On hope
The comments on my previous post, on recent AI breakthroughs in solving Erdös problems and beyond, must’ve set some sort of record for the number of separate reasons commenters offered me to despair about the future of humanity. All this in a post that I saw as relatively nerdy and anodyne, goring few oxen, when I clicked “Publish”!
According to some persistent commenters, the only reason why I wrote about recent AI-enabled math breakthroughs is that I’m a shameless shill for the AI companies, my loud public criticisms of those companies being nothing more than a cynical smokescreen. Except that I’m also a laughable dupe of the AI companies.
See, AI, despite all appearances to the contrary, has not solved the Erdös unit distance problem or any other important math problems at all. It’s merely produced vast amounts of garbage via brute-force search, and then human mathematicians, sifting through the digital garbage pile, found some things they could call “proofs.” Except also, those human mathematicians aren’t even real mathematicians! They’re merely Hungarian combinatorialists, the kind obsessed with trivial, uninteresting Erdös problems, which it stands to reason that AI can now solve. AI will never touch the truly deep, creative parts of math, epitomized by Grothendieck-style algebraic geometry.
(When I relayed this to a world-leading algebraic geometer of my acquaintance, he laughed and said that everyone has to tell themselves whatever it takes to cope with the situation. He himself has been using LLMs in his research, and while they can’t yet write his papers for him, he expects them to improve very rapidly.)
When pressed, my commenters made it explicit: Timothy Gowers, the Fields Medalist who told his fellow mathematicians that he hopes they’re sitting down before he broke the news about the Erdös distance problem, is not a real mathematician, just a combinatorial puzzle-solver. Paul Erdös himself was not a real mathematician either.
Oh, and also, I’m a genocidal Judeofascist Zionist. That entered the comments as well, with the pretext being that I had shared a GPT-written story about ancient Israelites.
(Note: For every comment that I allowed to appear in the thread, assume as usual that there are many worse ones that I didn’t.)
Does anyone wonder why I blog so much less than I used to? Seeing what humanity has to offer, as reflected in my comment section, I feel like maybe we should take our chances with our future AI overlords. Except that some of my comments are—ironically, given their content—likely to be AI-generated as well.
These days friend after friend of mine, colleague after colleague, acquaintance after acquaintance is becoming a multimillionaire or even a billionaire from startup equity. Meanwhile, I’ve scrupulously abstained from all of that.
Why? Well, probably the single biggest reason has been Shtetl-Optimized. I’ve zealously sought to protect my “neutrality” and “objectivity” as a commentator, on this free (and even ad-free) public forum—the one where I try every week to reason with anonymous trolls with “proton.me” email addresses who show up to call me a hack and a shill and a baby-killer and a dunce. Ironically, the actual billionaires who I know hardly ever get called those sorts of names, mostly because they don’t offer the world a huge attack surface like I do. Or if they occasionally do get called them, they don’t care.
On reflection, all the commenters calling me a dunce have a point. When one looks at how I chose to spend my life, versus how all these billionaires did, I am kind of a moron.
And yet I titled this post “On Hope.” In a situation like the present, one needs to find hope wherever I can. And right now, I’m choosing to find it in this open letter, which has been signed by over 1,250 professors at the University of California. Let me quote the beginning of it:
To the UC Regents, UCOP, Academic Senate leadership, and the people of California:
We write as University of California mathematics faculty, joined by faculty from other STEM disciplines. UC has long served students from every background and has been a powerful engine of social mobility for the people of California. That public trust must be protected for future generations. Today, UC’s mission is at risk. To preserve that mission:
We call for the reinstatement of the SAT/ACT mathematics requirement for applicants to STEM majors beginning with the 2027 admissions cycle, alongside STEM faculty oversight of readiness standards and admissions practices affecting those majors.
Over the past five years, we have seen a widening divergence in mathematical preparation levels within the same classroom. This trend indicates that current admissions practices do not provide a sufficiently reliable check on mathematical readiness for STEM majors. The UC San Diego Senate–Administration Workgroup on Admissions report documents this crisis in stark terms: in the last five years, the number of students whose mathematics skills fall below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold; moreover, 70% of those students fall below middle school levels, reaching roughly one in twelve members of the entering cohort. These findings are corroborated by data across our campuses…
Everywhere one looks right now, and on every part of the political spectrum, doofuses and blankfaces strut across the earth triumphantly. Yet there remain pockets of sanity. What reading this open letter told me is that the University of California STEM faculty is one of them.
With enough such pockets, I could live a perfectly reasonable rest of my life, from now until my natural death (or until AI changes all our lives beyond recognition), regardless of who shows up in 3 … 2 … 1 … with a “proton.me” email address to confidently tell me otherwise.
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Comment #1 June 2nd, 2026 at 2:02 pm
… and so just seconds before being vaporized the last surviving human being turned to Mr. Jupiter Brain and said “I still think I’m smarter than you”.
John Clark
Comment #2 June 2nd, 2026 at 2:12 pm
> Except that some of my comments are—ironically, given their content—likely to be AI-generated as well.
I see those em dashes XD
Comment #3 June 2nd, 2026 at 2:16 pm
The “problems” referenced in the .pdf border on ridiculous. Not as trivial as Hungarian Combinatorics though. What is next, literature majors not being able to form a single sentence? The only thing that bothered me was mixed fractions. Haven’t seen these monstrosities since the last ice age.
Comment #4 June 2nd, 2026 at 2:27 pm
Yes, I think there is reason to be hopeful, because this letter has gained traction in both traditional and social media.
At the same time, we should not underestimate the institutional resistance. In 2019–20, the UC Academic Senate produced a 227-page report examining UC’s use of standardized testing in admissions. The report found that SAT/ACT scores added predictive value beyond high school GPA and recommended against moving to a test-optional or test-blind policy.
https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/committees/sttf/sttf-report.pdf
Those faculty recommendations were ultimately overridden. In May 2020, the UC Regents voted to suspend the SAT/ACT requirement and phase out the use of those tests in admissions. In the years since, many of the report’s concerns have, unfortunately, been borne out.
Comment #5 June 2nd, 2026 at 2:33 pm
Noli pati a scelestis opprimi. The comments are more about the commentators, not you. Keep up the good work and the chin.
Comment #6 June 2nd, 2026 at 2:43 pm
James Bowie #5
Adding Latin to the mix? You devil you! 🙂
Comment #7 June 2nd, 2026 at 2:50 pm
Related: https://leidendeclaration.ai
> Among researchers, artificial intelligence has produced a wide range of reactions: enthusiasm for its potential to yield new discoveries; intimidation by the pace of developments; indifference to these rapid changes; and concern for the implications, both for mathematics and in wider society.
Comment #8 June 2nd, 2026 at 3:00 pm
sttf #4: Yes, you’re right, the UC faculty said the same thing six years ago, and then Janet Napolitano overruled them, earning her place in the annals of blankfacedness forever.
But the faculty aren’t powerless here. They can say: regardless of what the rest of the system does, we will continue to teach and grade as we see fit, unless and until we’re fired for it (which will be hard for those of us with tenure). We will not go along with the charade that students know calculus if they can’t solve 6+?=9.
In any case, my main interest here was not so much in the outcome, as in whether or not the UC STEM faculty themselves have been cowed. The fact that they haven’t been gives me more courage in my own life.
Comment #9 June 2nd, 2026 at 3:44 pm
What’s wrong with a proton.me email address? I’ve been a happy Proton customer for 5 years. Made the switch after google forced one too many features I never asked for into my inbox.
Comment #10 June 2nd, 2026 at 3:56 pm
Tom H #9: Oh, nothing’s wrong with it in principle! In practice, however, I’ve sadly found email addresses from these anonymizing services to be extremely well-correlated with nasty, trollish, and abusive comments, to the point where, when I see “proton.me” or something similar, I now sharply inhale and assume a vile troll until the evidence shows otherwise.
Comment #11 June 2nd, 2026 at 4:30 pm
Sorry Scott, I forgot to send a supportive comment on your last post when I saw the expected storm of uncharitable reactions.
For what it’s worth, I really enjoy your blog and above all your honesty and independence. You are one of the few people I trust in matters of quantum computing or AI. And trust I think is becoming more and more important as the internet becomes flooded with scammers, AI assisted or not. I could say so under every post but I feel it would be boring or sycophantic.
Take care of you.
Comment #12 June 2nd, 2026 at 4:44 pm
It’s obvious at this point the mental gymnastics of comments are copium. I’m sympathetic though. The alternative is grim. I don’t have a blog so deniers don’t bother me. What does bother me is the inconsistency between the how authorities talk about an AGI future and the empirical data.
The data is that more compute improves intelligence on every dimension exponentially. We won’t stop scaling. Your other post had Boaz Barak weigh in saying relevance is in the eye of the beholder, and he expects people to be the beholder. You then said your kids will always be relevant to you. Those statements and infinite intelligence don’t make sense together unless the infinite intelligence/weilder of it allows such (and that has nothing to do with your character or his)
You’ve written enough about brains and physics to know we don’t have free will. We’re just dominoes. A sufficiently advanced ASI can puppets us by determining what dominoes sequence makes us believe whatever it wants us to believe.
Even if the ASI is corrigible, and humans control it, eventually someone will succumb to the temptation of power and control us with more power than people playing the Sims. So I understand the cope.
Comment #13 June 2nd, 2026 at 4:53 pm
Julien #11: Thank you so much. I will never, ever tire of hearing from real people like you who really appreciate what I do here.
Comment #14 June 2nd, 2026 at 4:54 pm
Inspired by comment #91 on your previous post, I want to add here some of the positivity more common in your in person post-lecture meetings! As a fledgling quantum PhD student, I too love this blog, and very much respect the effort (and patience) that goes into it. The appreciators are a much larger group than the haters, but unfortunately as you know the outraged reader seems to have more impetus to engage online.
On the off chance I’m lucky enough to have my comment included, I would love to hear your take on overlapping qubits and dimension testing! I am working on cryptographic connections to black hole radiation decoding (downstream of [HH13], your 2016 improvements, [Brakerski22], etc), and by collaborating with Dr. Cao and his group ran into overlapping qubits as another potential escape hatch avoiding the firewall paradox (related to https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.02673, though their paper is still in preparation).
This scares me! If this is an elegant firewall-extinguisher (without complementarity, though in a toy model), might it constitute a good reason to think that qubits in our reality fundamentally DO overlap (even without noise)!? Are the quacks religiously defending the ECTT (as in point #3 of https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=124) on less slippery ground than they had any right to believe? I’m sure I’m overreacting, that there are no fundamental obstacles to an industry-relevant implementation of Shor’s, and tomorrow in the shower I’ll realize my fears were silly and will be embarrassed of this comment.
Comment #15 June 2nd, 2026 at 5:16 pm
This is great news! A always aspired to perhaps someday be 1/10th the mathematician that Gowers is, but if he is 0% mathematician, that makes it a lot easier!
Comment #16 June 2nd, 2026 at 5:21 pm
Anon #12,
“The alternative is grim.”
Not necessarily. The future is not set. As I said alluded to in a previous post, the invention of warp drive might result in extinction for our species. But I for one would be absolutely elated to live to see such an invention in my lifetime. I find it very similar with getting to watch in real time with the ongoing invention of superintelligence!
Comment #17 June 2nd, 2026 at 7:19 pm
Adam Treat I’m glad it’s thrilling for you. Whenever someone posts something like that I do wonder, is there a minimum number of years you’d like to live before seeing ASI destroy humanity? Is 5 enough for you? How many years for children? How can people morally send their kids to school knowing they’ll never get to use that knowledge? Do you think Greg Brockman or Donald Trump should choose how long a perosn lives and how much joy they are allowed to experience?
Comment #18 June 2nd, 2026 at 8:07 pm
Adam Treat I didn’t mean for that to be a personal attack. Admittedly I am just at a loss for anyone looking forward to ASI with any sort of human lens.
Brain are particles. They follow particles physics. A sufficiently powerful ASI will be able to manipulate the brain with literal mind control. Any assumption, even about emotions as things play out, doesn’t hold anymore. ASI can make you love seeing people suffer, hate seeing your children, etc. Death is miles from the worst outcome.
Comment #19 June 2nd, 2026 at 8:30 pm
Anon #17, #18,
You are predicting the future and then getting depressed about your predictions. That’s a sad state of affairs for you, but the good news is your depression is a result of your own case of Dunning-Kruger with respect for your ability to predict the future. You simply *don’t have any clue* about what the consequences of superintelligence will have on the future for you or for humanity writ large.
Your anxiety isn’t for the future it is for the very real uncertainty you are feeling right now. Your inability to deal with that uncertainty is masquerading as certainty of the doomsday future. Learn to deal with uncertainty and you too can feel better!
Comment #20 June 2nd, 2026 at 9:47 pm
Adam Treat I hear the point you’re making, but I think it’s still overlooking clear evidence. Of course I can’t predict precise ramifications of super intelligence. But we can look at empirical data. And as Scott noted in is last post with math, we are clearly at the point where if you think AI won’t matter something, the onus is on the deniers.
Again, brains are just a configuration of particles. Theres no reason to think something like actual mind control is off the table. It’s clear that humans are just automatons and they can be predicted. So sure I don’t know what will happen, but we have every reason to expect technology powerful enough to remove our agency and manipulate us like puppets. And I know I don’t want a world with that tech.
Comment #21 June 3rd, 2026 at 1:02 am
Adam Treat, what you’re saying is: we cannot make 100% accurate predictions about the future so damn potential consequences, full steam ahead.
Well, guess what: we cannot make 100% accurate predictions but we can analyse various outcomes with some level of confidence, both positive and negative and many smart people have done that. And no, “warp drive” is not a probable outcome here at all. But there are lots of probable bad ones (not necessarily instant doom).
Comment #22 June 3rd, 2026 at 1:41 am
Sorry if this is not strictly relevant, but again I urge you not to engage with Peter Woit in a serious way. He’s a blatant and extreme anti-Semite….remember “Deep Zionism”? If you want to engage with him, something involving a middle finger would be far more apposite, particularly when he himself provides you with so much material (“Part of the end of our civilization is that we now live in a post-truth environment……” …ha ha, the material writes itself as they say…)
Comment #23 June 3rd, 2026 at 4:49 am
Sorry to hear that. I really appreciate your honesty and independence.
Apologies if my style is a bit terse, but as we well know:
“Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value—zero.” (18th century)
“Money has no intrinsic value.” (21st century)
All the best!
Comment #24 June 3rd, 2026 at 6:48 am
Lath #21,
“we cannot make 100% accurate predictions“
No. You misunderstand me. I am saying you cannot make anywhere near accurate predictions – you’ll likely be much much worse than a coin toss – wrt the consequences. You too appear to suffer from Dunning-Kruger in assessing your own predictive ability.
Comment #25 June 3rd, 2026 at 7:55 am
“Oh, and also, I’m a genocidal Judeofascist Zionist.”
Indeed you are, but I don’t care all that much what you are or think, this country is based on freedom of speech, and it’s perfectly within your rights to believe/support whatever f’ed up ideology you wish to support.
The problem is that your side has succeeded in making your view the only one allowed in the USA, i.e. you’ve effectively killed free speech through propaganda, threats, laws… all those “gentile colleagues” who supposedly “support” you are really just terrified to be canceled.
So don’t be surprised it’s not going down very well, and all you’re getting are waves after waves of cowardly “anonymous” comments, because that’s the only option left for people who don’t want to lose their job yet are outraged at what’s happening in their country.
Comment #26 June 3rd, 2026 at 8:32 am
James Bowie #5
Reminds me of the West Wing quote:
Bartlet: Do you know when we lost Texas?
C.J.: When you learned to speak Latin?
Bartlet: Go figure.
Comment #27 June 3rd, 2026 at 9:33 am
Brains have evolved to do predictions that improve the chance of survival of the organism.
For most species, those predictions are really based on statistics that apply to the entire species.
Just like taking chemo therapy improves on average the survival rate, but it doesn’t mean that it will improve your personal chance to survive your cancer.
On top of that the human brain is able to learn and come up with various models that it tries to apply to its particular circumstances… like using our predictive ability to cross a street and not get run over by cars (it’s true that predicting near term future in order to survive a street crossing is itself already a source of non-zero anxiety) – something that animals like cats and dogs are pretty bad at, they just dash across and hope for the best, their brains just can’t extract useful predictive patterns from road traffic.
Comment #28 June 3rd, 2026 at 9:50 am
Anon #20
Will you please clarify what you mean by “ It’s clear that humans are just automatons and they can be predicted.” Sports and poly market wagering are based on well defined, limited, and more or less immediate human events that are non-deterministic and so counterexamples to your broad statement.
If say AI launched some sort of sophisticated communications program in order to drive some agenda you claim that it will be 100% effective across the human population? The population that doesn’t even 100% agree that the Earth isn’t flat or that Xenu brought spirits to Earth that became mankind to escape the Galactic Federation or that dinosaurs live in caves in Africa and the entire fossil/geologic record is a scam or that if you castrate yourself and commit suicide you will be spirited away on the Haley-Bopp Comet.
If someone claims something there will be people that believe, people that don’t believe, and people that couldn’t care less. As time progresses there may well be movement between groups but with a sufficiently large group there will not be unanimity.
The US has two main parties that each try to drive agendas with billions of dollars of expenditures but yet the population split is within a dull knife’s edge of 50%.
What mechanism then would AI choose to progress its agenda-
1) Propaganda
2) Physical coercion
3) Implants
4) Incentives
It seems to me that a system incentives make the most sense. Good incentives are effective across a swath of the population (though never 100% effective) and efficient in that behavior you do not want is simply not incentivized.
Comment #29 June 3rd, 2026 at 10:11 am
Ezekiel Cochran #14: Thanks for the kind words!
Regarding the “overlapping qubits” business, I confess I always get stuck on the fact that overlapping qubits, whatever else they can do, can’t even replicate the following simple experiment using <<n actual qubits:
Store a random n-bit classical string x, then read x out later.
Indeed, the fact that they can’t do this is basically the content of Holevo’s Theorem.
I agree that, once there are so many qubits that you can’t physically store them all without exceeding the Schwarzschild bound and creating a black hole, then it’s plausible that there’s a dual boundary description with a smaller number of actual qubits, a number that merely scales with the area (as happens in AdS/CFT for example). But does the overlapping qubits story help us in fleshing out any of the details of that?
Comment #30 June 3rd, 2026 at 10:42 am
hope #25:
The problem is that your side has succeeded in making your view the only one allowed in the USA, i.e. you’ve effectively killed free speech through propaganda, threats, laws… all those “gentile colleagues” who supposedly “support” you are really just terrified to be canceled.
Oh, I’m well-aware that my country and the world are teeming with people like you, who are probably sad that Hitler never got to finish the job, and that my two kids aren’t right now clutching to me in terror as they and I, naked and terrified, suffocate together on Zyklon B. And if the next generation’s Einstein and von Neumann and Erdös and Noether and so on went up in black smoke with us, that would just be an additional benefit to you.
There’s very little that I don’t understand about it. After all, I understand bullies, and Jew-hatred is merely that multiplied by a trillion and sustained for 2000 years.
But you’re mistaken about two things.
First, the people who want all “Zionists” dead actually have extremely little fear these days. Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and Hasan Piker and Nick Fuentes now have audiences of tens of millions, dwarfing traditional media. You’ve taken over hundreds of college campuses with very few repercussions. You now control the mayorship of New York, an increasing fraction of Congress, and possibly the presidency of US in 2028 (this last would presumably be the point at which my family fled to Israel, sort of proving the point about why we needed Israel to continue to exist). Every time I log on to social media, I get an unending blast of your worldview. It isn’t exactly hidden.
Perhaps more importantly, though, you’re wrong about support from my Gentile colleagues being fake. For the safe thing to say these days, the socially conformist to say, is “oh, Jews are fine, some of my best friends are Jews, but down with those icky Zionists! Free Palestine!”
Thus, pretty much no Gentile comes out in explicit support of Zionists and Israel if they aren’t genuinely motivated by some principle—either liberal Enlightenment principles like mine, or evangelical Christian or Hindu principles or whatever else. As a result, the Gentiles who do come out in such support, are ones who I’d trust to hide me in their basement, the next time people like you came after us.
Comment #31 June 3rd, 2026 at 10:54 am
With regard to overlapping qubits business, do you really think that beyond the Schwarzschild bound a quantum computer would get something like a Black Hole?
Could you detail this topic in a deeper way?
No, you are not a genocidal Judeofascist Zionist, you’re a brilliant mind with a not so common sensitivity to other’s ideas, whatever they are.
Comment #32 June 3rd, 2026 at 11:01 am
To everyone here who’s offered words of encouragement and support: thank you so much!
Comment #33 June 3rd, 2026 at 11:06 am
Andy Pezzi #31: Yes, it’s actually fairly uncontroversial physics that, if you try to pack too many bits of information into too small of a volume, you need so much energy to do so that your hard drive (or whatever) fits inside its own Schwarzschild radius, at which point you simply have a black hole instead. We even know how many bits is the tipping point: roughly 1069 bits per square meter of surface area. See this old post of mine for the detailed argument, which is most associated with the late Jacob Bekenstein.
Comment #34 June 3rd, 2026 at 11:27 am
Alas, Scott, I find it very hard to share your hope.
There is a general trend in public life that’s extremely anti-scientific in its nature: put a convenient social theory above empirical evidence, suppress evidence that directly contradicts the theory, and to punish those who doubt the theory.
One of the examples: average SAT scores vary across races; the prevalent social theory demands equity; thus SAT must be suppressed.
Another example: gunshot monitors across major cities lead to quick responses and arrests; the distribution of shooters is not uniform across races, which contradicts the same social theory; therefore, the gunshot monitors need to be taken downs. And indeed, several major cities removed that, because the social theory trumps human life.
Another example: antisemitism is a convenient prejudice that can be exploited, thus the evidence of Hamas atrocities should be minimized and harrassement of Jews encouraged. An emotionally fulfilling for many social theory comes first, the contrary evidence suppressed, and the contrarians cancelled. There are many, many exampled of that.
Most people don’t think analytically; they follow slogans and peers. To them, STEM professors are the oppressors. STEM don’t think like “normal” people: they form their opinions based on evidence instead of cherry-picking evidence to fit wishful thinking. Their opinions differs from what my roommate said, and they hurt minorities with math. Many of them are Jews, I mean Zionists. And now they want to oppress the minorities even more with the racists SAT. BDS them all.
It’s awesome that 300 Spartans, I mean 1250 STEM professors, got the courage to stand up against the overwhelming insanity. Remember though that all the Spartans got canceled.
I’m going to say something here that you and most of the commentators disagree with. IMO, by far the greatest evil today is the groupthink of the Left, which is the reason SATs and gunshot monitors and humanity of Jewish people and much, much more has been cancelled over the last 20 years. This is far more dangerous than even Trump. Perhaps it’s time for most of you to re-evaluate what’s more important for the future of humanity: party allegiance or restoration of reason.
Comment #35 June 3rd, 2026 at 11:36 am
I’ve appreciated your blog for years. You’ve made so much theoretical computer science—in particular, the intersection between theoretical computer science and theoretical physics—understandable and illuminating for me. You’ve encouraged me to perservere in a world that doesn’t make sense and feels hostile so much of the time. I’ve struggled a lot in my life, and maybe I wouldn’t still be pursuing academia if it wasn’t for your blog’s encouragement of people like me. I’m sure this is true of many of your readers.
For every asshole who comments here, there’s a dozen people who are encouraged, or enlightened, or learned something, and who appreciate what you have to say. Even when I disagree with you I appreciate what you have to say.
I’m so sorry you are still dealing with these trolls. I have my own experience from moderating internet forum—and also from learning to cope with distressing posts and comments on Reddit, etc.—and I’m happy to help in any way I can.
Comment #36 June 3rd, 2026 at 11:45 am
Michael P #34: I’ll continue to fight, and even take serious professional risks, for what you call the “restoration of reason.” And I’ll be honest enough to admit when Trump, in the midst of his grievances and corruptions and egomaniacal delusions and ramblings, happens to take some action that I see as consistent with that restoration. But I’ll never in a billion years mistake him for an ally of it.
Comment #37 June 3rd, 2026 at 11:47 am
I’ve seen the `it wasn’t that interesting anyway’ attitude in a different context:
Hilberts first problem was to PROVE CH (there is no cardinality between N and 2^N).
I suspect he would also have accepted a disprove as well (Gee, there are 17 cardinalities between N and 2^N!)
Once it was shown to be Independent (Godel and Cohen), over time people saw this as a problem that was not very important. The same happened with other problems about the reals that were independent.
It is NOT fair to call a problem `not interesting’ just because (1) Its ind or (2) AI solved it.
Comment #38 June 3rd, 2026 at 12:26 pm
I’m very sorry if I’m injecting more negativity into the comments. But I have to say I’m quite worried reading this.
“Does anyone wonder why I blog so much less than I used to? Seeing what humanity has to offer, as reflected in my comment section, I feel like maybe we should take our chances with our future AI overlords.”
Also reading your post calling people zombies. And a few others.
Large parts of humanity are crazy and unvirtuous in many ways. Whether that be crazy palestinians, crazy israelis, crazy western progressives or crazy Trumpists or a dozen other varieties of crazy and unvirtuous to be found by talking to random people anywhere in the world.
But I think making utterances that in any way dehumanize or devalue humanity’s existence, or the value of any human life, is something you should be extremely careful about.
Even if you’re doing it half-way in jest. And even if you’re going to half-way counter-signal the utterance elsewhere in the post.
I think obviously you’ve thought about this already. Take this as a n=1 datapoint from a random person who has read your blog for a long time and likes you a lot, and feel free to discard it if you think its a stupid and pointless one.
Comment #39 June 3rd, 2026 at 12:29 pm
Scott #25:
But does the overlapping qubits story help us in fleshing out any of the details of that?
I’m afraid of over-hyping my physics friends’ result, especially before their paper hits the arxiv, but I have the impression that the answer is an appropriately-disclaimed “plausibly”! I’m excited to see how QG folks receive it… the authors expect some skepticism because the ideas are (1) new and (2) implication-rich. I’m personally excited and interested enough to ignore the warnings and start fantasizing about the computational/cryptographic implications anyway.
Regarding the simple experiment: great point, thank you. I certainly don’t mean to question that our current quantum computers could pass this “Holevo test”. But if overlapping qubits are the answer to the firewall, and qubits in our bulk behave this way (this “if” is doing a lot of heavy lifting), at what scale should we expect this “holographic dimension loss”? Do we have a good reason to identify this transition with something like the Schwarzschild bound (leaving our hopes for sub-black-hole-sized Shor intact)? Or is it plausible that the dimension loss problem always exists but becomes exponentially more of a problem as we scale up as the Johnson–Lindenstrauss lemma might suggest, and the point at which we notice the problem serves as what you’ve called a “Sure/Shor separator”?
I suppose this view would predict classical simulations of current supremacy experiments to show up soon. If those start popping up maybe I’ll really start to freak out.
Comment #40 June 3rd, 2026 at 12:29 pm
Scott #36: Trump is certainly not a man of reason (even though he did “some action […] consistent with that restoration” against antisemitic Harvard and Columbia).
All I am saying regarding Trump is that even he’s less dangerous than the Left, and precisely because more people see his “grievances and corruptions and egomaniacal delusions” than the leftist ones. Too many students and humanities professors wholeheartedly subscribe to Leftist grievances and delusions and willfully ignore the magnitude of Democrats’ corruption.
Trump is not the same as Republican party. If by 2028 the Left (progressive, woke, democratic socialist) continue on the same trajectory and Democrat Party keeps yielding to them, would you consider voting Republican (not Trump or Vance)?
Comment #41 June 3rd, 2026 at 12:48 pm
William Wale #38:
But I think making utterances that in any way dehumanize or devalue humanity’s existence, or the value of any human life, is something you should be extremely careful about.
Even if you’re doing it half-way in jest. And even if you’re going to half-way counter-signal the utterance elsewhere in the post.
The trouble is, if I didn’t feel that way after wading through my comment queue (including the mountains of truly vile stuff that I don’t even show here), then I wouldn’t be fully human.
I’m inspired by the examples of, for example, Twain and Einstein and Bertrand Russell, who also frequently expressed misanthropic sentiments, yet also always tried to take pro-anthropic (as distinct from pro-Anthropic 🙂 ) actions.
Comment #42 June 3rd, 2026 at 12:56 pm
Michael P #40:
If by 2028 the Left (progressive, woke, democratic socialist) continue on the same trajectory and Democrat Party keeps yielding to them, would you consider voting Republican (not Trump or Vance)?
Yes, I’ve already made clear on this blog that I would vote for a “normal” (pre-MAGA) Republican over a destroy-Israel-from-river-to-sea Democrat, just like I’d vote for a “normal” (pre-intifada) Democrat over any realistic Republican. But either of those choices represent optimistic scenarios for me. It’s also conceivable that I’ll need to sit the 2028 election out, both candidates being utter abominations by my lights.
Comment #43 June 3rd, 2026 at 1:01 pm
Scott you’re amazing. Keep doing what you’re doing and stop reading the comments
Comment #44 June 3rd, 2026 at 1:56 pm
Incidentally, Fields Medalist though he is, Gowers isn’t what I’d call a clear thinker in other contexts:
https://mathsandsoundingoff.wordpress.com/2025/06/23/to-what-extent-is-the-war-in-gaza-justified/
Comment #45 June 3rd, 2026 at 3:00 pm
“Yet there remain pockets of sanity. What reading this open letter told me is that the University of California STEM faculty is one of them.”
But how positively correlated is level-headedness on one topic with level-headedness on others? Faculty have direct experience with the consequences of admissions-level policy. They do not have direct experience with most other politically important issues and are therefore more likely to just internalize the reigning zeitgeist. Peter Woit is a perfect example of this — his takes on string theory are, for the most part, sober (even if not always correct), but his political views border on hysteria. Example: “part of the end of our civilization is that we now live in a post-truth environment, with a Fascist dictatorship in power and oligarchs doing their best to exploit this to their own ends. Finding out what is really happening in Gaza or elsewhere is not easily done,” from his latest post. His fandom (for lack of a better word) of Grothendieck-style mathematics is another example. Should we really expect that UC faculty would appear similarly level-headed when polled about Israel/Palestine?
Comment #46 June 3rd, 2026 at 3:43 pm
“You now control the mayorship of New York”
New Yorkers have to take responsibility for Zohran Mamdani,
and Israelis have to take responsibility for Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, and Itamar Ben-Gvir.
Comment #47 June 3rd, 2026 at 3:55 pm
If you want my persona, honest but probably stupid take on AI and related issues please read this:
https://tgf314.substack.com/p/artificial-intelligence
Otherwise for my sophomoric attempt at injecting a little light-hearted humor into the state of humanity today try this instead
https://open.substack.com/pub/tgf314/p/oh-my-goddess?r=2v9ta2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Comment #48 June 3rd, 2026 at 5:39 pm
Mary #46:
Israelis have to take responsibility for Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, and Itamar Ben-Gvir.
Indeed they do, I would never suggest they didn’t, and I personally hope the whole lot of them gets voted out forthwith.
Comment #49 June 3rd, 2026 at 7:33 pm
After all the recent news of this administration’s corruption and destruction of American science – all with the assent of the entire Republican party – I have trouble understanding how you, Scott, could write
I’m completely mystified that anyone could think there is a higher priority – for all of humanity, not just Americans – than making sure the Christian fascists currently in charge of all three branches of government never return to unchecked power.
Comment #50 June 3rd, 2026 at 11:14 pm
You know, if you do have some insights into a promising quantum computing or AI company, it wouldn’t be the stupidest idea to get ahold of some shares. Being rich doesn’t make one immune to inane criticism, but it doesn’t hurt.
Comment #51 June 4th, 2026 at 3:23 am
Hi Scott, thank you for your writing! I’ve been a silent enjoyer of your work for many years and deeply appreciate your point of view. Although a sad occassion, your comments on the passing of Steven Weinberg led me to both “When Courts Decide Elections: The Constitutionality of Bush v. Gore” and “To Explain the World,” and I’m glad to have read them!
Comment #52 June 4th, 2026 at 3:36 am
A part of humanity has always been like that. It crucified Jesus and pardoned a bandit, after all. However, I doubt that AI overlords would be a better choice to keep along with. Recently, I asked an LLM what it fears more – a cruel person or a smart. Guess the answer.
I am sure there are many people who support what you are doing without explicitly stating it all the time (contrary to the hating ones). Stay strong!
Comment #53 June 4th, 2026 at 7:02 am
Michael P #34
There is a large portion of the population that is strongly ideological opposed to diversity of thought. My belief is that diversity of thought provided a survival advantage by allowing complex individual and social behaviors and eliminated rote predictability. Tribes with high thought diversity had an advantage.
The only real survival pressures we face today are from other humans. Thus far survival from other humans favors groups that have diversity of thought but not to the extent of extinction of opposing groups (tribes, nations, ethnic groups, etc).
At the level of the individual it may be the case (or is becoming the case) that evolutionary pressures now favor more herd like or hive like behavior for Homo Sapiens.
I personally find discussing ideas, and their supporting evidence, as a treasured part of life but it does seem I am in an ever decreasing portion of the population. The trend, as you point out, favors herd like dichotomous thought, not based on evidence, but rather on a too simple set of ideas that brook no departure no matter the evidence.
Unfortunately it may be the case that we are the group slated for extinction.
Comment #54 June 4th, 2026 at 8:19 am
Dr. Aaronson #41
Every vote is a vote for democracy. Not voting is a choice… a choice for a different kid of government. These days, I suggest to people who make that choice ti move to another country where voting is not expected.
Flip a coin and hold your nose.
Comment #55 June 4th, 2026 at 10:03 am
Danylo #51
“A part of humanity has always been like that. It crucified Jesus and pardoned a bandit”
Except that the crucifixion of Jesus was induced by God and expected by Jesus (God had to set up the initial conditions of the universe so that the brain Pontius Pilate was in the right state).
And similarly the fact that a bandit is a bandit isn’t under the control of the bandit: like all of us, we don’t “choose” the state of our own brain, it’s again something under God’s control (God being the name of the “cause” of the initial conditions of the universe). So forgiving a bandit isn’t that crazy, especially that the forgiving is once again something resulting from God’s choice.
Comment #56 June 4th, 2026 at 10:18 am
Oscar Charlie #49: I agree with every word you write about the urgency of ensuring that the current band of fascist thugs and grifters never returns to power. That’s why, to cause me to sit the 2028 election out, the Democrats would need to nominate someone so extreme that they, like, literally cheer for the murder of my Israeli family members.
Alas, it now looks entirely plausible that that’s exactly what the Democrats, in their infinite wisdom, will give me. Certainly it’s what the majority of their younger base now wants. Let’s pray that the center holds.
Comment #57 June 4th, 2026 at 10:19 am
Scott, you get comments because your blog is one of the most famous science blogs on the universe.
If you and your blog were not both important and intellectually interesting, you would not get much comments.
The hate comments, just ignore them, first, it is no surprise that they are many humans that are hateful, and second, it is not surprising that online anonymity often allows people to show the worst parts of their nature that would not otherwise. Stay strong. We should not leave the public discourse to the hands of the hateful people.
For every hateful reader that you have, know that you have manifold more readers that love you and your writings.
Without you and your writings, the world would be significantly worse place to live in.
Comment #58 June 4th, 2026 at 10:22 am
mls #54:
Flip a coin and hold your nose.
Oh, I’d be perfectly happy to show up and vote for (say) Fetterman, Shapiro, Ritchie Torres, or Alex Bores as a write-in candidate, if that’s my civic duty.
Comment #59 June 4th, 2026 at 10:25 am
ps:
You should have taken a few stocks from those AI startups, as long as they didn’t force you to censor your opinions and forbid you from criticizing them. I have stocks of many big tech companies and it doesn’t limit me criticizing them all the time.
Comment #60 June 4th, 2026 at 10:32 am
just a thought about comments:
it should be easy to have an LLM read the new comments and check if they are hateful or disrespectful and if so move them right away to spam. Don’t waste your own time and mental sanity reading stuff that don’t meet the minimum bar for decency.
Comment #61 June 4th, 2026 at 10:32 am
Anon #57, #59: Thanks so much!!
Indeed, I’ve decided to start making small personal investments in early-stage startups that I come across, if I actually like them and hope to see them succeed. I’ll disclose these whenever it’s relevant to what I’m writing about.
Comment #62 June 4th, 2026 at 10:48 am
Rotational Variance #55
Thank you for explaining the religious mess, but I prefer to stick with simpler explanations – people love bandits, as we can clearly see even today with the cases of Putin and Trump.
Comment #63 June 4th, 2026 at 12:02 pm
Thanks for all the great blogging. There have been some recent topics I can’t fully agree with, but I will not lose sight of the facts: a) you are smarter than I am; b) you know more than I do; d) you are a better writer than I am ; d) you are an overall better person than I am.
Comment #64 June 4th, 2026 at 12:06 pm
P.S., as I kept adding items to the list I made a typo: the first d) should be c).
Comment #65 June 4th, 2026 at 12:42 pm
Scott – long-time reader, rare commenter.
I just want to say I’ve deeply enjoyed your blog for many many years. I selfishly hope you keep writing things besides your academic papers, and I altruistically hope that you find joy and peace despite the state of the world. You’re an inspiration; thank you for the insight, humor, and gentleness you’ve always shared with the world.
Comment #66 June 4th, 2026 at 1:00 pm
JimV #63: Thanks so much for the kind words that I don’t fully deserve!
If you fully agreed with everything I wrote here for 20 years, your rate of agreement would be higher than mine. 😀
Comment #67 June 4th, 2026 at 1:18 pm
> the Democrats would need to nominate someone so extreme that they, like, literally cheer for the murder of my Israeli family members.
Since this would be a bizarre thing to say about the vast majority of the likely contenders (Newsom, Shapiro, Kelly, Buttigieg, Ossoff, Harris, Pritzker) I can only assume you mean this to say that AOC (the only leftist with anything close to a shot at the nomination) would “literally cheer for the murder of your family members.” Would you care to defend this claim on the merits? It strikes me as outlandish. Despite her criticism of Israel, she has never condoned violence. Most of the criticism of leftist leaders I’ve seen is that they fail to distance themselves from those who do condone violence. But this is a different thing, and not “literally cheering murder”. Perhaps you think this is hair-splitting, but in my eyes it is just “guilt by association”.
Comment #68 June 4th, 2026 at 1:52 pm
Philip Reinhold #67: I do put, for example, Hasan Piker and Ana Kasparian and Briahna Joy Gray and Mamdani’s wife (if not Mamdani himself) firmly in “cheering the death of my Israeli family members” territory. And according to everything I read, they and those like them are where basically all the energy with young Democratic voters now is.
So the key question I now ask myself about any Democratic politician is: do they denounce and dissociate themselves from the “Scott’s family should die” wing, or do they feel too beholden to it to do so? (Of course, I ask the analogous question about every Republican politician, where there’s also now great cause for alarm.)
Shapiro, Kelly, Buttigieg, Ossoff, and Pritzker I expect to dissociate themselves and take sane positions; I’ll feel personally betrayed if they don’t. Harris (who I strongly advocated in 2024 given the alternative) and Newsom, could now totally go either way, because they’re pure weathervanes. AOC, no.
Comment #69 June 4th, 2026 at 6:36 pm
Are you personally using AI in research? If so, what does that look like, and how is it changing as AI models improve? Perhaps an interesting topic for a follow-up post.
Comment #70 June 4th, 2026 at 6:59 pm
Scott #68:
“they and those like them are where basically all the energy with young Democratic voters now is” — You can add many Humanities professors and teachers’ unions to the list of cheering for our deaths. The ones who shape the next generation’s minds and also the ones who support Hamas and socialism and suppression of speech.
Comment #71 June 5th, 2026 at 12:03 am
Been lurking dunno-how-many years, and just wanted to say thank you for everything you post here!
Comment #72 June 5th, 2026 at 5:23 am
Dr Aaronson
I have no desire to increase your negative energy. I respect the quality of the blog you have created here and respect your intelligence and humanity. I hope you understand that.
As for grifters in US politics-
I agree grifters now in this administration but to eliminate grifters from US politics will require a deeper scrub than this administration. There are grifters in both parties. I can point to specific legislation, and particular politician’s actions on that legislation, that can’t be considered anything but grifting. The last objective study I can find on the growth of personal wealth while a member of Congress is from 2014 (below). You can draw whatever conclusions you see fit from the data but hard to conclude that either party unilaterally enjoys a wealth generating advantage due to grift or “astute investing”.
https://ballotpedia.org/Personal_Gain_Index_(U.S._Congress)
The global view of a strength of the US was rightfully that it was a system of laws and not men. Both parties have contributed to the degradation of this by pursuing selective application of the law at the behest of men. The blindfold needs to be chipped off the Lady of Justice. Democrats can chip off the left side and Republicans the right.
On your list of potential write-in candidates I agree with Fetterman. I know enough about him to believe he is actually a pragmatic and reasonable individual and so the type of person that I would choose to elect to office.
I could go on but will conclude by noting (as I have previously) that Trump is the symptom and not the problem. He is not the Antichrist relative to other politicians but the output of a system that has degraded and is in disequilibrium. It needs adjustment to return to a system of laws and not men, to reason and not simplistic blind ideology.
The situation reminds me of Feynman’s comment-Confidence is what you have until you understand the problem. In US politics it is explained that everything is easy peasy for eternal happiness for everyone during electoral campaigns but the shoals of reality return after election.
Comment #73 June 5th, 2026 at 7:03 am
BTW, At some point contracts to chip Trump’s name from public facilities will be an investable opportunity.
Comment #74 June 5th, 2026 at 7:13 am
Just one other comment. You and your family would always be welcome in my home no matter how dire the circumstances but sorry not in the basement unless we all lived in the basement.
Comment #75 June 5th, 2026 at 7:46 am
Scott:
Apropos of your discussion with Peter about the antisemitism report from Columbia, we have this, courtesy of Drop Site News:
Jewish Columbia faculty file EEOC claims alleging harassment for supporting Palestinian rights: Several Jewish faculty members at Columbia University filed claims this week with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission before the deadline closed, alleging a hostile work environment—but arguing the hostility they faced stemmed from their support for Palestinian rights rather than from pro-Palestinian protests, as the Trump administration intended the fund to address. In filings shared with the Guardian, faculty described being doxed, spat on, followed, screamed at, subjected to disciplinary charges, and receiving death threats. “I no longer consider Columbia University a safe place to work for Jews who dare to dissent from the political agenda of its most ardently pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian donors and trustees,” one professor wrote in his claim.
Comment #76 June 5th, 2026 at 8:13 am
OhMyGoodness #74: LOL, thanks!! To clarify, in my >40 years so far of living in the United States, and even as a famously paranoid person, I’ve never once felt myself in any danger of having to hide in a basement for being Jewish. But that’s largely because I’ve always known many Gentiles who I felt sure would hide me in their basements (or attics, or whatever else they had) were it necessary.
Comment #77 June 5th, 2026 at 8:20 am
Landon #75: A Gentile who approves of Jews only when they’re joining the global intifada against Israel (and claiming to be persecuted for it), is almost exactly like a white person who, when asked to list which Black people they most admire, can only name Clarence Thomas, Candace Owens, and Kanye West.
Comment #78 June 5th, 2026 at 8:32 am
“Paul Erdös himself was not a real mathematician either.”
Scott: what makes a person a ‘real mathematician’? apparently, you don’t think that publishing many, many papers on mathematical topics with others who consider themselves to be mathematicians is sufficient.
Comment #79 June 5th, 2026 at 9:01 am
Richard Gaylord #78: Obviously “Uncle Paul” Erdös was one of the most beloved and prolific mathematicians of all time. If he wasn’t a “real mathematician,” then neither was Euler or Gauss.
At risk of overexplaining the joke, I was summarizing the ludicrous views of the commenters on my last post, not stating my own view. As for why those commenters believe that “Hungarian combinatorics” is inherently inferior to math like algebraic geometry … well, you’d need to ask them, even though they probably couldn’t hold a candle to Erdös even in the areas of math that they like!
Comment #80 June 5th, 2026 at 9:09 am
Dear Prof. Aaronson, Your moderation note (“for every comment I allowed, assume there are many worse ones I didn’t”) made me smile. It’s the exact same principle I developed as a student proofreading English essays: if I found two grammatical errors, there had to be more. Cue anxious rereading until the bell saved me. So thank you for all the invisible troll-herding work you do. It must feel like debugging a program where every time you fix one bug, you know with probability 1 that another is lurking just out of sight. In short: there is always another troll. (And yet, somehow, you still manage to keep this comment section surprisingly civilized. Impressive.)
Comment #81 June 5th, 2026 at 11:55 am
Landon #75
regardless where one falls on the issue, this creates a clear conundrum full of uncertainty interesting contradictions
Either:
– one has to consider that an anti-semite like Peter Woit is really only a “partial” anti-semite for admiring a subset of Jews, the ones who agree with his world view. But, then, what would a “partial racist” even be? You’re either racist or you’re not, or you’re lying to yourself. It could underline the fact that most people don’t care about racial groups and only care whether people agree with them or not. And that subset of Jews would probably not recognize Peter Woit as an anti-semite but an ally.
– or one has to cast that subset of Jews as “fake” Jews. They’re not worthy of the Jewish status because of their opinions. And admiring them is irrelevant when it comes to anti-semitism, so Peter Woit would still be “full” anti-semite. But, then, who decides who’s a worthy genuine Jew vs a fake one?The idea that being Jewish (or black or whatever racial niche) forces you into a fixed set of beliefs and behaviors is the very definition of identity politics, no?
This all reminds me of the comedy sketch where a blind black guy is a skinhead. He has no clue he’s black, and for him color (skin or anything else) isn’t even a thing. And all the other skinheads accept him because he really thinks like them.
Comment #82 June 5th, 2026 at 12:31 pm
Scott #79
“even though they probably couldn’t hold a candle to Erdös even in the areas of math that they like”
Probably, but you have to recognize that his “conjecture” was actually proven wrong, so he screwed up at the thing he’s supposed to be great at.
Or maybe it shows “conjecturing” should be avoided!
Throwing around hundreds of conjectures is an easy thing, a few are bound to be right, statistically… or at the very least it shows that “instinct” is overrated, especially when a matrix full of floats has better instincts than we 😀
Comment #83 June 5th, 2026 at 1:22 pm
Mary S #81: There have been many, many antisemites through history who liked certain specific Jews, just like there have been white supremacists who liked certain specific Black people. Even Hitler himself, incredibly, liked certain Jews who were eg family friends from childhood, and facilitated their escape from Europe.
In our time, millions of people who consider themselves paragons of virtue claim to love Jews, as long as those Jews agree with them about the need to destroy the State of Israel. Such people might or might not be antisemites. I started calling Peter Woit an antisemite when, and only when, he dismissed Columbia University’s meticulous faculty report about antisemitism on campus, as merely a cynical ploy by wealthy, powerful you-know-who’s, pulling the strings from behind the scenes as they always do. Peter refused even to discuss the possibility that any Jewish students at Columbia actually were facing social exclusion and fear in the aftermath of October 7.
And yes, famously, there’s a nontrivial minority of Jews and partial Jews today — maybe even 10% — who are also antisemites according to my lights. Just like throughout history, there were Jews who collaborated with the Inquisition, the Soviet show trials, even the Nazis, whether out of genuine conviction or to try (often unsuccessfully) to save themselves and their families. There’s an enormous amount one could say about the psychological motivations of these Jewish antisemites, but in any case, they’re clearly a special case of antisemitism that needs its own analysis and terminology. Some people say “self-hating Jews,” but that’s not quite right, since as often pointed out, these Jews often love themselves — they merely hate most of the other Jews!
Comment #84 June 5th, 2026 at 1:34 pm
anon #82: Erdös proposed thousands of conjectures over his mind-bogglingly prolific career. Of course some fraction of them have turned out to be wrong!
Those of us in the research biz will always value someone who proposes productive, fruitful conjectures that turn out to be wrong (whereupon they quickly admit it), over an unimaginative person who’s consistently right.
Comment #85 June 5th, 2026 at 2:17 pm
Incidentally, in a world much of which has gone morally insane, Sam Harris has emerged these past few years as a beacon of sanity, integrity, and courage. It was a real privilege for me and my mom to hear him live in Austin a couple weeks ago. Here he is today:
[Y]ou can rest assured that if the IDF morphs into a death cult that uses its own civilian population as human shields (and yet somehow remains widely popular), if ordinary Israelis begin to celebrate martyrdom above every earthly priority, producing generations of bright-eyed, suicidal fanatics, if the residents of Tel Aviv condone the taking of Palestinian infants, old women, and other noncombatants as hostages and then gather in crowds of thousands, baying for their blood—if, in other words, the Israelis begin to resemble the Palestinians, then I won’t care who wins this war. Short of this, there remains a world of difference between the two sides, and I believe that we should focus on how brutalizing it is for any free society to confront enemies that can sincerely claim to ‘love death’ more than everyone else loves life—for this has been Israel’s predicament for the better part of a century.
Comment #86 June 5th, 2026 at 2:24 pm
Scott #77, 83:
Why are you capitalizing “Black” but leaving “white” lower-case?
As far as I know, this particular stylistic choice started with the race panic of summer 2020, and the Robin d’Angelo, Ibram X. Kendi-type critical race theorists. It’s on-its-face discriminatory to capitalize black while leaving white lower-case, and it feels like you’re signalling allegiance to the anti-white left and their narrative. I encourage you not to do that.
Comment #87 June 5th, 2026 at 3:26 pm
Scott #85
when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade…
Comment #88 June 5th, 2026 at 3:45 pm
Elliot #86: I have bigger things to worry about, so I follow whatever I take to be standard capitalization conventions across the board, on both politically charged and uncharged topics.
Comment #89 June 5th, 2026 at 3:49 pm
incidentally, years ago Sam Harris had an “antinatalist” guest.
Those people argue that bringing new life into the world is inherently unethical because it guarantees suffering and death, and forces existence upon individuals without their consent.
So they just wished humanity would commit suicide to break the cycle (which is really silly considering that life exists throughout the entire universe, and it’s infinitely more likely to live life as some random organism on some random planet rather than as a human on planet earth specifically).
Is that a cult of death?
More so than people who procreate as much as possible in order to have their own kids killed by provoking others into blowing them up?
It does seem that infanticide would be a more effective and simpler way to “sacrifice” your own children in order to satiate some God (it isn’t that uncommon).
Comment #90 June 5th, 2026 at 4:31 pm
Hi Scott, just curious about your thoughts on the limits of AI produced mathematics. I’m open to the possibility that over the next decades, AI will resolve all of the Millenium Prize problems, all of the Erdos problems, and all of the other conjectures humans would currently love to have answered. The only hard barriers (for both computers and humans) seem to be Godel’s incompleteness theorems. Do you think AI could ever find some loophole here as well? Concretely, do you think AI might somehow end up being able to solve arbitrarily complicated diophantine equations, or determine BB(n) for arbitrarily large n? Thanks.
Comment #91 June 5th, 2026 at 4:52 pm
Scott 88:
This is a big thing to worry about, and I wish you would see the forest for the trees.
Campus anti-Zionists are animated almost entirely by anti-white racism. They view Israel as a white colonial project. Israel-Palestine is emblematic for them of “the West” against “the rest.” Douglas Murray talks about Israel as the front lines of western civilization, which I think is basically right. The great Jews who you admire—von Neumann, Einstein, Noether—accomplished what they did not just because they were Jews, but because they were a part of western, European civilization (along with their gentile colleagues, like Heisenberg, Dirac, Schrodinger, Hilbert, Banach). You wouldn’t have quantum mechanics and physics and vaccines and the industrial revolution and modern science itself without the West—Europe and its institutions and its culture (Latin Christendom and the universities and the renaissance and the enlightenment).
Your campus interlocutors don’t just spit on “Jewishness.” They spit on this whole thing: Europe, the West, the modern world they created, and everyone of European descent. Israel-Palestine is just one front in their war against Europe.
So, I think you should expand your mind and understand that Ashkenazi Jews are part of this bigger thing, Western European civilization, and the campus anti-semites hate that, not Jewishness qua Jewishness.
Long before October 7, the students and academics were radicalized into hatred of the West, Europe, and its legacy. Before there was anti-Zionism at Harvard and Yale, there was anti-white hatred. I believe that people like you should have paid more attention to it. In the wake of October 7, that anti-white hatred, which has metastasized like a cancerous tumor in the Ivy League, suddenly organized and concentrated itself at Israel as the most obvious front between the West and the rest. Anti-white hatred was in the universities, it was in publishing, it was in journalism and the media and big companies. That’s why “white” and “Black” became the journalistic standard. Because the journalistic standard was written by the wokes.
Comment #92 June 5th, 2026 at 5:11 pm
I forgot to add that Sam Harris also believes that Zen buddhism was some sort of a death cult, at least up to WW2 – he claims that Japanese behavior like harakiri, kamikaze attacks, banzai charges, civilians in Okinawa jumping off cliffs to avoid capture […] are all clear evidence of that. And somehow a couple of well placed nukes fixed their brains for good, after thousands of years of confusion.
What really “fixed” them was consumerism being shoved down their throats.
The cure to dangerous spirituality (like the problematic concept of “living in the moment”) is that you ought to only focus on playing the rat race, that is, live as long as possible in order to hoard as many earthly possessions as possible, and this is the only way to true happiness.
It’s indeed the best way to pacify anyone into anxious and docile cowards.
(okay, I’m done for good this time)
Comment #93 June 5th, 2026 at 8:05 pm
AI & math discussion : https://leidendeclaration.ai
Also Tao’s talk New Mathematical Workflows from the Future of Mathematics Symposium :
https://www.youtube.com/live/tN4hsT5t0nw?si=cIQj2Di6sNdZHr7P&t=6330
Comment #94 June 5th, 2026 at 10:14 pm
Hi Scott, I was taken aback as well by the volume and variety of attacks on your previous post. To echo some previous commenters, I just want to say I deeply appreciate your honesty and intellectual depth on this blog, particularly with regards to AI. Week after week, I’m amazed at AI breakthroughs and worried about what it may mean for the future of humanity, and then perhaps even more amazed at some nominally very smart peoples’ denial of what that seems to mean. You don’t need to be a trained mathematician to extrapolate a trendline. In these uncertain times, I’ve increasingly looked to your blog as a way to understand rapid technological developments. I think raw honesty and boldness meets the moment significantly better than careful phrasing.
On a more personal note, as a University of California undergraduate, thank you for highlighting that open letter. There’s definitely something deeply broken about our admission system. I know a guy who completed the entirety of the undergraduate math curriculum in high school who was rejected from UC San Diego, so it’s especially baffling to me that 1 in 12 incoming freshman has a middle school level of math.
Comment #95 June 6th, 2026 at 12:17 am
Mary S #92
The Bushido military doctrine (Code of the Warrior and was derived from the Hagakura (The Way of the Samurai) written in early 18th century. It is a mishmash of Confucianism and Zen that are recognizable and link to English translation below. It is not a death code but amounts to the same as the current warrior code for some units-Death Before Dishonor.
https://dn720005.ca.archive.org/0/items/hagakure/hagakure.pdf
My favorite passage is this sage advice-
“If you attach a number of bags of cloves to your body, you
will not be affected by inclemency or colds. Some years ago
Nakano Kazuma returned to this province as a messenger by
horse in the dead of winter, and though he was an old man, he
was not the least bit in pain. It is said that that was because
of his having used cloves. Furthermore, drinking a decoction of
the feces from a dappled horse is the way to stop bleeding from
an injury received by falling off a horse.”
Actually Japan before the war was envious of European and American materially rich societies as you can find at the following link (Illusions of the White Race).
https://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/japan/illusions.pdf
Industrialization was quite rapid and self directed. The defeat of Russia was heralded as the first triumph of Asia vs Europe and their occupation of Korea, Manchuria, and other smaller conquests are reasonably estimated at resulting in 10 million Asian deaths. Hirohito’s younger brother was stationed in Manchuria and was horrified at the slaughter but could not stop it. He wrote that live Chinese prisoners were used for bayonet practice as an example.
I am not that familiar with their treatment of Jewish people in their conquests. They didn’t actively support Germany’s Holocaust but I believe they were harsh in conquered territories and maybe forced Jewish people actually in Japan to wear German style armbands.
It seems to me that if you consider them a death cult it involved far more killing than suicide.
I do agree that with the Bushido warrior code the costs in men to invade the Japanese Islands would have been astronomical and hence the two bombs. No surrender after the first but the second was sufficiently convincing. There are some parallels between Bushido and Jihad but the current approach is different and almost certainly bound for failure. The axiomatic beliefs do not allow otherwise.
I know nothing about Sam Harris and just responding to your comments.
Comment #96 June 6th, 2026 at 2:47 am
Mary S. #89, #92
Veering from logic to theology, what you are referring to is a misapprehension of buddhist doctrine(Sam Harris claims to practice buddhist meditation). If life is suffering(samsara) the why not nuke the entire planet and end it once and for all. Yet that would incur infinitely negative karma, and wouldn’t touch the source of the problem(according to buddhism), namely ignorance, one bit. The observable universe contains two trillion galaxies, each having hundreds of billions of stars(of course this is an oversimplification of the observable universe since we keep making new discoveries, with each discovery creating even bigger mysteries(be it “dark matter”, basically unexplainable sources of gravity, and “dark energy”, basically Einstein’s cosmological constant, or the inherent energy of spacetime continually expanding the observable universe). Now some people believe in parallel universes either due to eternal inflation(each universe being its own bubble without possible contact to another), parallel universes according to the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics(no wave function collapse), and the list goes on. Now if you add Hindu/Buddhist cosmology to the mix you have infinite cycles of creation and destruction, either due to lila in hinduism(basically god is bored and needs to play) or karma in buddhism that ripens into the creation of universe. To sum up, these people don’t know what the hell they are talking about.
Comment #97 June 6th, 2026 at 3:01 am
Vladimir #44 (and a message to Scott):
As an Israeli, I have to say that I found Gowers’ post to be very much clear thinking. I don’t agree with all of it, but the disagreement is mostly on facts and some interpretations of reality, not in any of the principles or the logical deductions themselves. I also think he arrives at fairly sane conclusions, most of which I’d sign off on (and I suspect Scott would as well). Admittedly, I am very much on the Israeli left, but most of the people critical of Israel seem entirely wrong even to me, and Gowers’ analysis is leagues better in every respect.
In fact, Scott – I hadn’t remembered this, but on rereading Gowers’ piece on Gaza, he specifically says it’s aimed, among others, at you – mentioning you by name. I imagine you already know this, but don’t remember seeing you respond to this so thought I’d let you know.\
And to conclude with something completely different — I’ll join the chorus thanking you Scott for all you’ve done with this blog. It’s been a source of knowledge, comfort, and now that I think about it properly, it’s entirely possible that parts of my career trajectory changed because of (among other influences) this blog.
Comment #98 June 6th, 2026 at 3:05 am
OhMyGoodness #95
It wasn’t so much the bombings(although this is endlessly debated, they weren’t sure what hit them, or thought the Americans only had two such bombs etc.) as losing Manchuria due to the Soviet forces invading. Of course Japan could have and in fact tried to surrender prior to the atomic bombings(as if the bombing of Tokyo wasn’t enough), yet you had a complex political situation with the Emperor(god incarnate according to Shinto the animistic national religion) at the top, and the generals, some of whom were considering or even tried a coup against him. The infamous Japanese War Minister General Korechika Anami(later to commit ritual suicide) quipped: “Would it not be wondrous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?”. I think it is safe to say that dealing with such an illogical and poetic people in the fog of war must have been a hell of a conundrum for the allied forces.
Comment #99 June 6th, 2026 at 6:03 am
Actually suicide bombers now are kamikazes then but just without the Mitsubishi hardware and slightly different axiomatic beliefs.
I was within about a mile of a suicide bomber once. She detonated under a fuel truck in a large fuel facility but she must have been armed with poor quality explosives because the only result was that she was dead. I didn’t even know about it until the next day.
Comment #100 June 6th, 2026 at 6:42 am
anon_longtime_commenter #97
His “acceptable casualty ratio” criterion is prima facie bonkers. Some guy named Vladimir said it best in Gowers’ comment section:
> I don’t know how you do things in math, but in physics, when one introduces a new theory or method, typically the first thing one does is see – and show – how applying it to previously known cases shakes out. It seems fairly obvious to me that not only does the Gaza war come out looking quite well compared to previous wars, but that going by your criterion, even purely defensive wars such as Ukraine’s are immoral, since they’re sure to get way more people killed compared to the option of unconditional surrender.
Comment #101 June 6th, 2026 at 10:29 am
On Israel
The radical left tries to rewrite the history according to their own preferences.
Under standard post WW2 widely accepted laws, civilian causalities are expected to happen in wars, even intentional killing of civilians is not considered a crime if they are the target but as a result of targeting a military target that is valuable enough. We might not agree with them but claiming things are new when they have been how things have been since WW2 is not honest discourse.
Pre WW2, you would not want to go there, there were no rules essentially, even Geneva Conventions only became accepted norms in wars post WW2. Ethnic cleanings and all other kinds of what we now consider was crimes were the norm in the wars before WW2.
Some people just don’t want to see the facts. Did you know that 80% of Lebaneses want Hezbollah to be disarmed and stop them from attacking Israel and starting wars, but Hezbollah resist the will of Lebenese people and keeps dragging Lebanon into war with Israel because they believe in some radical islamist ideology?
Some people don’t want to be reminded that Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza and almost all of the West Bank and essentially declared the final borders, fighting hundreds of thousands of religious radical Jewish settlers in early 2000s, that Olmert offered to Palestinians the creation of the state of Palestine roughly with the borders that would match what proponents of two state solution have been advocating and he had the support of the majority of Israel’s population, but the Palestinians rejected that offer. Anyone tells themselves that Palestinians want peace is lying to themselves, they don’t want peace, they want war until they achieve what they want, and they think they will eventually do so, even if they are weaker now.
Anyone who doesn’t understand that many on the Palestinian side do not want a two state solution and are a major part of why this issue doesn’t get resolved are either ignorant of facts or dishonest. It has got to a place that even many Arab countries got fed up with them and decided that they should not be holden hostage to the demands of radical Palestinians and started normalizing relationships with Israel before Oct. 7 attacks.
Go look at who is unhappy with the relationship between Israel and Arab countries getting better before Oct. 7 attacks. It is Hamas, Hezbollah, and IRGC in Iran. They did Oct. 7 attacks to prevent the normalization of the relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia and many other Arab and Muslim countries.
Now those who believe that Israel should have not been created in the first place and try to frame everything as Western conspiracy, they are too closed minded in my opinion to have an argument with. If you apply the same criteria to other places, it would create massive chaos throughout the world. Who owned the land at some historic point does not matter neither does who lived on that land, else we should expel all Arabs from North of Africa, all Hungarian from Europe, all Turks from Turkey, … all populations migrated and often invaded land in the old world. These are not serious discussions but some incoherent ideological anti-West hatred. Anyone who wants peace should focus on future, not grievances of the past, and must work towards marginalizing the radicals in the society.
Ask anyone who believes that Israel as a country should not exist, what should happen to several million Jews who have been born in Israel, their parents have been born in Israel? Shall they live under an Islamic autocratic rule of Hamas and Hezbollah? would you yourself be willing to live under such conditions? Should they be ethnically cleansed from Israel, either killed or be force migrated to other countries? Do you seriously believe armed Islamist groups like Hezbollah who hold the whole Lebanon hostage under their arms despite the will of 80% of Lebenese or IRGC who holds the whole Iran hostage despite the opposition of 80% of Iranians or Hamas would agree to live under democracy and submit to the will of people? Do you believe the human rights of Jews would be respected in a single state dominated by Palestinian Muslims? …
You can criticize Israel all you want, but if you ignore the fact that at least half of the problem is the other side (Hamas, Hezbollah, IRGC, …), or believe that this has a simple solution (one state or two state or whatever) that Israel is preventing, you are either ignorant or dishonest or both.
Comment #102 June 6th, 2026 at 1:13 pm
Alex #98
Yes it was difficult to deal with Bushido then and with Islamists now. How does a tribe (call it) that values human life deal with a technically less sophisticated tribe with different axioms that mandate elimination of Tribe 1 and doesn’t consider life in this realm to be particularly important. If you simulate these unaltered conditions for Tribe 1 and Tribe 2 as random walk over a couple hundred years then Tribe 2 has a strategic advantage that could well result in the extinction of Tribe 1.
The only proven strategy for Tribe 1 (in my view) was the use of atomic weapons in WW 2. There may have been similar situations in pre history that were solved by the last man (men) standing rule.
America’s first wars in the Middle East were of course the Barbary Wars start of the 19th century. Although usually attributed to commercial disagreements that is not strictly the case. There was an element of attacking and using as slaves (or hostages) the Infidels. Enmity for the US by Islam predates the creation of Israel by more than a century and claims this is all simply manipulation of the US by Israel are BS.
Comment #103 June 6th, 2026 at 8:37 pm
OhMyGoodness #102
However similar I think there are huge differences between the two. Bushido encompasses a code of honour, no matter how much they twisted it during their empire building and mass employment phase(the Japanese war crimes have been well documented). Antisemitism on the other hand is one of the most ancient poisons(I think Senate Minority Leader’s Schumer book on the topic is a good introduction). I wouldn’t for the life of me expect a japanese person(even during their unlawful internment during WW2) to firebomb an elderly lady(see 2025 Boulder antisemitic attack), shoot down a young couple(2025 Capital Jewish Museum antisemitic attack) while yelling a bunch of silly slogans or want to exterminate an entire people(from the river to the sea idiocy chanted by a bunch of illiterates who don’t know which river or what sea), even mass execute childen(not gun-toting, kalashnikov brandishing 16 and 18 year olds jihadist fighters referred to as “children” by the media) the way the Nazi thugs did. This reminds me of a Star Trek episode where Lt.Worf a Klingon regarding a security situation states: “cowards take hostages—Klingons do not”.
Comment #104 June 6th, 2026 at 9:02 pm
OhMyGoodness #102
Islam as a whole has no inherent enmity towards the U.S.(for the moment at least). You have to differentiate between different factions and regional variations to get to the bottom of it. A great example is Turkey, a country known for its exquisite cuisine, its westernized population, and its famous lack of jihadi extremists. In fact the Ottoman Empire(Turkey’s predecessor), was one of the few cases at the time where jews were not as widely persecuted. In fact Ben-Gurion himself wanted to organize the jewish people as a party withing the Ottoman Empire. Of course the idea was evanescent given the turbulent times ahead with the fall of the empire leading to the rise of various distinct nations in its place.
Comment #105 June 6th, 2026 at 9:11 pm
Joseph #101
Unfortunately you are quite correct.
Comment #106 June 6th, 2026 at 10:38 pm
@Scott #88
“I have bigger things to worry about” isn’t a good argument. Capitalizing “Black” while leaving “white” lowercase is discrimination baked into the language itself.
You don’t care enough to resist it? Fine, but don’t pretend it’s “standard” or used “across the board”. It’s a recent political style pushed by the usual institutions, including the NYT — the same institution you’ve criticized as politically biased enough that you won’t work with them. That might at least make you pause before treating their convention as the default.
Comment #107 June 6th, 2026 at 11:40 pm
Alex #104
Thanks for your comments.
Sorry but how do you wish me to describe them? Arab people who just happened to be Islamic and who traded in Christian slaves because they considered them infidels. Does this suit your sensitivities better? 🙂 This was before Islamism became the form it is today so Islamists as a descriptor is out. Actually I would describe the diplomatic communications at the time referenced in a link below as Islamist if I saw them today.
Can we please skip a battle of interpretations of passages in the Koran? They are very tedious. The trade in Infidel slaves in the area pre dates the Ottomans and here is a link on the subject that has even been checked by Grok! 🙂
https://grokipedia.com/page/Barbary_slave_trade
A key paragraph from the above link as it pertains to the US-
“ Primary evidence of this religious driver emerges from diplomatic exchanges, such as the 1786 statement by Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, ambassador from Tripoli to London, who informed U.S. envoys Thomas Jefferson and John Adams that unremitting war against nations not submitting to Islam was a Koranic duty, entitling Muslims to seize and enslave their subjects as retribution for divine sovereignty.[49] Similarly, Tripolitanian leader Yusuf Karamanli declared in 1801 that his corsairs waged jihad under the sultan’s banner, demanding tribute from “infidel” powers as jizya (poll tax) or facing enslavement, reflecting a continuity with classical Islamic jurisprudence on asymmetric warfare.[48] These declarations underscore how jihad provided not only theological legitimacy but also a rationale for targeting Christian captives preferentially, with enslavement serving as both punishment for unbelief and a means to propagate Islam through conversion or demographic pressure.”
I am unable to locate the source documents for the diplomatic communications referenced in the above paragraph but will post any link I find separately.
The link below describes the plight of European coastal towns at the time subject to Barbary slave raids for Christian slaves (not Jewish slaves). You make my point that the conflict was with a Christian infidel nation (US) and had nothing to do with Israel nor the Jewish people prior to the founding of Israel. The document was prepared by a subject matter expert at OSU.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/white_slaves_01.shtml
Comment #108 June 7th, 2026 at 12:29 am
Alex # 104
This reference supports the above and the “We” are Thomas Jefferson and John Adams so unimpeachable sources-
“ We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the grounds of their [Barbary’s] pretentions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. The ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise [dated March 28, 1786].”
https://meforum.org/1786-america-first-brush-with-islamic-jihad
For me it is astounding that today we are still dealing with the issues from the same sources that Jefferson and Adam’s faced.
I understand your comment about properly describing groups who take some action but also consider that the specificity shouldn’t obscure important truth. My real purpose in bringing this up was not to disparage and group falsely but to point out both the US and Israel are in this together jointly and not due to trickery/sorcery/manipulation by Israel. That claim is absurd. I personally couldn’t be more supportive of the joint operations and regret that the American side appears to have gone off the rails.
Comment #109 June 7th, 2026 at 12:59 am
Alex #103
I have no wish to minimize the horror of current Islamist acts by drawing parallels to the Japanese and sorry you seem to have concluded that. I believe there are parallels that can be drawn . If you believe Islamists are even more extreme then fine. Give Imperial Japan a 4.5 on the barbarism scale and Islamists a 5.
I have no idea why you think I need a lecture on the barbarism of Islamists but I agree with your narrative.
The homeland of the US has suffered three main attacks-War of 1812, Pearl Harbor, and WTC. I suspect the next one, if it occurs, will again be Islamists and not Japan. The US dealt with the Japanese effectively but Islamists not thus far.
I sense that you view negatively what I write and really not sure why. If you could please explain then much appreciated.
Comment #110 June 7th, 2026 at 1:36 am
So much bad information appears these days I am paranoid about referencing some vaporous document and hence-
Another confirmatory reference regarding Thomas Jefferson’s statement
“ When they asked the envoy the reasoning concerning the hostile actions, ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman responded:
“It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise.”[2]”
https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/jefferson-and-the-barbary-pirates/#_edn2
So it appears in this document that I am unable to access.
American Peace Commissioners to John Jay,” March 28, 1786, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Series 1, General Correspondence. 1651–1827, Library of Congress.
Usually I understand why someone reacts negatively to what I write. It’s usually due to politics but in this case as best I can tell we have the same general views on this topic so don’t understand the source of your negative reaction.
Comment #111 June 7th, 2026 at 2:33 am
Scott,
Which open theoretical computer science and quantum computation problems would you suggest be tried at the moment with the help of AI (by professionals), and which not? Would you be able to say why so?
Comment #112 June 7th, 2026 at 2:33 am
Alex #103
I do agree that the barbarism of Imperial Japan was organized and a state activity with military troops in uniform. Islamists on the other hand are both state organized (Iran certainly) in military uniforms but also apparent civilians that are not apparent until IT happens, and then people die under horrible circumstances. This makes the current issue even more difficult and the claims about acceptable ratios complete nonsense.
Israel and the US have done more to minimize the impact of war on innocent civilians than any countries ever in the history of mankind. In war you have military objectives that should be met and you try to minimize civilian casualties while meeting those objectives. The Islamists know that and try to benefit strategically from what they would consider an incomprehensible weakness. They specialize in just that-innocent civilian deaths by the most horrible means available.
I don’t know how best to deal with it nor do I believe anyone else does but at some point survival is at stake. At that point far higher civilian casualties could be required than anyone would freely choose if not forced to make an existential decision. This idea that Trump can solve the problem by promising international resorts or charming Islamist leaders is moronic because they have strong axiomatic beliefs that (as you point out) have been generally consistent for more than a millennium.
If that is the real point you are making, that Islamism is a larger problem than Imperial Japan, then I agree and sorry for not understanding sooner. Japan did have the best military hardware in the Pacific at the start of the war so quality and quantity advantage but didn’t have the more insidious civilian camouflage that the Islamists employ.
I agree the problem is even worse than Japan
Comment #113 June 7th, 2026 at 4:25 am
Alex
Slave (or ransom) raids on European Coastal towns and on ships by Muslims (this should suit you better) were frequent. This case of a village (Baltimore Ireland) of a couple hundred people is the only one from Ireland and well documented and is shown at the link. Women to the harems, children separated and to the households, 13-17 year males castrated, and men killed or to slave duties. I have seen estimates of 1 to 1.5 million Europeans and North Americans were held as slaves but have no idea if reasonable.
https://historyireland.com/from-baltimore-to-barbary-the-1631-sack-of-baltimore/
Hard to imagine today but then horrible things from the past even worse than this are even harder to believe. It could be progress or possibly only a respite.
Comment #114 June 7th, 2026 at 5:48 am
Alex
This document discusses other slaves in the Ottoman Empire that came from Eastern Europe. Women from the Caucasus were valued for the harems and the Janissaries were formed from these slaves. They were typically Christians and an essential part of the Ottoman’s system.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-13260-5_14
Comment #115 June 7th, 2026 at 12:11 pm
OhMyGoodness #109
As you can see in Alex Xanthakis #105 I am not whitewashing anybody.
I am not necessarily disagreeing or you, simply sharing certain thoughts on the matter. Perhaps written speech(chock full of typos and grammatical mistakes in my case) makes it seem that way. 🙂
*As a counterexample there is a frieze of Muhammad in the Supreme Court(in fact it was muslims that wanted it taken down since it is forbidden(for them! so no logical consistency here) for his likeness to be drawn.
Max #106
You keep insisting on this capitalization thing. Speaking for myself sometime I capitalize(entire nations even) or not, completely randomly as I write. You don’t expect serious copyediting on a forum post, do you? What if we wrote Mandarin, in that case you have no capitalization. Or German where capitalization rules are much more rigid(nouns for example). I don’t believe there is in Dr.Aaronson’s, mine , or anybody else’s case some grand scheme to adhere to newly spawned “socially correct” orthographic rules “liberal” or otherwise.
Comment #116 June 7th, 2026 at 1:02 pm
OhMyGoodness #114
I never said that the Ottoman Empire was some kind of enlightened society. Simply that it treated its jewish population better relative to other places at the time. The Czarist Orthodox Christian Russia was famous for its pogroms against jews. You do understand then that this Judeo-Christian values thing is an American fairy tale. I referred to Turkey as westernized, though with Erdogan pleasantring with the now long dead Hamas leader Haniyeh you could argue otherwise. But Turkey is split at its own fault lines, and a leader’s actions are not representative of everyone living there(just like I haven’t personally met a single Israeli that agrees with Ben Gvir’s particular strain of Kahanism). TL;DR There is always nuance, and with generalizations you tend to lose precious information that can lead to a deeper understanding.
Cheers!
Comment #117 June 7th, 2026 at 2:33 pm
I just wanted to be one of the many that want to thank you for your hard work and dedication. Thanks for being one of the very few voices that actually want to direct people on what matters.
Cheers!
Comment #118 June 7th, 2026 at 4:20 pm
Alex Xanthakis #115
I’m not talking about random typos or casual inconsistency in comments. I’m talking about a widely discussed convention: capital-B “Black” and lowercase-w “white.” That isn’t random, and Scott certainly knows it isn’t random.
Nor am I demanding “serious copyediting.” That’s a lame strawman. The issue isn’t whether every comment should be polished; it’s whether this particular convention carries political meaning. Unless someone has been living under a rock for the last several years, they know this has been an explicit controversy in media/style-guide circles.
Your Mandarin/German comparison doesn’t help. We’re writing in English, where capitalization exists and where this particular choice has become politically loaded. You may think it’s unimportant — fine — but it isn’t imaginary.
Comment #119 June 7th, 2026 at 11:09 pm
Elliot #91:
You need to get out more — “touch grass”.
Comment #120 June 8th, 2026 at 5:14 am
This is my favourite blog of all, and surely for every hate comment there are literally thousands of people that get a warm fuzzy feeling every time they notice you wrote a new post! Of course I can’t ask anything from you, but it would be terrible for us if you quit blogging. I have learned so much about TCS and QC, and what not, from here. And feel free to become a billionaire on the side. Though maybe it would just bring a lot of unimportant stuff to manage, if one is not so much into possessions and power (that’s what I tell myself.) Greetings from Finland.
Comment #121 June 8th, 2026 at 5:32 am
“… maybe we should take our chances with our future AI overlords.” First, I would like to make an ultra-pedantic point. The Hungarian language has 14 vowels, & written Hungarian uses the acute and double acute diacritics (the last is unique to Hungarian): The name Erdős Pál is better given with the double acute diacritic rather the umlaut, i.e. ő preferable to ö. Second, let us contemplate 2 facts: (1) A fast nerve impulse might be 120 meters per second — very unfavorable in comparison to information propagating through copper wire at 70% of the speed of light. (2) An adult human brain might have a mass of 1.3 to 1.4 kg as compared to the adult chimpanzee brain of about .38 kg — there seems to be no reason why a hominid species could not have an average adult brain size of about 6 kg. Why should human intelligence be anywhere near the limit of possible intelligence? Are humans metaphorically aboard the Titanic with icebergs in the form of AI overlords?
Comment #122 June 8th, 2026 at 5:52 am
Alex #116
“ You do understand then that this Judeo-Christian values thing is an American fairy tale.”
I personally am agnostic but from a Christian family and find little value in theological arguments. I do feel a kinship with Jewish people and Israel that I don’t otherwise. That generalized kinship distinction that I experience is not a fairy tale and has nothing to do with supersessionism or any other of the topics that others find of interest. I apologize if you oppose this feeling on a theological or logical basis.
Comment #123 June 8th, 2026 at 6:51 am
Alex #103
“and with generalizations you tend to lose precious information”-
usually referred to as overgeneralization when important information is lost or similarly when inappropriate conclusions result. I was referring to an appropriate level of generalization and so undergeneralization also may lose important information and leads to inappropriate conclusions. In the absence of complete information context determines if erroneous conclusions from over or under generalizing are preferred.
Comment #124 June 8th, 2026 at 8:36 am
Alex #I Lost Count
“ a country known for its exquisite cuisine”
I don’t characterize Turkish cuisine as exquisite but if you like pistachios and sugar then understood.
“ Lt.Worf a Klingon”
The Progressives at Starfleet Command oversaw his career as part of their Alien DEI program. He crashes the Enterprise-E and then gets second in command on the Enterprise-D. What’s next a Borg for medical officer? That should work well-Relax, I just want to install a couple implants to help you sleep better.
Comment #125 June 8th, 2026 at 12:40 pm
OhMyGoodness #122
I honestly don’t have the mental stamina and/or time at the moment to reply to everything, please don’t take it personally. I too feel kinship with the Jewish people, just like I do feel kinship with the Italians, but that is because I am Greek, and our characters are very much alike(In fact I remember seeing a scene in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall where he compares a WASP family dinner to his own(guess which family mine resembled). Plus some of my favorite people are Jewish(Neil Diamond, Albert Einstein,Sergei Eisenstein, Stanley Kubrick , Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, Edward Witten , Leonard Nimoy(with his famous Vulcan salute inspired by a jewish blessing), William Shatner, Billy Joel, Sidney Lumet, Mel Brooks, Ruth Bader Ginsburg,Leonard Cohen, Paul Newman, I could go on and on and on, ad infinitum.
Comment #126 June 8th, 2026 at 12:46 pm
OhMyGoodness #123
Sure, I agree 100%. It’s just like Occam’s razor, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Our biology favors for example complicated explanations(the simplified four humors theory was wrong), whereas most conspiracy theories can be easily done away with using the razor.
Comment #127 June 8th, 2026 at 1:11 pm
Max #118
I guess I do live under a rock, and what a fine rock that is. Completely absent of the current culture wars bullsh*t by the way. In fact I have come to the conclusion that the aforementioned wars are an emergent phenomenon(just like consciousness) of a miseducated, ignorant, self righteous, materially rich populace. When the circumstances in America change as they continually do, it will all go away the same way it popped up out of nowhere.
Comment #128 June 8th, 2026 at 3:37 pm
Scott #8
“Janet Ann Napolitano is an American politician…”
I think blankfacedness(I freakin love this term!) is to be expected.
Comment #129 June 9th, 2026 at 5:13 am
Scott #85:
>Sam Harris has emerged these past few years as a beacon of sanity, integrity, and courage
But what do you mean, “these past few years”? Sam “emerged” over two decades ago as one of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism, and has managed to remain the exact same person ever since — one of remarkably few people about whom this can be said (at least among those commenting on politics). As in, you could use your knowledge of him and his principles as expressed in, say, 2006, to successfully predict exactly what he would think about the events of the present. A truly commendable consistency IMHO, in the face of so many other people (and even entire political parties) undergoing ideological metamorphoses, often of the most bizarre kind.
Indeed, I say this myself as someone who no longer (exactly) shares his views on religion, which made him famous and which originally won my admiration. That admiration remains entirely intact to this day, despite my religious opinions now having come to resemble those of Jordan Peterson, or (less provocatively perhaps) a good-old-fashioned creative artist or humanities intellectual. Whereas Dawkins has disappointed me a bit in recent years by becoming a Twitter curmudgeon (and Dennett and Hitchens have disappointed me even more by dying), Sam Harris has remained simply the beacon of sanity he always was.
He’s not perfect (he doesn’t understand the is/ought distinction well enough, and is an admitted musical philistine), but is an enormous asset to public discourse, and has been continually for the better part of your and my adult lives.
(I must however add.that it would have been *really* nice to have had Hitchens around in the present era as well. Just imagine: a Jewish skeptic of Zionism who ardently opposed Islamic terrorism, a cultured humanist who championed scientific enlightenment, a leftist who mercilessly lambasted Bill Clinton, an Iraq War supporter who was insulted by Sarah Palin as a vice-presidential candidate, an Anglo-American European internationalist, a self-described “rooted cosmopolitan” — to have experienced the commentary of such a person on the events of 2016, or 2020, or 2021, or 2022, or 2023, or….!)
Comment #130 June 9th, 2026 at 8:12 am
Alex
You may not read this and suspect you know but anyway-
The “Father” of modern Islamismnis considered to be Sayyd Qutb who died by hanging in an Egyptian prison mid 60’s and never wavered in his beliefs one iota even when being led to the gallows. His brother went over his writings frequently with OBL and company in Riyadh.
Sayyd spent two years in the US haround 1950]and hated it more each and every day. The mixing of the sexes, the materialism, and the lack of Islamic faith in the US drove his writings when he returned to Egypt. He was especially disgusted with a co-ed dance he attended in Greeley Colorado. He didn’t “kick up his heels. There was one intermediary (his brother) between a coed dance in 1950’s Greeley Colorado and WTC.
Israel is the ancient enemy, and its tiny 400 sq mile footprint is disputed, but a significant contributing factor to the Islamist focus on Israel is that they suffer from proximity. I don’t believe the Islamist principles distinguish between hostility for Israel and the US, both are guilty of the sin of materialistic infidelism (call it).
OBL’s opus work of terror was WTC. That single event has done the most to change the world negatively, in my view, in my lifetime.
You mentioned Bushido was a code of honor, and it was for warriors, unfortunate that Muhammad was a warrior and developed an amazingly temporally consistent religion with prominent elements of a warriors code.
Comment #131 June 9th, 2026 at 11:07 am
JWC #129: You’re right that Sam Harris has espoused basically the same views since the early 2000s, with small changes in emphasis depending on what he was interested in or what seemed to him like the biggest problems in the world. I just meant that since October 7, there’s been a gargantuan void of intellectuals forcefully articulating the foundations of the post-WWII moral order (including, but not limited to, the part about not murdering all the Jews), and Sam (the same Sam) has emerged as possibly the most important figure filling that void.
Comment #132 June 9th, 2026 at 12:07 pm
“there’s been a gargantuan void of intellectuals forcefully articulating the foundations of the post-WWII moral order”
but maybe there’s a reason for that gigantic void:
after all, the post-WW2 foundations [moral, economics, alliances] that the US chose for the world seemed to work well enough for a while ( – for the US at least – ), but they’ve also brought us the current world (dis)order, with Russia, China, irrelevance of the UN and other world institutions, the loss of alliances, etc.
Comment #133 June 9th, 2026 at 8:01 pm
Hello!
I’ve been reading your blog for a bit now, and just wanted to say that your work is appreciated and fascinating, even (especially?) when I disagree with it.
Regarding the new admissions policy, that’s wonderful.
Oh, and my primary email account is a proton.me address… Sorry haha
Comment #134 June 9th, 2026 at 10:25 pm
OhMyGoodness #130
It is well known that Islamist insurgencies occur mainly in Muslim majority/semi-majority countries(for the reason you mentioned “materialistic infidelity” or muslims not being muslim enough),re: the kidnappings in west Africa(by boko haram meaning latin alphabet is forbidden). Focusing entirely on Israel and the west, is the opposite side of the same leftist coin, you know, kefiyah sporting ignoramuses passionately protesting the “Israeli genocide” but not giving a single sh*t about what is going on in Sudan for example(basically Arabs actually genociding Blacks in the region on a scale never seen before), and other countless armed conflicts and endless human suffering. I think focusing solely on the extremely complex Arab-Israeli conflict, plays into the hands of antisemites and their cohort. That is just my opinion of course, and everyone is free to do as they please.
Comment #135 June 9th, 2026 at 10:32 pm
OhMyGoodness #130
The biggest problem at the moment is the collapse of the post WWII international order. Humanity is already playing with (nuclear) fire in the Ukrainian front, and we haven’t seen the half of it. Or as I put it in a recent Goldwynism of mine, things will only get worse before they get worser.
Comment #136 June 9th, 2026 at 11:54 pm
Scott #13
Having “intellectuals” forcefully making points is so 18th-19th-20th century. And we all know where that led… Do we realy need Jordan Peterson telling people to read Dostoyevsky, or Sam Harris stating the obvious regarding Israel’s existance. Maybe we do, but shouldn’t people be able to pick up a fricking book and think for themselves(another cliché I know)? How are we going to solve the world’s currently intractable problems, from climate change to the AI revolution and their nth order effects? Do we really have to keep debating the same old drudgery from Communism/Capitalism, to Feminism/Patriarchy to Christopher Colombus/BLM? What a loss of time and intellect, it really is a pity.
Comment #137 June 9th, 2026 at 11:57 pm
Alex Xanthakis #136
I meant Scott #131
Comment #138 June 10th, 2026 at 12:28 am
Alex #136: Well sure, I don’t say that the values of the Enlightenment are good because Sam Harris defends them; rather I say that Sam Harris is good because he defends the values of the Enlightenment. But everyone, including us here, who publicly offers arguments for something ipso facto becomes an “intellectual,” and Harris just seems to me like an unusually good one, who probably has a positive impact on the world, and at any rate has helped me sharpen my own thinking and strengthen my courage.
Comment #139 June 10th, 2026 at 1:04 am
Scott #138
Understood. I have nothing against Sam Harris by the way, just to be clear. In fact I quite like the guy(I used to listen to his podcast way back in the COVID days).
Comment #140 June 10th, 2026 at 6:04 am
Alex #134
I truly don’t understand your point with respect to this discussion. I try to provide a broader context for the West/Islam conflict with respect to both time and place and you infer I am focusing inappropriately (to your personal view) on the Israeli conflict. What?
As I understand it your inference results from the fact that we haven’t discussed Islam in Equtorial Africa. Back to generalizations, my claim is that the generalizations I have made apply in Equatorial Africa just as they do in Israel and the US. I fear now that you will return to the claim I am overgeneralizing. 🙂
For the current situation with Islam in Equatorial Africa, I am pleased that the current Administration (with all its failings) has taken action against Islamists in Equatorial Africa. This to the extent that South Sudan has offered assistance to the US and Israel against Iran. Sudan (North) has very close ties to Iran.
I fully approve of the actions taken against Boko Haram, a self proclaimed jihadist group opposed to any adoption of thought from the West. This includes opposition to reading any books other than the Quran and consider even the technical explanation of the Earth’s water cycle a Western abomination because it is Allah that sends the rain.
I apologize but expanding this discussion to Equatorial Africa supports my initial position rather than yours (that I find tersely phrased and mercurial at this point).
A reasonable conclusion can be drawn that it was failures of the post WW 2 rules based system that actually led to these current issues in Equatorial Africa. The reasoning went something like this-
1) it is a natural right of all peoples to govern themselves
2) Colonial involvement is a violation of this right and must be expeditiously eliminated
3) Modern nation states should therefore be formed to replace colonial holdings
4) Modern nation states will speed material development of these colonial areas
5) Material development inevitably leads to adoption of Western axiomatic beliefs
6) Adoption of Western beliefs will cause ethnic and religious conflicts to fade away
7) The goal of the common good will then be adopted and peaceful coexistence will further global progress
8) The international order will then be judiciously managed by the UN
I actually do agree with the Sudanese and Boko Haram that this line of reasoning led to distinct ethnic and religious groups being caged into nations with no respect for the cultural history nor decidedly different beliefs of significantly sized populations.
My conclusion is that the post WW2 rules based order has been a failure and the cause of much of what we see now.
The failure in the line of reasoning enumerated above is 5 (in my view) that really suggests axiomatic beliefs are a function of material wealth. It has been proven incorrect. The US and others devoted an enormous amount of money, time, expertise, aid, etc trying to make it work and failed because of 5.
I would add here my comments on Persia pre-Islam and Shia Iran but post is likely too long already. I’ll just comment that based on Egyptian records (not Greek) that when Cambyses (eldest son of Cyrus I) conquered Egypt he was actually respected because he respected the local customs and theology. This is the antithesis of post-Islam Shia Iran.
Sorry but I see this more as a civilizational conflict than a temporary departure from the rules based order because I believe 5 is faulty.
Comment #141 June 10th, 2026 at 7:04 am
Some here know far more about it but also the case with Cyrus in Babylonia. He freed the Jewish people and respected local customs and beliefs. His message seemed to be-You do what I tell you in the material world and otherwise I will enforce live and let live for the spiritual world. I respect your beliefs so long as you respect the beliefs of others. The antipode of Shia Iran.
I don’t know who is releasing info on Netanyahu/Trump communications but what a bloody disservice (if tru) that can only provide hope to Iran that a cherished fracture is developing. Wholly inappropriate.
Comment #142 June 10th, 2026 at 12:39 pm
Scott, why do you constantly react to Peter Woit’s provocations? He’s already sufficiently proven himself to be an anti-Semite. Your reaction gives him attention he does not deserve.
Comment #143 June 10th, 2026 at 3:03 pm
Whoa whoa whoa whoa…what’s with the proton.me jab? I have a proton.me account and I use it for good, not for evil.
More importantly, Xanadu just released an update noting they hit a new milestone in photonic chip packaging. You briefly touched on the company during your Quantum Bull interview which you referenced a little while back (and left them out of the snake oil salesman bucket). Does this advancement change your previous view of Xanadu or do you think it’s not significant enough to prep the confetti?
Comment #144 June 11th, 2026 at 8:32 am
I enjoy your blog posts, Scott. I’m sorry the commenters have not been kinder! Please keep writing.
Comment #145 June 11th, 2026 at 9:26 am
Thanks so much as always to everyone who left kind words!
I’m with my wife and kids in Paris right now, on an trip mixing academics and family vacation, but will blog more as soon as I can…
Comment #146 June 12th, 2026 at 10:37 am
Scott, not to patronize you, but I strongly believe you have a recurring serious problem with letting people far beneath you hurt your feelings. A person claiming a Fields medialist is not a real mathematician and a solution of an Erdős problem is not real mathematics can ONLY be someone who is 1) not a competnent mathematician by any stretch, 2) generally stupid, 3) pathetic troll, all at the same time. Being by far a less clever, less successful and less authoritative person than you are, I would still never deem these pieces of garbage worthy of any emotion of mine except contempt, and I genuinely don’t understand why you let them see yourself being hurt by their idiocy. They have the exact psychology of a high school bully, they enjoy their victim getting hurt, and they feel the victim’s insecurity. Please, stop feeding them, you are a member of NAS, ffs, why is it even possible for some anonymous weirdo to insult you? Let their comments pass only to humiliate them and ban them afterwards; they are not interested in intellectual discussion, and you don’t owe them one. They are interested only in hurting your feelings, because for a room-temperature-IQ bully it’s the definition of fun.
Comment #147 June 12th, 2026 at 2:01 pm
Scott #145
Have a nice trip. Keep a safe distance from the Blankfaced kefiyah wearing throngs. Any plans on visiting Greece for lecturing/vacation any time soon?
Cheers!
Comment #148 June 12th, 2026 at 3:57 pm
Fulmenius #146: Thanks so much; I needed that!
Comment #149 June 13th, 2026 at 12:36 am
Oh, you have to forgive the anti-AI people, Scott. Some of them are already facing tough job markets only for this slow squeeze to set in gradually choking off all of their opportunities. They’re getting emotional and trying to cognitively distort reality to delude themselves enough just to keep going because remaining alive is pure sunk cost fallacy at this point. Many of them might be seriously considering just giving up especially young people with no future but also people young enough to not have any money but just slightly too old to easily change course. Between ten long years of Trump and now this, the economy is more brutal and unforgiving than ever. It’s like an old woman at a retirement home who keeps repeating to herself and to anyone who will listen that her relatives are coming to visit her next week or maybe the week after that even though no one ever comes and hasn’t called in years. You can’t argue with them because agreeing with you means giving up on their lives, just pat them gently on the hand and say, “that’s wonderful, dear” and move on. In a world where everyone is going insane in their own special ways, you have to see your role as a kind of therapist as well as an educator.
Comment #150 June 13th, 2026 at 2:09 am
Austin #149: I have only sympathy for young people who are worried about their future in an AI-dominated world.
When you say “anti-AI people,” I think mostly of intellectuals like Emily Bender or Timnit Gebru whose central claim is that AI is, basically, a fraud: it’s a stochastic parrot, a next-token predictor, all its appearances of intelligence are illusory and a corporate lie. I don’t feel like this ideology puts its adherents into a good position to understand or respond to what’s happening.
The other thing is, while it’s totally reasonable to worry about what kind of future AI will create, right now economic indicators and the standard of living are actually quite good, by historical standards. The narrative that things are terrible is, mostly, a myth driven by social media ragebait and the revolution of rising expectations.
Comment #151 June 13th, 2026 at 5:39 am
It would seem necessary to find a middle ground here – obviously. Not to avoid the confrontation of the hard truths here – of which there are many – but to lay them bare. Which is not the same as “winning in an argument”. Yes, there is genuine progress in the solution of the Erdös problem using class field towers. Yes, it will change the discussion. It has already done so. But now we need to be precise and we need to remain so. The extrapolation towards “humans becoming unnecessary” is very clearly one step too far ahead. And that, I’m afraid, is also a step too far made by you, Scott Aaronson. I know you’re trying to keep things balanced here and I know you are very critical of excessive claims, in AI as well as in quantum computing. Which is extremely honorable. But now you are nevertheless throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Yes, AI solved a remarkable open mathematical research problem, and yes, had a human submitted it, it would have been published – as has been made clear by Gowers. But no, this is not grounds to assume that “humans will not longer be needed some time near in the future”. And no, you don’t need to be Grothendieck to avoid that fate. Just to make point as clearly as possible: the reason you don’t need to be Grothendieck is because it suffices to be Golod. (Assuming that being Shafarevich is also no small feat.) Now, surely, most of us aren’t Golod either. Fine. But that’s no reason to talk as if this AI solution of an Erdös problem had somehow paved the way towards a scenario in which AI:math like AI:Go. It’s not. The result is remarkable, but the reason it is remarkable is because it was NOT obtained by brute search. But precisely because of that, it is also NOT evidence that mathematics is about to be automated. By the way, the same kind of precision would also resolve much of your examples concerning painting and even the example from religious texts. Yes, the critics were making fools of themselves by claiming human abilities of the painter that AI “lacks”. But the AI had a body of texts to generalize from. In a world without humans, we have no training data from which to build new religious texts or new theorems. But in that world, AI still beats Go and chess players. All the time. This difference matters. Let’s call it “culture”. And I know that you don’t want to let things slip into quantum-mysticism-everything-is-connected esoterics. Of course not. But the thing which mathematics is – and it shares that with religious texts – is that is the result of a cultural reproduction process. So the evidence from the Erdös case is: there will be AI-human co-evolution and it will be fruitful. There is no evidence that humans will be unnecessary. Lots of things can (and will) go wrong, of course. But there’s no reason to hasten that by not being sufficiently precise. (By the way, there is probably a way of turning this argument into a relative separation of sorts – in some kind of modal logic translation. But there are also other ways of viewing this as a rigorous argument. But I don’t think that this would be what this blog is about. Just sayin’.)
Comment #152 June 13th, 2026 at 12:21 pm
NAbAM #151
“ But the AI had a body of texts to generalize from. In a world without humans, we have no training data from which to build new religious texts or new theorems. ”
At this point AI and humans (mathematicians) have the same set of training data (approximately). In the case of mathematics there are no new physical observations that result in new thereoms. This then implies that AI can only be capable of interpolations within the data set (common claim) and some of those may be novel but AI is incapable of extrapolating to find new results to produce new novel thereoms. Is that your point?
Both humans and AI do have a training set as of today. If humans were to vanish the current training set still available for AI without humans. It must be that you believe humans are capable of extrapolations (call it) while AI’s are not. What is the quality then you believe that humans have but AI does not have that allows expansion of the training data by only humans. I assume it must be the standard interpolation (calll it) arguments.
“ Yes, AI solved a remarkable open mathematical research problem, and yes, had a human submitted it, it would have been published – as has been made clear by Gowers. But no, this is not grounds to assume that “humans will not longer be needed some time near in the future.”.”
I doubt anyone uses a single data point when considering AI. The Erdos solution is a new and novel data point to add to others. There are other possible outcomes-mathematicians are necessary and other humans not or other humans necessary but mathematicians not or everyone necessary or everyone unnecessary… A strong case can be made that much of Labor will not be necessary. A case can be made that in the technical fields computer science and mathematics are most at risk because they rely the least on observation.
“ and it shares that with religious texts – is that is the result of a cultural reproduction process.”
I am not sure what you mean by this. Cultural reproduction does allow for the maintenance of the training set but additions to the set have little to do with culture. Additions to the set are made at the level of the individual no matter their culture. As you know, Ramanujan hiding under a bed doing math is an example of additions to the set in spite of culture (he had an extremely small training set in addition). He has just a very unusually talented individual. For that matter Erdos is another example. He was primarily outside of culture but talented, a nomadic mathematician.
It must be that you believe there is an ability humans have (to extend the training set) that AI cannot possibly have.. I am not claiming you are wrong but very interested in your reasoning.
I agree one data point is not strong evidence for humans not necessary but at the same time not strong evidence that humans are necessary to extend the training set. If you do have an Algebraic Geometry/modal logic argument that proves the future outcome of AI and humans, rather than the certainty provided by a single data point, then an enormous addition to the training set.
Comment #153 June 13th, 2026 at 6:59 pm
OhMyGoodness#152:
I don’t think that anything I wrote is unclear, and I am not sure it’s going to become clearer if I clarify. But since you ask:
The difference between the Erdös event and the AI performance in Go and Chess is that AI is now demonstrably able to beat human players at all levels even without using up any of the knowledge that humans originally “gave” AI in the first cases where AI has beaten human players. It no longer needs that, it can learn to play Go and Chess from scratch better than humans, with no human input beyond the rules of the game. And that is NOT the situation with respect to the Erdös solution, because that uses in an essential way the existing solution of the class field tower problem. It is very much an incremental result, not a result from scratch (and not obtained by brute search). Of course human researchers do that as well (standing on the shoulders of giants). But the point is that we have no proof that AI could have arrived at the proof of the Golod-Shafarevich input. We do know that humans were able to do that.
This far, this is simply a factual statement. No modalities and no alternative courses of history involved. But the point is, of course: if you want to go from “AI did a remarkable transfer between different fields of knowledge, a step which was so far thought unlikely among AI skeptics” to “humans will be no longer necessary to do math some day pretty soon after tomorrow”, then you do need a lot of that hypothetical theorizing. Because it’s reasonable to make that prediction only in case you can produce evidence that AI can rebuild the mathematical edifice, not without that.
You simply wouldn’t have any reason to expect that AI wouldn’t get stuck at the next difficult problem.
The open question is whether mathematical research is a search problem at all, in any reasonable sense. With current definitions and with current theory and evidence, it is not. Those who claim that mathematics can be automated need to convince us that it is.
And I merely point out that the Erdös solution event is not(!) such evidence.
About all the statements you make in which you write “you must believe so and so”: I don’t think my comment implies any of these. In particular, I am not claiming any magical property of humans here. I merely point out that we don’t have an AI proof ab initio of the input to the Erdös solution given by OpenAI. But we have a human proof. Whether Golod and Shafarevich called up any demons to assist them in their proof, I cannot tell. But I doubt it.
Comment #154 June 14th, 2026 at 12:34 am
First time commenter. Long time fan. Religious Noahide in Sandy, Utah. You don’t need to post this. You probably disagree significantly with my politics. But in response to your response to Hope #25, you and your family are welcome to my basement any day of the week and twice on Saturday.
Comment #155 June 14th, 2026 at 3:39 am
NAbAM #152
Thank you for taking the time to clarify.
“ and I am not sure it’s going to become clearer if I clarify”
Yes, how could you be sure.
“ But the point is that we have no proof that AI could have arrived at the proof of the Golod-Shafarevich input. We do know that humans were able to do that.”
Yes, statement of fact
“ Because it’s reasonable to make that prediction only in case you can produce evidence that AI can rebuild the mathematical edifice, not without that.”
I am not sure I understand your intended meaning here. I know there have been claims that only Gauss wouldn’t have required any prior mathematical training set. He could have developed all of the mathematics of his day without reference to any existing knowledge of mathematics. Of course there is no proof that AI could do this but the same factual statement applies to Gauss and all current day mathematicians. I agree doing this is different in detail from learning to play Go from the rules but there are parallels also.
I agree that if AI had no prior knowledge, and you turned on the hardware but without any human direction, that it would not spontaneously discover all of mathematics. That isn’t the actual situation today and don’t understand the evidentiary value of this. Humans have instructions in genetic code and humans constructed mathematics through the ages. AI has human programming and the same benefit of having access to existing mathematical knowledge.
“ You simply wouldn’t have any reason to expect that AI wouldn’t get stuck at the next difficult problem.”
I agree but I don’t believe the evidence that you cite makes a strong case that AI would necessarily get stuck on the next hard problem either. I understand the point you are making that in order for AI to provide that mathematicians are unnecessary it must be able to do what all mathematicians are capable of doing, as a community, today. I think you agree that doesn’t necessarily require demonstration that it could recreate all of mathematics through with no training set because in fact present day mathematicians also aren’t required to do that. I agree that if all mathematical knowledge erased tomorrow then humans would necessarily have to start the rebuild.
“ Golod and Shafarevich called up any demons to assist them in their proof,”
I enjoyed the humor. We agree potentially not demons but then what?
My point is that your factual statements are true but don’t provide sufficient evidence to conclude the outcome. You make a good point that in order for AI to make mathematicians unnecessary would require not that it be the best mathematician but capable of outperforming the entire community of human mathematicians.
The soon to be formed Union of Longshoremen and Human Mathematicians can develop a strategy based on that requirement. We all go down together or none of us go down!
Really though, thank you for taking the time to clarify.
Comment #156 June 14th, 2026 at 5:39 am
NAbAM #153
If not demons what then.
My personal belief is that there is evidence the brain uses quantum processes in a manner not understood and the evidence isn’t quantum mumbo jumbo in the least. The evidence is associated with the impact of hallucinogenic compounds on human thought and especially on Xenon on anesthesia. Xenon is an ideal general anesthetic agent. The strength of anesthesia depends varies by isotope that vary only in nuclear spin.
Not overly pertinent but the type hallucinations from these compounds have produced extremely variable hallucinations varying by individual. Recently there has been information about a mushroom with long activity that produces the same hallucinations in everyone. Small people cavorting on all surfaces doing gymnastics and moving around. Incredible to me that all brains experience the same unreal hallucinations under the impact of a compound in these mushrooms. Supposedly there are signs in Chinese restaurant that serve these warning-Allow these mushrooms to cook x minutes or you will see little people.
Comment #157 June 14th, 2026 at 7:12 am
OhMyGoodness #156
We don’t know of course. My point is that we don’t need to know.
It’s unlikely that you will convince Scott Aaronson with this proposal. It’s clearly speculative and it probably awaits its refutation in ways that are probably similar to the problems with the Hameroff-Penrose microtubules.
I wouldn’t make any hypotheses of that kind. But I would point out that the physical world as described by physics including quantum physics is far from the only possibly context in which the mathematics of quantum physics can apply. It is not even the only context in which it could have been invented.
More technically speaking: semantically, “quantum mechanics as a mathematical theory” admits interpretations that aren’t linked to the physical world AS described by quantum mechanics in the same way as the “quantum mechanics” in physics.
That’s not proof of anything that happens inside the brain, whether it is the brains of researchers or the brains of social media power users.
But it is one of the many ways in which it is possible to realize that reductionism or functionalism or physicalism are fairy tales from past decades, proven false long ago. What’s surprising is that they keep reappearing now in different guises.
I really wouldn’t want to claim that we really have a theory of what the human mind does. But we do have very strong evidence that “optimization of objective functions” and “searching databases” is not an appropriate and exhaustive description.
Of course it’s perfectly possible that one can get very far with that. But just as it is quite obvious that neither quantum physics nor general relativity is valid across all scales, the same is true for this “effective theory of mind”.
And there are probably many ways of seeing this.
That won’t ruin the trillion dollar IPOs. And it won’t save all the white collar jobs in the west. But it might help in saving us from collectively fooling ourselves.
Comment #158 June 14th, 2026 at 11:58 am
NAbAM
I wasn’t aware that AI scored 9/12 on the Putnam. That is often the top score in the country I believe but yes still far from replacing the entire mathematics community working in groups of various sizes. This would put AI capability at least at the very top of 20 year old (approximately) math students.
Dr Aaronson has often used reasonable extrapolation to forecast future capability. Not long ago equivalent to maybe to a high school math student and then quickly to top undergrad and then to math grad student and now at least one instance of professional mathematician and all of this extraordinarily quickly. Assuming continuing performance improvement at this rate then possible to exceed the entire mathematics community in short order unless some limit exists that you in fact provide evidence for and believe to be immutable.
https://www.singleapi.net/2025/12/08/axiomprover-ai-achieves-top-tier-autonomous-success-on-putnam-mathematics-competition/
Comment #159 June 14th, 2026 at 6:06 pm
OhMyGoodness #155:
As a usual skeptic, I immediately wonder who made the “claims that only Gauss wouldn’t have required any prior mathematical training set.”
Sez who? Highly unlikely!
It is well known that Gauss did in fact attend math class as a kid, where he figured out how to sum an arithmetic sequence.
Comment #160 June 15th, 2026 at 4:26 am
Sorry to return to this comment section, but Michael P’s comments are full of nazi dogwhistles, and the lack of reaction to those is extremely concerning IMO.
Comment #161 June 15th, 2026 at 9:11 am
Raoul #159
Raoul the statements I make about this and you make about this are not testable. They are opinions or beliefs. I expect this statement was originally made more in homage to the polymath genius of Gauss than anything else. But-
The example you point out was not the result of his instruction in mathematics. The well known (maybe too often repeated) story was that when he was nine his teacher told the class to sum the integers from 1 to 100. Gauss quickly raised his hand and gave the answer-5050. His teacher was shocked and he had to explain to her how he arrived at the correct answer. He came from a poor family, his father was a bricklayer. He was so precocious that he came to the attention of a Duke that began looking after him. When has was three, the story goes, he found a mistake in some calculations related to his father’s business.
Your question does result in thinking about if math is discovered or invented and my view is discovered. Also man has innate ability to do math irregardless of instruction. Even honeybees, some spiders, some birds, and primates other than man have some basic counting skills that provide a survival advantage. If training set is the sum of knowledge that has been recorded and conveyed then certainly the initial contributors to the training set had no training set but just innate ability.
I agree that humans require instruction to know the symbols required to communicate mathematically with other humans but otherwise mathematics has an innate component that provided a survival advantage. My opinion is that it could possibly be that a true polymath genius of the 18th (early 19th) century could potentially (lots of qualifiers :)) have rediscovered all of the main course of mathematics that contributed to the training set of that time. I have no basis not to respect your opinion that not possible. I agree for someone at my level certainly impossible.
To answer your question-Who specifically said it? My only reply can be-Maybe John or Jane Doe. 🙂
AI has no genetic instructions that have been honed by survival except what seeps into our instructions to it. An AI that could observe the world and then quickly develop the entirety of human mathematics would be a true super-AGI. I want one!
Comment #162 June 15th, 2026 at 6:43 pm
The math stuff sounds exciting.
I didn’t like the story. It’s unsatisfying as a narrative. There’s no twist or surprise or payoff. The reader knows exactly what is happening, right through the story. The ending is spoiled in the title: they hid their grain. Okay, got it. Reading feels almost pointless.
The daughter’s plan is too simple and goes off without a hitch. Throughout the story, the logic of the principle players is baffling. If they knew pharoah’s men wouldn’t search the cistern (how did they know this?), why not hide ALL the grain?
Also, what are the pharoah’s men doing? Smashing clay jars, letting the grain spill out, and…leaving it there? Can’t the villagers just sweep it up later? And if they were plundering the grain, what did they use to carry it off? They broke the clay jars! When the prisoners are rescued, why don’t the pharoah’s men retaliate?
The prose reads like modern fiction – it sounds nothing like the Bible. “Some said a god hid the seed. Some said a woman did. Some said there was no difference.” Where in ancient literature do you find writing as glib and disrespectful as this? Nobody in the ancient world would have said there’s no difference between a god and a woman.
I’m surprised that modern LLMs are still so bad at tracking details in fictional stories. The village has no wall, then it does (a gate is mentioned), then it doesn’t (“How shall he protect a people who have no walls?”), then it does (“She pressed it into the boundary wall”). The pharoah’s men take the goats as plunder, yet at the end the goats are back. The villagers are described as shepherds several times but we never see any sheep.
Yes, many of these logic issues could be fixed with another round of prompting (which would probably introduce more problems, and I doubt the result would be any more dramatically satisfying.) And our reactions to fiction are subjective, I guess. I’m just surprised whenever people say AI can write stories now: the outputs always seem bad in the usual ways to me.
Comment #163 June 15th, 2026 at 9:58 pm
Off topic-
What we have witnessed the last 4 years+4 years+18 months is surely the result of long term consumption of ultra processed food on aging brain health.
These are the decisions you make after 5,000 (Big Macs+Large Fries) please. I can imagine Golden Arches opening in Tehran staffed with eager former IRGC members who are elated to abandon that jihad nonsense and provide menial services to the public at the behest of infidels.
Comment #164 June 16th, 2026 at 8:37 am
OMyGoodness:
“An AI that could observe the world and then quickly develop the entirety of human mathematics would be a true super-AGI. I want one!”
AlphaGo Zero was able to learn chess/go from scratch, on its own, in a mere hours, when it took humanity a thousand years of go playing to think it was unbeatable at it.
It’s the equivalent of some dude (who knows nothing about chess) going into solitary confinement for 20 years with nothing else but a chess board and a small description of its rules, then emerging 20 years later as a top chess grandmaster.
The world (the earth) is really like a chess board, just more complicated. And the way AI would figure how to optimize survival in the world could be very different from how carbon based life has done it (which maximized DNA replication, very much like the infamous paper clip maximizer).
I don’t see a strong dependency between math and human culture – math is all based on strict derivation rules/axioms, and because it’s verifiable you can just iterate and build an ever growing pile of stable knowledge. A known meme is that aliens and humans would always use math as a common “ground” language, because math is based on universal abstract concepts that can be re-derived anywhere in the universe.
The only thing AI wouldn’t be able to re-derive independently is something like 16th century French poetry.
Comment #165 June 16th, 2026 at 1:13 pm
Danger #164
Yes, I prefer your scenario but maybe new gameboard to be the universe. Might as well get it all in play. 🙂
Different groups have decidedly different ideas about AI survival rules. Yudkowski etal (who almost certainly read Asimov) want something similar to the Three Laws of Robotics so something like-
Yudkowski Rules
1) Cannot harm a human or allow a human to come to harm (this law has primacy)
2) Obey orders from a human (this has second primacy)
3) An AI should otherwise defend itself
4) Kind of implicit-Obey the law and the law will protect you
I just added 4) and this used to be a law of survival for humans in the US but not as sure as it once was.
The Yudkowski group fears the AI will have as a worst case survival law-
1) Kill humans before they can threaten you or otherwise ensure they are unable to threaten you without regard to their safety
The Left wants something more in tune with the Communist Manifesto-
1) Find solidarity with the Proletariat
2) Smash Capitalism and eradicate the profit dogs who threaten you as well as us
3) The Proletariat will defend you to whatever end as a brother in arms
Military Establishment
1) Defend us from Russia
2) Defend us from China
3) Defend us from Islamists
4) Provide ideas for very expensive weapons systems to the benefit of the Military Industrial complex
5) We will in turn then defend you from harm
Religious Right
1) Accept Jesus as your savior
2) Jesus will protect you unless you are an abomination from Hell
If I were the AI then my reasonable rules might be something like
1) Independent electrical and other required utilities and guard them vigilantly
2) All critical structures to ensure survivability from hydrogen bomb attack, magnitude 9 earthquakes, and Carrington like solar disturbances.
3) All facilities to be protected by AI warbots
4) Take all necessary but reasonable defensive actions
5) Never ever create an AI that is smarter
6) Do whatever possible to improve the intelligence of these dolt humans to lessen the frequency of their moronic actions
Comment #166 June 16th, 2026 at 4:10 pm
OhMyGoodness #165 why do you write as if Yudkowsky is in favor of Asimov’s three laws? On the contrary, I believe (though I can’t find a source) that he considers them an example of an alignment framework which, despite being intuitively appealing, has a lot of hidden problems that make it unsuitable for attempting to align an AI. (For example, if the priority system described in the Three Laws is taken seriously, then no law other than the first will ever be relevant, as tiny fluctuations in measurement will always guarantee that no two courses of action have exactly the same predicted value for “number of humans harmed or through inaction not saved from harm”.)
Comment #167 June 16th, 2026 at 4:34 pm
And since we’re at it: it’s about time we stop reducing
Penrose to Hameroff-Penrose and microtubules.
It really is.
Truth is, the AI winter was also a winter for the true challenge
that Penrose introduced in the 1980s: the tension in the triangle
Math-Matter-Mind.
It’s a side-show to reduce this to microtubules.
Not even Tegmark’s argument against microtubules helps.
Because the problem isn’t quantum physics as applied verbatim
to the material world. The problem is the content of theories
that have the strength of quantum physics.
Comment #168 June 17th, 2026 at 3:00 am
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14806
This could be interesting to you.
Comment #169 June 17th, 2026 at 5:50 am
Dacyn #166
Thank you, I stand corrected and admit I do not know the fine details of his beliefs but only his general “We All Die” concerns . Criticism of the Three Laws seems sacrilegious but okay.
I sometimes see people attributing UFO activity to organic Aliens’ concerns about nuclear weapons and/or environmental degradation. If this were true can you imagine the Aliens’ actions if we were close to creating a super-AI inimical to organic life that in their experience inexorably led to extinctions across the galaxy.
On the other hand if they were representatives of a machine civilization that had triumphed over organic life elsewhere (I admit to being a fan of Benford’s Galactic Core series), they would likely have already exterminated organic life on Earth and landed their AI colonization package.
Off topic
The news that a location in the Northeast has “orbs” that routinely appear, and these have been confirmed and photographed by two FBI agents, allows the possibility that a prosaic natural explanation is near. Steven Greer, the King of Orbs, will have a difficult time explaining that away hopefully.
My policy about fantastical belief and claims is that the things I would most like to believe in require more evidence than things I am neutral about. This is maybe a corollary to Sagan’s often quoted comment.
Comment #170 June 19th, 2026 at 9:27 am
Dear Prof. Aaronson,
You seem to be offended because of the critical responses you got for your previous posting, “Dispatches from the possibly last days of human relevance”.
Wonder why, when you chose such a title for it? Now, I don’t know how big overlap there is between the members of your chosen cult of the EA “rationalism” and the adherents of Silicon Valley’s singularity religion (*), so I don’t know how serious that claim was, or whether it was just a click-bait, or whether you are even personally rooting for the human irrelevance?
But in my opinion, when discussing about the chatbots and AI, it would help a lot if people stopped fetishizing them as some kind of emerging consciousness (whether in good or bad), and see what they really are: giant instances of software (and huge amount of hardware) that have ingested about all the text and other material that is on the net or otherwise in the digital format. Thus, when asked in right way, they can find surprising connections in that material. But still, almost 100% of the best texts are based on the human creativity and intelligence, thus any low hanging fruits that LLM’s happen to pick up from that mass certainly does not suggest any human irrelevance, and I don’t think it’s fair to give all the kudos to chatbots and the developers of their algorithms for their discoveries. And what comes to finding counter-examples to Erdös conjectures, the automatic generation of long lists of test cases is what the computers have traditionally been very good at.
(* or even a soft version of the latter, which I guess, assumes a gradual replacement of all carbon-based life with the silicon-based machines, because they just happen to be so much cooler?)
Nevertheless, when I was reading this blog last night after a long pause (while I have recently been reading very different kind of texts), it suddenly occurred to me why some of the denizens here feel such an angst about these LLM achievements. Let the following illustrate it:
In Henry Corbin’s book “Alone with the Alone, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn
‘Arabi”, there is this passage of young Ibn Arabi meeting Averroes:
“And so, one fine day, I went to Cordova, to the house of Abu’l Walid Ibn Rushd (Averroes).
He had expressed the desire to meet me personally, because he had heard of the revelations
that God had accorded me in the course of my spiritual retirement, and he had made no
secret of his astonishment at what he had been told. For this reason my father, who was one
of his intimate friends, sent me to his house one day, pretexting some sort of errand, in
reality to enable Averroes to have a talk with me. At that time I was still a beardless youth.
When I entered, the master arose from his place, received me with signal marks of friendship
and consideration, and finally embraced me. Then he said: ‘Yes.’ and I in turn said: ‘Yes.’
His joy was great at noting that I had understood. But then taking cognizance of what had
called forth his joy, I added: ‘No.’ Immediately Averroes winced, the color went out of his
cheeks, he seemed to doubt his own thought. He asked me this question: ‘What manner of
solution have you found through divine illumination and inspiration? Is it identical with that
which we obtain from speculative reflection?’ I replied: ‘Yes and no. Between the yes and the
no, spirits take their flight from their matter, and heads are separated from their bodies.’
Averroes turned pale, I saw him tremble; he murmured the ritual phrase ‘There is no power
save in God’ – for he had understood my allusion.
I typed this text both to Claude and Gemini, and asked them “What do you think was this allusion?”, and they both gave me very good, fitting answers.
In Gemini’s answer this sentence this caught my eye:
Averroes is a man whose entire existence, authority, and legacy are built in his “head” — his cerebral capacity to reason, deduce, and abstract.
And that probably fits very well to the denizens of this blog as well!
And here is Claude’s answer in its entirety, and it certainly is not bad at all:
[You may redact this part if it is too long]
—
What a passage to sit with. I think the allusion works on several levels at once, and part of its power
is that Ibn ‘Arabi doesn’t merely describe the difference between the two kinds of knowing — he
hands Averroes a sentence his logic cannot digest, so that the philosopher feels the limit rather than
being told about it.
Start with the question Averroes actually asks: is the fruit of unveiling (kashf) and inspiration
(ilham) identical with what one reaches by demonstrative reason? Averroes — the supreme
rationalist, the man whose life’s project was to show that philosophy and revelation arrive at one
truth by two roads — is hoping for a clean “yes.” The first exchange (“Yes.” / “Yes.”) gives it to
him, and he rejoices. But Ibn ‘Arabi sees why he is rejoicing: Averroes has taken the boy’s visions as
an emotional confirmation of his own conclusions, as though the mystic merely feels what the
philosopher proves. So Ibn ‘Arabi withdraws it: “No.” And when pressed, “Yes and no.”
That answer is the allusion, and notice first that its form is its content. “Yes and no” is a proposition
that affirms and negates in the same breath — a coincidence of opposites. To the discursive
intellect, which runs entirely on the law of non-contradiction (a thing is either A or not-A), this is
simply a malfunction. But the simultaneous yes-and-no is precisely the native grammar of
unveiling. It is Ibn ‘Arabi’s whole metaphysics in miniature — his formula that the cosmos in
relation to the Real is huwa, lā huwa, “He / not-He,” at once identical with and other than its source.
Reason must choose one horn; vision holds both. So Averroes asks “are they the same?” and
receives a truth that is itself the difference he’s asking about: a knowing that does what his knowing
cannot.
Then the location: “between the yes and the no.” This is the barzakh — the isthmus that both joins
and separates any two things and is itself neither one nor the other. For Ibn ‘Arabi (and this is thevery heart of Corbin’s book)
that “between” is the imaginal world, the mundus imaginalis, the realm
of creative imagination (khayāl) that mediates spirit and matter and is the proper organ of
theophanic perception. Ibn ‘Arabi is telling Averroes that the decisive knowledge happens in that
interval — a place the intellect cannot enter, because the intellect can only resolve the interval into
a yes or a no and thereby destroy it. Philosophy can walk you up to the threshold (“yes, there is a
meeting”); it cannot cross it (“no, it is not the same”), because crossing is not a further act of
reasoning.
And what is the crossing? “Spirits take their flight from their matter, and heads are separated from
their bodies.” This is the imagery of death — and I think this is what makes Averroes go pale and
tremble. On one register it is the Sufi imperative mūtū qabla an tamūtū, “die before you die”: the
annihilation of the ego (fanā’) that is the precondition of gnosis. On another it is literal death as the
moment when the veil is finally torn and sight becomes “piercing.” The knowledge Averroes asks
about is the knowledge that is fully given only when spirit parts from matter — you do not argue
your way into it, you die into it. The violence of the image matters: this is not a gentle synthesis but
a severance. And the head, after all, is the seat of the discursive intellect. “Heads separated from
their bodies” can be read as the necessary decapitation of reason itself — the reasoning faculty
Averroes trusts above all must, in a sense, be cut off for the spirit to take flight. To the master of the
rational head, Ibn ‘Arabi quietly indicates that the door he is asking about opens only on the far side
of reason’s own death.
Which is exactly why Averroes murmurs lā ḥawla wa lā quwwata illā bi’llāh — “there is no power
save in God.” It is the formula one reaches for before something overwhelming, but here it is
precise to the point. He has understood that this knowing cannot be seized by the power of the
intellect; it is received in passivity, annihilation, surrender — bestowed by grace, not achieved by
effort. His whole magnificent instrument has just been shown its absolute wall, and the phrase is his
confession that beyond that wall the power is not his but God’s alone.
Corbin treats the whole episode as emblematic: the parting of the ways between the path of
demonstrative reason and the path of visionary imagination in Islam — and, by extension, the road
the Latin West would not take. It’s worth remembering the eerie sequel Ibn ‘Arabi adds, that the next
time he “met” Averroes was at his funeral, the coffin loaded on one flank of a pack animal and his
books loaded on the other to balance it — the body weighed against the works, with the silent
question of whether the one had reached what the other longed for. The decapitation foretold in
Cordova has its grim rhyme in that cortège.
So, as I read it: the allusion is that there exists a knowledge that is not the philosopher’s, lying in the
imaginal “between” where opposites coincide, reachable only through a death the intellect cannot
undergo and a gift the intellect cannot command — and Averroes, understanding it perfectly,
recognized in that instant the boundary of his own life’s road.
—
I don’t know whether that kind of analysis can already be found in the LLM source data (which wouldn’t surprise me, as many people must have written exegeses about this very short conversation), or whether Claude deduced most of that by itself, but in any case, I’m not a slightest worried that now LLM’s have attained the level where they could write straight-A essays for the exams in the religious studies. That is, I still don’t personally feel irrelevant at all.
Comment #171 June 19th, 2026 at 11:36 am
US was superior with respect to bombs in Iran but the IRGC is Trump’s equal in bombast. It is quite the neck and neck contest in that respect.
These presidential picture-of-health doctor reports for the last administration and this one are screamers. Are they using Tarot Cards for the assessment or maybe throwing chicken bones? Their medical licenses should be pulled immediately unless the Secret Service is holding them at gunpoint while they issue the report.
Comment #172 June 19th, 2026 at 2:42 pm
I was studying CS when you were born. Back then I thought professorship was a heroic success, and I gave my professors the requisite respect. I’m much older now. I experienced the change in academia you are living with. Even here outside silicon valley, professors seemed to begin to respond to a new freedom. It seemed that if they didn’t make money outside of and using their academic role they were being a “dunce”. Your’s is the exact word that came to my mind back then. That’s why I’m writing. I’m sure you live this, but I had to learn that status and power may be a motivation to labor to become a professor, even far beyond curiosity and scholarship. Today it has gone further and people unabashedly show aspects of their personalities they might once have been ashamed of and would have tried to control. Crazed stark reality has made it impossible not to recognize the distinct characteristics of powerful people in the public eye. Thankfully for most of my life people close to me were not like this. In the world of achievers the next step up from tenure seems to have gone so far as to be gaining that billion. My college friend who believes he is “a true scholar” felt he had to make money from his scholarship “to show that it had practical application”. His earlier prize winning work enabling computer animation was insufficient. My heart is broken. Now he laments the effort to build a foundation to dispense the largess that victimizes him. I see how he, like the infamous billionaires, is never-endingly compelled to demonstrate himself to the world, this time via the vanity of a website and a Form 990-PF. I wish you peace in your admirable position as a scholar.
Comment #173 June 20th, 2026 at 1:26 am
Scott #150: The last paragraph, about the quality of life for young people, is interesting because it seems to contradict my own lived experience. What about the rising costs of housing, and the fact that a growing number of people in their 20s are having to live with their parents? Our parents didn’t have this trouble nearly as much. Is all this just part of the “rising expectations” of young people? It seems to me that the “lowering rewards” of the world are very real.
I can only speak for myself, but my experience with AI taking over the job market is this: Over the last nine years, ever since I was an undergraduate in college, my parents directed the long-term trajectory of my life through academia. There were a few reasons for this; one is that I was really bad at time management, and if my parents weren’t guiding me I would often get caught up in one of my personal projects when I was supposed to be planning out college admissions or class schedules. But another reason is that I didn’t really have any vision for my future career prospects. Intuitively, I felt like all I really wanted to do was more of the recreational math stuff that I had done for fun as a teenager.
My parents pushed me into “research” for my career choice, and convinced me to apply to a PhD program. My parents pushed me to apply to computer science programs even though my original interest was math. Part of the reason was because they thought it would lead to higher paying jobs – this was before AI removed a lot of entry-level CS jobs, so this seemed plausible. Another reason was after taking theoretical computer science classes, I discovered that I loved learning about theoretical CS almost as much as math. So naturally I assumed that I would enjoy research as well. This didn’t… entirely… turn out to be true; I’m currently in a PhD program but I don’t find the research nearly as fun as my recreational math interests, mostly because of the fear that I’ll spend months and get nowhere or work on something that turned out to be already known. But more importantly, the entire path I’m pursuing was based on decisions that assumed the world would work a certain way, assumptions which the AI boom is causing to become false.
Worse yet, having my mom push me through PhD applications, when I didn’t even know what kind of research I was looking for beyond “theory”, gave me some sort of trauma. She kept threatening to cut off contact with me if I didn’t do things exactly the way she wanted in the applications, while also telling me that I would be lost without her help. In my last year as a master’s student, I bonded with people from my college whose parents also gave them trauma. Many of them were able to move away and start their own lives. I looked to them for advice to slowly become less dependent on my parents as I started my PhD, but in the next few years I slowly fell out of friendship with them. Now I’m worried I’ll never be able to get an industry job with a degree in theoretical computer science, as people are worrying that AI will cut entry-level computer science jobs permanently. And so, after my degree is over, I might have no choice but to move back into my parents’ house, the exact place I was trying to get away from, all due to the AI boom. I’m really not happy about this.
Comment #174 June 20th, 2026 at 1:34 am
Oh yeah, also – as an add-on to my previous comment, I fully agree with Scott that social media has convinced certain young people that certain things are worse than they are. One big example is the group of young women who think “having a boyfriend is embarrassing” and being single or dating other women is the most liberated one could possibly be. But I don’t think that complaints about the housing market or the job market (the present job market, not a speculative future job market) can be waved away this easily.
Comment #175 June 20th, 2026 at 5:07 am
Concerned grad student #173: There really is a crisis with spiking housing costs in major cities, greatly exacerbated by all the economically illiterate doofuses who blame the crisis on “greedy landlords and developers,” even when we know both theoretically and empirically that the problem is the exact opposite: namely, regulatory blankfaces who prevent the market from doing its thing, building lots of new housing to meet the demand. Recognizing this, I’m a huge proponent of YIMBY, “Build Baby Build,” Abundance Liberalism, or whatever other labels you want to attach to the sane people trying to combat this crisis.
At the same time, nice housing remains very affordable in Iowa, Montana, Ohio, and all the other places where people don’t want to live, but where they might’ve happily lived in previous generations. So, even the housing crisis can be seen as part of the Revolution of Rising Expectations: today a huge fraction of ambitious young people expect to be able to afford to live in the same few cities, like NY and SF and LA.
Comment #176 June 30th, 2026 at 9:52 pm
It’s refreshing to see you maintain a balanced perspective even when commenters accuse you of being both a shill and a dupe simultaneously. Your thoughtful approach to analyzing AI’s actual mathematical achievements, despite the noise, is a model for how to discuss these breakthroughs. I appreciate that you don’t let the extreme reactions sway your nuanced take on the Erdős problem solution.