{"id":2957,"date":"2016-11-09T11:28:21","date_gmt":"2016-11-09T16:28:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2957"},"modified":"2017-01-12T09:07:06","modified_gmt":"2017-01-12T14:07:06","slug":"what-is-there-to-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2957","title":{"rendered":"What is there to say?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Update (Nov. 10):<\/b><\/font> In the wake of the US’s authoritarian takeover, I will sadly understand if foreign students and postdocs no longer wish to study in the US, or if foreign researchers no longer wish to enter the US even for conferences and visits. After all, I<\/i> wouldn’t feel safe in Erdogan’s Turkey or the Mullahs’ Iran. In any case, I predict that the US’s scientific influence will now start to wane, as top researchers from elsewhere find ways to route around us.<\/p>\n

I make just one request: if you do<\/i> come to the US (as I selfishly hope you will), please don’t avoid places like Austin just because they look<\/i> on the map<\/a> like they’re in a sea of red. To understand what’s going on, you need to look at the detailed county-by-county results, which show that even in “red” states, most cities went overwhelmingly for Clinton, while even in “blue” states like New York, most rural areas went for Trump. Here’s Texas<\/a>, for example (Austin was 66% Clinton, 27% Trump).<\/p>\n

\n

I’m ashamed of my country and terrified about\u00a0the future. \u00a0When Bush took power in 2000, I was depressed for weeks, but I didn’t feel like I do now, like a fourth-generation refugee in the United States—like someone who happens to have been born\u00a0here and will presumably continue to live\u00a0here, unless and until it starts to become unsafe for academics, or Jews, or people who publicly criticize Trump, at which time I guess\u00a0we’ll pack up and go somewhere else (assuming there\u00a0still is\u00a0a somewhere else).<\/p>\n

If I ever missed the danger and excitement that so many European scientists and mathematicians\u00a0felt in the 1930s, that sense of trying to pursue\u00a0the truth\u00a0even in the shadow of an aggressive and unironic evil—OK, I can cross that off the list. \u00a0Since I was seven years old or so, I’ve been\u00a0obsessed by the realization\u00a0that there are no guardrails that prevent human beings from choosing the worst, that all the adults\u00a0who soothingly reassure you that\u00a0“everything always works out okay in the end” are full of it. \u00a0Now I get to live through it instead of just reading about it in history books and having nightmares.<\/p>\n

If James Comey hadn’t cast what turned out to be\u00a0utterly unfounded suspicion over Hillary during the height\u00a0of early voting, maybe the outcome would’ve been different. \u00a0If young and poor and minority voters in Wisconsin and North Carolina and elsewhere hadn’t been effectively disenfranchised through huge\u00a0lines and strategic voter ID laws and closures of polling\u00a0places, maybe the outcome would’ve been different. \u00a0If Russia and WikiLeaks hadn’t interfered\u00a0by hacking one side and not the other, maybe the outcome would’ve been different. \u00a0For that matter, if Russia or some other power hacked\u00a0the trivially-hackable<\/a> electronic voting machines that lack\u00a0paper trails—machines that something like a third of American voters still used this election—there’s an excellent chance we’d never find out.<\/p>\n

But in some sense, all of that is beside the point. \u00a0For take all of it away, and Trump still<\/em> would’ve at least come within a few terrifying points of\u00a0winning—and as Scott Alexander rightly stresses<\/a>, whatever horrible\u00a0things are\u00a0true about the American electorate today, would still<\/em> have been true had Hillary eked out a narrow win. \u00a0It’s just that now we all get to enjoy the consequences of \u00bd\u00b1\u03b5\u00a0of the country’s horrible\u00a0values.<\/p>\n

There is no silver lining. \u00a0There’s nothing good about this.<\/p>\n

My immediate problem is that, this afternoon, I’m supposed to give a major physics colloquium at UT. \u00a0The title? \u00a0“Quantum Supremacy.” \u00a0That term, which had given me so much comedic mileage through the long campaign season (“will I disavow support from quantum supremacists? \u00a0I’ll keep you in suspense about it…” ), now just seems dark and horrible, a weight around my neck. \u00a0Yet, distracted and sleep-deprived and humor-deprived though I am, I’ve decided to power through and give the talk. \u00a0Why? \u00a0Because Steven Weinberg says he still wants to hear it.<\/p>\n

I see no particular reason to revise anything I’ve said on this blog about the election, except perhaps for my uncritical quoting of all the analyses and prediction markets that gave Trump a small (but still, I stressed, much too high) probability of winning.<\/p>\n

I stand by my contempt for the Electoral College, and my advocacy for vote-swapping. \u00a0The fact that vote-swapping once\u00a0again failed\u00a0doesn’t mean it was a bad idea; on the contrary, it means that we didn’t do enough.<\/p>\n

I stand by my criticism of some of the excesses of the social justice movement, which seem to me to have played some role in spawning\u00a0the predictable backlash whose horrific results the world\u00a0now sees.<\/p>\n

Lastly, I stand by what I said about the centrality\u00a0of Enlightenment norms and values, and of civil discourse even with those with whom we disagree, to my own rejection of Trumpism.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, the Trump supporters who are leaving me anonymous taunting comments can go elsewhere. \u00a0On this<\/em>\u00a0day, I think a wholly appropriate Enlightenment response to them is “fuck you.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Update (Nov. 10): In the wake of the US’s authoritarian takeover, I will sadly understand if foreign students and postdocs no longer wish to study in the US, or if foreign researchers no longer wish to enter the US even for conferences and visits. After all, I wouldn’t feel safe in Erdogan’s Turkey or the […]<\/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_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","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,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rage-against-doofosity","category-the-fate-of-humanity"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2957","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=2957"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2968,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2957\/revisions\/2968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}