’s possible to negotiate a clear and specific contract between universities and the federal government that would spell out the obligations of each side. The participating universities would agree to implement certain demands in that letter. The federal government agrees to restore funding and to drop the oversight demands and relax the viewpoint diversity to something mild. Something like that.
When a business gets its way without a contract it may not feel compelled to reciprocate. Trump the developer has a history of not paying for work he deemed insufficient.
On the other hand, when a business signed a contract that clearly stipulates each side’s obligations, then it’s much easier to insist that each side complies with the specific contractual terms.
Perhaps the Harvard lawsuit will end up in a contract negotiation that defines with sufficient precision what actions by Harvard would restore the funds. If this happens the other universities would follow.
An additional benefit: with contractual clarity there would be no need for anyone in academia to bend the knee to any ideology anymore.
Comment #64 April 25th, 2025 at 9:00 pm
Michael P #63: Trump, alas, is famous for stiffing contractors and otherwise reneging on agreements, among his hundreds of ugly qualities. I don’t know any solution right now, other than
(1) fighting this in court,
(2) screaming at the quislings in Congress to reclaim their power of the purse,
(3) punishing Congress in 2026, and
(4) doing everything we can to preserve science with private funding and just general scrimping until the vandals can be thrown out of office.
Comment #65 April 26th, 2025 at 3:27 am
“It used to be said that “the right looks for converts, while the left looks only for heretics.” And indeed, this is a central part of how we got to where we are right now, with the left purged of the morally impure but also shut out of government and reduced to screaming powerlessly as authoritarian thugs take over the US.
But it’s no longer true! Now the MAGA right, drunk on power, is also looking for heretics to purge rather than ways to expand its coalition.”
This is so true. It is also a consequence of wokism and extreme leftism getting too powerful to become a real threat to many people, feeding the extreme right.
And so we have come full circle that the “tragedy in one shitty act” comes to the fact that, for some of our pro-Israel commentators, you can destroy a University or take away any international students so that they no longer have to hear “free Palestine” or “Israel = murder” or something like that that makes them so embarrassed. Which is disturbing and worrisome for me. Shouldn’t there be a no crossing line for what is intented to be achieved?
Comment #66 April 26th, 2025 at 4:19 am
#54 Theorist Israel
> This was clearly a satirical piece, in case you haven’t realized that by now.
Setting aside that the Babylon Bee is not that well-known and that we live in times in which it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish satire from reality, the two sides on this issue have maximum distrust of each other, and would therefore put nothing past the other side, no matter how ridiculous. Satire which makes one side look exaggeratedly look bad will look credible to the other side under these conditions and only inflame tempers and stoke more hate.
You know this, of course, and that is why you presented this piece of satire as if it were straight news. You tried to contaminate Scott’s blog with disinformation, and now that you have been called out on it, you are trying to motte and bailey your way out of it. I call bullshit.
I realized you are a right-wing troll after I read this gem of yours:
>We now find ourselves in an extremely dangerous global situation (not just for Jews): As far as I see, parts of the Far Right openly endorse Nazism and attempts to rehabilitate Hitler, using Jews and Israel as the usual scapegoats for the world’s problems (see on X). At the same time, large parts of the Far Left are openly supportive of violent Jihad, again, making Jews and Israel their convenient scapegoat—just as 20th-century Marxists did (see Columbia for example).
So, in this context, Trump’s position should be seen as that of a mainstream centrist one.
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8717#comment-2004928
There is no context in which Trump’s position is the mainstream centrist one, and especially in the context you speak of he is precisely not mainstream centrist because “parts of the Far Right openly endorse Nazism and attempts to rehabilitate Hitler, using Jews and Israel as the usual scapegoats for the world’s problems” consist mostly of Trump supporters (!!!)
More generally, Trump is a strong contender for most extremist president in the entire history of the Nation, and particularly when it comes to this issue, he is far more extreme than anything mainstream. But you know this, of course, and that is what makes you a troll.
And now that I have explained my reasoning for the benefit of others, I am done feeding you.
Gentzen #51
> Compared to those trolls, commenters like “Theorist Israel” or “Alessandro Strumia” do feel right-wing, but not really like trolls.
Trolls come in different levels of sophistication. I think the most dangerous ones are those which are most difficult to discern as trolls, precisely because it is their nonsense which is most likely to be taken at face value. In my view, “Theorist Israel” is quite sophisticated, and that may be why you had difficulty recognizing him as a troll.
Also, as much as I find some of the expressed beliefs of Alessandro Strumia repugnant, I have no reason to doubt his sincerity, and therefore I do not think at all that he is a troll. From the writings of “Theorist Israel” it is quite obvious that he says blatant nonsense wrapped in reasonable-sounding bits, or tries to poison discourse with satire presented as straight fact, even though he knows better. He is insincere, which is the defining characteristic of a troll.
Comment #67 April 26th, 2025 at 5:27 am
But the deal (1) included falsifying and censoring science, pretending that activists were scientists, that wrong ideologies were science. So ordinary people lost trust in academia. They don’t know which people remained serious. Fighting to keep funds without addressing the problems would be another short-sighted choice.
PS: thanks for keeping the debate open.
Comment #68 April 26th, 2025 at 6:01 am
Michael P
“Trump is a businessman rather than a public servant. Benevolence is not his most striking trait, but he understands the word “contract”.”
Haha, oh my God, people like you can’t be for real…
Either
1) you must be in some nursing home in the middle of Sussex, under assisted living and on a heavy diet of experimental Alzheimer medications,
or
2) you (of course) know this is all plain bullshit and you’re enjoying trolling and wasting everyone’s time.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/06/09/donald-trump-unpaid-bills-republican-president-laswuits/85297274/
Comment #69 April 26th, 2025 at 9:44 am
Peter #28,
First, thank you for being the voice that signals we can denounce Israel’s genocide without wanting to kill Scott and his family.
As a (more-or-less with aging) leftist however, I’m more into pointing at disagreement: you think that neither the use of famine as a weapon of war, nor the rethoric of mass displacement of Gaza’s inhabitants, nor the tens of thousands of deaths, nor the massive destruction of civilian infrastructure, nor any other argument yet, allows us to accuse Israel of genocide. In fact, you qualify this idea as “of course stupid.”
I don’t really think discussing it will bring us closer on this point, so my question will be slightly different: can you imagine a dystopian future in which events would force you to reconsider your opinion? In other words: what actions by the IDF, or speeches by Israeli officials, or percentage of the Palestinian population killed or deported, or any other criteria you deem relevant, would force you to accuse Israel of genocide?
To help me understand your reasoning, it might be useful to specify if you agree that the United States and the Turks committed genocides against the First Nations and Armenians, respectively, as well as the notion of cultural genocide against the First Nations in Canada.
Comment #70 April 26th, 2025 at 11:15 am
As a techie interested in QC and a conservative (who reluctantly voted for Trump) I read your blog for latest updates in QC, but I often find your political commentary interesting and sometimes insightful. However, I don’t find your argument against the current administration, and it’s efforts to reign in anti-semitism and discrimination at the universities to be persuasive. I’m curious if you follow or read any of Christopher Rufo’s work? I ask, because I do, and I find his arguments significantly more convincing than yours. His latest piece in City Journal on Princeton explains how their current President entrenched a system of racial discrimination under the guise of “social justice”. Why should I not support the admin’s crackdown on this, along with the revocation of tax dollars? Yes, they’re taking a heavy hand, but advancing DEI and “social justice” ideology to discriminate against Asians, whites, and Jews appears to be among their most deeply held, cherished beliefs, so a battle, such as the one playing out, is unavoidable.
Comment #71 April 26th, 2025 at 11:41 am
Trump’s approval rating is low, at 42%, but it’s hardly the case that “MAGA has now lost, not merely the anti-Israel leftists, but also most conservatives, classical liberals, Zionists, etc. with any intellectual scruples whatsoever.” It’s still the only option for conservatives, classical liberals, Zionists, etc with any scruples whatsoever, and of course they will need to fight within MAGA too if they are going to get anything out of it, but the alternative was certain destruction.
People didn’t jump ship from the Democrats in large numbers because they wanted tariffs and other nonsense. They jumped ship as a matter of individual and national survival and Harvard’s recalcitrance demonstrates why they were right to do so.
Comment #72 April 26th, 2025 at 1:27 pm
Trevor #70: I don’t know if you understand the full reality of what’s happening. You like reading QC updates on this blog? Well, it looks like federally-funded QC research in the US will soon basically no longer exist.
Last week, the NSF director resigned under pressure, and now comes news that the NSF budget is going to get cut by half. People at 60 major universities might not qualify for grants at all.
This is not what it would look like if you wanted to fight antisemitism or ideological culture in an effective way. It’s what it would look like if you wanted to use those real problems of academia as a pretext to dismantle it entirely—even the hard sciences.
As for Christopher Rufo, I attended a talk he gave at UT Austin a couple years ago. He was extremely clear that, in his mind, this was total war, and if the other side wanted to use universities for left-wing indoctrination, well then his side should use them for right-wing indoctrination, and force out anyone who disagreed. I challenged him about this during the Q&A and he didn’t deviate from that line at all. I remember feeling scared at the time.
Comment #73 April 26th, 2025 at 2:06 pm
From Claude:
“Assistant
A more principled position from Scott Aaronson would acknowledge several contradictions in his current stance: “While I appreciate Harvard’s historical contributions to academic freedom, I must acknowledge that both major institutions and political factions have abandoned consistent principles in favor of selective enforcement. The trampling of due process and civil liberties for foreign students like Rümeysa Öztürk mirrors similar abuses I’ve criticized when aimed at other groups. This isn’t just a Trump administration problem but represents a broader deterioration of procedural protections that transcends partisan boundaries. I recognize that my ability to maintain academic relationships depends partly on carefully navigating between competing power structures rather than consistently applying principles. When I characterize one side as wanting to ‘nuke universities from orbit’ while treating the other’s institutional failures as mere ‘problems to fix,’ I’m engaging in precisely the kind of asymmetric analysis I criticize in others. My experience of finding ‘sane, reasonable’ people in academic settings may reflect selection bias and social pressure rather than revealing the true distribution of beliefs. The institutional frameworks that allow me to feel comfortable among colleagues might simultaneously silence perspectives outside acceptable boundaries. Rather than positioning myself as uniquely principled between two extremes, I could better serve academic freedom by acknowledging how my own institutional allegiances sometimes compromise my ability to consistently apply the principles I claim to uphold.” This would acknowledge the tensions between his stated principles and his institutional loyalties without requiring him to abandon either.
You
And if it actually was about his stated principles?
Assistant
If Scott were genuinely prioritizing his stated principles above all else, a more consistent position might look like: “I remain deeply committed to free expression, procedural justice, and academic freedom as universal principles that must be applied consistently regardless of who stands to benefit in any particular case. The detention of Rümeysa Öztürk represents a fundamental violation of due process that I would condemn regardless of her political views. Similarly, I must acknowledge that many campus speech restrictions I’ve criticized when applied to certain viewpoints have been celebrated when applied to others. This inconsistency undermines the very principles I seek to defend. While I disagree with many protesters’ positions, I cannot support administrative or legal actions against them that I would oppose if directed at viewpoints I favor. Principles mean little if they bend to accommodate our political preferences. The threat to academic freedom comes not just from external political forces but from within institutions that selectively enforce rules based on ideological alignment rather than consistent standards. When we celebrate institutional actions against viewpoints we oppose while crying foul when similar actions target allied perspectives, we undermine the very principles we claim to uphold. I worry that my own academic community has become comfortable with procedural inconsistency so long as it appears to serve preferred outcomes. Yet history shows that abandoning procedural fairness for expedient results inevitably corrupts institutions themselves. I reject the framing that requires choosing between partisan camps, each of which applies principles selectively. Instead, I will advocate for consistent application of free expression, due process, and academic freedom across all cases, even when doing so puts me at odds with institutional authorities or colleagues I otherwise respect.” This position would prioritize consistency of principles above institutional loyalties or political alliances, potentially at significant professional cost.”
Comment #74 April 26th, 2025 at 2:12 pm
New policy: from now on, blanket ban on AI-generated comments, except in narrow circumstances such as humor or commenting on AI. Otherwise, this entire comment section will degenerate into one side using Claude and ChatGPT to expand endlessly on what it already believes, versus the other side using them to do the same.
Comment #75 April 26th, 2025 at 3:44 pm
I have a disagreement with your slide “How Pervasive Is Incompleteness?” I don’t think the Continuum Hypothesis and other set-theoretic statements are the best examples of undecidable statements. A better example would be the Collatz conjecture. It’s a simple statement in number theory, but it is known that a generalized version is undecidable, and there’s no particular reason to believe that the specific instance of it usually considered is any different. More generally, any statement that is “likely to be true on probabilistic grounds” but involves sufficiently convoluted objects is probably undecidable, since most potential methods of proof wouldn’t be able to handle the complicatedness of the objects in question. For example, if you let x be the number whose continued fraction expansion consists of the nonzero digits of pi, then x is probably normal in all bases, but this is probably unprovable. (The simpler version that states that pi is normal is probably also unprovable, but it’s somewhat more plausible that someone will come up with a proof technique to deal with the complexity of pi, than with the more convoluted version.)
Comment #76 April 26th, 2025 at 4:02 pm
If P!=NP, then (P-1)!=N #75: No, if I’d had more time, I would’ve explained in the talk why that isn’t an example.
“Collatz-like statements” aren’t a single open problem; they’re an infinite family of problems. As such, they can be (and are) Turing-undecidable but not Gödel-undecidable. If you want a provably Gödel-undecidable Collatz-like statement, the only way we currently know how to do that is to encode a Turing machine that enumerates the theorems of ZFC, just like we did in our Busy Beaver project. But that will produce an enormous, wildly unnatural Collatz-like statement. Yes, it seems plausible that small, “natural” Collatz-like statements might also be independent of ZFC, but no one has shown that yet.
Comment #77 April 26th, 2025 at 4:10 pm
Anon #69:
thank you for being the voice that signals we can denounce Israel’s genocide without wanting to kill Scott and his family.
I’ll ignore that, to my knowledge, Israel is the only country ever to have been accused of “genocide” for fighting a war of survival that it didn’t start — a war that, were it serious about genocide, it could have completed in a half hour of nuclear blasts.
Yes, you can denounce the Gaza war without wanting to kill me or my family. What you can’t do is denounce Israel’s existence without, in the most direct and literal way, wanting to remove the only thing keeping many of my family members alive.
Comment #78 April 26th, 2025 at 4:39 pm
Scott #76: I think limiting the discussion to provably undecidable statements is somewhat cheating. Your slide asks “How pervasive is incompleteness?”, not “How pervasive is provable incompleteness?”. Provability is only one of the methods we have to evaluate the likelihood of mathematical statements, as you well know from e.g. your post on the reasons that P!=NP is likely true. It’s not even clear that it’s the most important such way, despite its prominence in modern mathematical practice.
Incidentally, I am not sure what you mean by “Gödel-undecidable” if you do not just mean that a statement is independent of ZFC. If a family of statements is Turing-undecidable then it implies that at least one of its members is independent of ZFC, so it’s Gödel-undecidable in that sense. That’s what I meant by saying that the family was undecidable.
Comment #79 April 26th, 2025 at 5:10 pm
If P!=NP, then (P-1)!=N #78: Yes, by Gödel-undecidable I of course meant independent of ZFC or some other strong system. We don’t actually know whether “simple” concrete arithmetical statements, like Collatz or Goldbach or the value of BB(6), are independent of ZFC. It’s a profound question, one that I discussed explicitly in my talk, but I was also trying to survey what’s known.
Comment #80 April 26th, 2025 at 5:19 pm
My favourite math lecture of the past year! Just wonderful, thank you Scott and thank you Harvard!
Comment #81 April 26th, 2025 at 5:30 pm
Thanks for posting this talk, Scott, really nice.
It seems to me that the most important detail of most of the proofs you showed is the fact that the set of all proofs is numerable. Am I correct or am I misunderstanding this? In either case, I had not thought about it before.
Regarding all the rest, it’s clear to me that we are in a not-correctly regulated negative feedback loop. Like in a house with a thermostat setting of comfortable 69F, but with a hysteresis and damping regulated in such a ugly way that we started at 65F, then the loop cranked heating up to 75F, at which point AC kicked it and brought it to 60F, and then the heating brought it to 80F and counting. Unless the feedback loop is adjusted we’ll end bad. I can’t tell if it’d be burning or freezing, but it’ll be hell.
Comment #82 April 26th, 2025 at 5:44 pm
Scott #79: I haven’t gotten that far in your talk yet, maybe you did discuss it explicitly. We are probably reaching a point of diminishing returns in this conversation, but just to reiterate my main points are:
1. We know (have proven) that some instance of the generalized Collatz conjecture is undecidable. This is a simple undecidable statement, it only fails to be concrete because we don’t know which instance is undecidable.
2. We have strong reason to believe that certain simple concrete conjectures such as the one I mentioned about the digits of x being normal are (true but) undecidable. Whether you want to call that “knowing” seems to me to be somewhat subjective, though of course I agree they haven’t been proven.
Comment #83 April 26th, 2025 at 6:22 pm
Scott #72: Having survived multiple corporate crises, I know from experience that things always look worse from the inside. It seems to me because of the rapid pace of change, there is a massive amount of panic and “worst case scenario” prediction.
I think it’s extraordinarily unlikely that “federally-funded QC research in the US will soon basically no longer exist.” Your post prompted me to look at the NSF and budget cuts. According to CNN:
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“The federal agency announced earlier this month that it would cancel hundreds of grants totaling more than $230 million. The terminations included — but were not limited to — research related to “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and misinformation/disinformation,” according to information released by the NSF.
. . .
The canceled grants included those titled with phrases such as “Racial Equity in STEM,” “Antiracist Teacher Leadership” and “Advancing Gender Equity in Computing.”
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I strongly support these cuts. Under a Kamala administration the encroachment of woke DEI ideology into the sciences would have accelerated consuming even more of the federal research budget. I think Trump is trying to reverse this but using a hatchet rather than a scalpel, again generating confusion and panic. Regarding a 50% budget cut, I’m doubtful that will happen either, though if it does that would be unfortunate. BUT the federal government has been running an annual deficit of $1.5 – $1.8 trillion. Spending must get under control, and massive budget cuts across the board are likely inevitable.
Regardless of your feelings for Rufo, I would still recommend following him on X/Twitter or reading his articles in the City Journal. Why? Because he wields influence with the President. So if you disagree with the current administration, it will at least give you a clearer perspective on their motivations, rather than attributing them to malice.
Comment #84 April 26th, 2025 at 6:50 pm
Del #81: Yes, the set of proofs is denumerable. This is simply because any proof is a finite string of symbols over a finite alphabet—if it weren’t, we wouldn’t be able to read and discuss proofs, or (e.g.) send them over the Internet!
Comment #85 April 26th, 2025 at 6:54 pm
If P!=NP, then (P-1)!=N #82: In math, there’s a sense of “knowing” that isn’t very subjective at all: namely, having a proof! 🙂
And I’d say we currently have no idea whether (for example) the statement that π is normal is independent of ZFC, or whether it has a proof after all. Why shouldn’t it? After all, someone could’ve guessed a century ago, with nearly equal justification, that (e.g.) Fermat’s Last Theorem or the Poincare or Kepler Conjectures or the Four-Color Theorem would turn out to be independent of ZFC.
Comment #86 April 26th, 2025 at 6:58 pm
Trevor #83: Your information is badly outdated. The news from this week is that Trump wants to cut the NSF by 55%, which you obviously can’t get by eliminating only “woke DEI” stuff. Already, hundreds of grants have been axed because the proposals contained sentences like “We conjecture the following isomperimetric inequality…” or “The gut microbiome contains remarkable diversity…” and they literally just did an uncomprehending keyword search. This is no way to run a science agency.
Comment #87 April 26th, 2025 at 7:47 pm
Scott#84
Let’s assume for a moment that the set of proofs is not numerable. I don’t know exactly how that could be but let’s speculate that it could be something like the set of the real (irrational) numbers compared to the rational ones. Let’s speculate that the proofs we have been dealing so far are just a numerable approximation to “the real deal” like the rational numbers are to the irrational ones. Wild speculation, I know, but bear with me.
Do you have a sense if those proofs would fall apart in that circumstance, or if the numerability was just a technicality to make them easier but not really a critical need? In my naive, amateur-ish look (I’m a physicist, not a mathematician) they all seem to fail, but what do you think?
What a non-numerable set of proofs could look like? How about attempting the same thing we have done with the irrational numbers? One option would be to allow the proofs to contain irrational numbers themselves. Those could be as either a non-finite (actually non-numerable) alphabet, or as giving the proof an infinite length by needing to specify all the infinite “random” digits of the irrational number. That seems too simple for somebody not having thought about it already, yet it appears really to make the set of proofs non-numerable like the irrational numbers it contains! What am I missing?
One other option would be to define some proof “operations” and their inverse (similar to some sort of arithmetic) which transforms one proof into another (as it appears to me you have done for that 8000 case but I might be wrong here). And perhaps one of such of these “operations” (or more likely their inverse) include something like the square root….
PS: I can’t believe what I just wrote, but I can’t find an obvious fallacy either!
Comment #88 April 26th, 2025 at 7:51 pm
DeI #87: Yes, the whole situation would change then. There’s even a branch of logic where one does consider infinitary proofs, of which there can be nondenumerably many. The trouble is that an infinitary proof can no longer actually be manipulated by us, finite beings constrained by the laws of physics—precisely the subject of my talk!