{"id":2535,"date":"2015-12-03T02:08:49","date_gmt":"2015-12-03T07:08:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2535"},"modified":"2017-01-12T16:25:29","modified_gmt":"2017-01-12T21:25:29","slug":"if-i-cant-do-math-i-dont-want-to-be-part-of-your-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2535","title":{"rendered":"If I can’t do math, I don’t want to be part of your revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

1. Emma Goldman<\/a>, the fiery early-20th<\/sup>-century anarchist, is credited for giving\u00a0the world the immortal refrain “if I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution”<\/em> (actually it’s not clear that she ever said it so\u00a0pithily, but she did\u00a0express such a\u00a0thought<\/a>). \u00a0Admittedly, no one would mistake me for either a dancer or<\/em> an anarchist, but I’ve always felt a kinship with\u00a0Goldman over her terpsichorean<\/a> line in the sand. \u00a0The other day, it occurred to me\u00a0that there’s a parallel sentence that sums up my entire political philosophy—on the one hand, my default instinct to side with the downtrodden and with the progressive left, but on the other,\u00a0my dissent\u00a0from any even vaguely anti-STEM, anti-rationality, or anti-nerd undercurrents, and my refusal\u00a0to join\u00a0any popular\u00a0uprising\u00a0that seems liable (for example) to\u00a0delay the discovery of a\u00a0P\u2260NP proof, by inconveniencing the people working on one.<\/p>\n

So, here’s my\u00a0sentence, which you should feel free to reprint on t-shirts and coffee mugs as desired:<\/p>\n

If I can’t do math, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

2. Over at Scientific American<\/em>‘s website, John Horgan posted\u00a0an account of a workshop on Integrated Information Theory<\/a>, which I attended a couple weeks ago at NYU (along with David Chalmers, Giulio Tononi, Christof Koch, Max Tegmark, and a dozen or so others). \u00a0I was the “official skeptic” of the workshop, and gave a talk based on my blog post The Unconscious Expander<\/a>. \u00a0I don’t really\u00a0agree with what Horgan says about physics and information in general, but I do (of course) join him in his skepticism of IIT, and he gives a pretty accurate summary of what people said at the workshop. \u00a0(Alas, my joke about my lunch not being poisoned completely bombed with the IIT crowd … as I should’ve predicted!) \u00a0The workshop itself was lots of fun; thanks so much to David, Giulio, and Hedda Hassel Morch for organizing it.<\/p>\n

3. As you might have noticed, I\u2019ve created a new category on this blog: “Obviously I’m Not Defending Aaronson.” \u00a0This category\u2014reserved for posts that caused at least a hundred\u00a0people to hate me\u2014refers\u00a0to\u00a0a peculiar phrase I\u00a0encountered\u00a0over and over, in the social media threads denouncing me as a horrible\u00a0person. \u00a0The phrase tends to\u00a0occur in passages\u00a0like: “look, obviously I\u2019m not defending Aaronson, but it\u2019s worth pointing out\u00a0that, if you carefully reread everything\u00a0he wrote, he never actually said<\/em> that war\u00a0orphans should be roasted alive and then eaten for fun. \u00a0That\u2019s just something we all know that a clueless, arrogant nerd like him would<\/em> think.”<\/p>\n

4. Right now I’m at the “ThinkQ” conference<\/a> at IBM in Yorktown Heights. \u00a0Here are the PowerPoint slides<\/a> from my talk yesterday, entitled “The Largest Possible Quantum Speedups.” \u00a0Regular readers of this blog will\u00a0find a lot that’s old and a little that’s new.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1. Emma Goldman, the fiery early-20th-century anarchist, is credited for giving\u00a0the world the immortal refrain “if I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution” (actually it’s not clear that she ever said it so\u00a0pithily, but she did\u00a0express such a\u00a0thought). \u00a0Admittedly, no one would mistake me for either a dancer or an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[11,42,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nerd-interest","category-obviously-im-not-defending-aaronson","category-self-referential"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2535"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2554,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2535\/revisions\/2554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}