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<h1><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/">Shtetl-Optimized</a></h1> <div class="description">The Blog of Scott Aaronson <br><br><font color="yellow" size="-1">If you take nothing else from this blog: quantum computers won't <br>solve hard problems instantly by just trying all solutions in parallel.</font> <br><blink><a href="https://thezvi.substack.com/p/childhood-and-education-9-school"><font color="white">Also, please read Zvi Mowshowitz's masterpiece on how to fix K-12 education!</font></a></blink></div> </div> </div> <hr /> <div id="content" class="narrowcolumn"> <h2 class="pagetitle">Archive for the ‘Adventures in Meatspace’ Category</h2> <div class="navigation"> <div class="alignleft"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=10&paged=2" >« Previous Entries</a></div> <div class="alignright"></div> </div> <div class="post"> <h3 id="post-8200"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8200" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to My pontificatiest AI podcast ever!">My pontificatiest AI podcast ever!</a></h3> <small>Sunday, August 11th, 2024</small> <div class="entry"> <p>Back in May, I had the honor (nay, honour) to speak at <a href="https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/programme">HowTheLightGetsIn</a>, an ideas festival held annually in Hay-on-Wye on the English/Welsh border. It was my first time in that part of the UK, and I loved it. There was an immense amount of mud due to rain on the festival ground, and many ideas presented at the talks and panels that I vociferously disagreed with (but isn’t that the point?).</p> <p>At some point, interviewer Alexis Papazoglou with the <a href="https://iai.tv/home">Institute for Art and Ideas</a> ambushed me while I was trudging through the mud to sit me down for a half-hour interview about AI that I’d only vaguely understood was going to take place, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9O75xFQUio"><strong>that interview is now up on YouTube</strong></a>. I strongly recommend listening at 2x speed: you’ll save yourself fifteen minutes, I’ll sound smarter, my verbal infelicities will be less noticeable, what’s not to like?</p> <p>I was totally unprepared and wearing a wrinkled t-shirt, but I dutifully sat in the beautiful chair arranged for me and shot the breeze about AI. The result is actually one of the recorded AI conversations I’m happiest with, the one that might convey the most of my worldview per minute. Topics include:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>My guesses about where AI is going</li> <li>How I respond to skeptics of AI</li> <li>The views of Roger Penrose and where I part ways from him</li> <li>The relevance (or not) of the quantum No-Cloning Theorem to the hard problem of consciousness</li> <li>Whether and how AI will take over the world</li> <li>An overview of AI safety research, including interpretability and dangerous capability evaluations</li> <li>My work on watermarking for OpenAI</li> </ul> <p>Last night I watched the video with my 7-year-old son. His comment: “I understood it, and it kept my brain busy, but it wasn’t really <em>fun</em>.” But hey, at least my son didn’t accuse me of being so dense I don’t even understand that “an AI is just a program,” like many commenters on YouTube did! My YouTube critics, in general, were helpful in reassuring me that I wasn’t just arguing with strawmen in this interview (is there even such a thing as a strawman position in philosophy and AI?). Of course the critics would’ve been more helpful still if they’d, y’know, <em>counterargued</em>, rather than just calling me “really shallow,” “superficial,” an “arrogant poser,” a “robot,” a “chattering technologist,” “lying through his teeth,” and “enmeshed in so many faulty assumptions.” Watch and decide for yourself!</p> <p>Meanwhile, there’s already a <em>second</em> video on YouTube, entitled <a href="https://youtu.be/8ZPUkxOEM-s?si=rYtAbi01FKotpXdS">Philosopher reacts to ‘OpenAI expert Scott Aaronson on consciousness, quantum physics, and AI safety.’</a>   So I opened the video, terrified that I was about to be torn a new asshole. But no, this philosopher just replays the whole interview, occasionally pausing it to interject comments like “yes, really interesting, I agree, Scott makes a great point here.”</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/> <p><strong><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-red-color">Update:</mark></strong> You can also <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvqZ40Eu0u4">watch the same interviewer grill General David Petraeus</a>, at the same event in the same overly large chairs.</p> <div style="min-height:33px;" class="really_simple_share really_simple_share_button robots-nocontent snap_nopreview"><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_like" style="width:100px;"><div class="fb-like" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8200" data-layout="button_count" data-width="100" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_twitter" style="width:100px;"><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-text="My pontificatiest AI podcast ever!" data-url="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8200" data-via="" ></a></div><div class="really_simple_share_google1" style="width:80px;"><div class="g-plusone" data-size="medium" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8200" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_specificfeeds_follow" style="width:110px;"><a href="http://www.specificfeeds.com/follow" target="_blank"><img decoding="async" src="https://149663533.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/plugins/really-simple-facebook-twitter-share-buttons/images/specificfeeds_follow.png" alt="Email, RSS" title="Email, RSS" /> Follow</a></div><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_share_new" style="width:110px;"><div class="fb-share-button" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8200" data-type="button_count" data-width="110"></div></div></div> <div class="really_simple_share_clearfix"></div> </div> <p class="postmetadata">Posted in <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=10" rel="category">Adventures in Meatspace</a>, <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=12" rel="category">Metaphysical Spouting</a>, <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=8" rel="category">The Fate of Humanity</a> | <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8200#comments">89 Comments »</a></p> </div> <div class="post"> <h3 id="post-8074"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8074" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to “Never A Better Time to Visit”: Our Post-October-7 Trip to Israel">“Never A Better Time to Visit”: Our Post-October-7 Trip to Israel</a></h3> <small>Thursday, June 27th, 2024</small> <div class="entry"> <p>Dana, the kids, and I got back to the US last week after a month spent in England and then Israel. We decided to visit Israel because … uhh, we heard there’s never been a better time.</p> <p>We normally go every year to visit Dana’s family and our many friends there, and to give talks. Various well-meaning friends suggested that <em>maybe</em> we should cancel or postpone this year—given, you know, the situation. To me, though, the situation felt like all the more reason to go. To make Israel seem more and more embattled, dangerous, isolated, abnormal, like not an acceptable place to visit (much less live), in order to crater its economy, demoralize its population, and ultimately wipe it from the face of earth … that is explicitly much of the world’s game plan right now, laid out with shocking honesty since October 7 (a day that also showed us what the “decolonization” will, concretely, look like). So, if I oppose this plan, then how could I look myself in the mirror while playing my tiny part in it? Shouldn’t I instead raise a middle finger to those who’d murder my family, and go?</p> <p>Besides supporting our friends and relatives, though, I wanted to <em>see</em> the post-October-7 reality for myself, rather than just spending hours per day reading about it on social media. I wanted to form my own impression of the mood in Israel: fiercely determined? angry? hopeless? just carrying on like normal?</p> <p>Anyway, in two meeting-packed weeks, mostly in Tel Aviv but also in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Be’er Sheva, I saw stuff that could support <em>any</em> of those narratives. A lot was as I’d expected, but not everything. In the rest of this post, I’ll share eleven observations:</p> <p>(1) This presumably won’t shock anyone, but in post-October-7 Israel, you indeed can’t escape October 7. Everywhere you look, on every building, in every lobby, hanging from every highway overpass, there are hostage posters and “Bring Them Home Now” signs and yellow ribbons—starting at the airport, where every single passenger is routed through a long corridor of hostage posters, each one signed and decorated by the hostage’s friends and family. It sometimes felt as though <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yad_Vashem">Yad Vashem</a> had expanded to encompass the entire country. Virtually everyone we talked to wanted to share their stories and opinions about the war, most of all their depression and anger. While there was <em>also</em> plenty of discussion about quantum error mitigation and watermarking of large language models and local family events, no one even pretended to ignore the war.</p> <p>(2) Having said that, the morning after we landed, truthfully, the first thing that leapt out at me wasn’t anything to do with October 7, hostages, or Gaza. It was <em>the sheer number of children playing outside</em>, in any direction you looked. Full, noisy playgrounds on block after block. It’s one thing to know intellectually that Israel has by far the highest birthrate of any Western country, another to see it for yourself. The typical <em>secular</em> family probably has three kids; the typical Orthodox family has more. (The Arab population is of course also growing rapidly, both in Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza.) New apartment construction is everywhere you look in Tel Aviv, despite building delays caused by the war. And it all seems perfectly normal … <em>unless</em> you’ve lived your whole life in environments where 0.8 or 1.2 children per couple is the norm.</p> <p>This, of course, has giant implications for anyone interested in Israel’s future. It’s like, a million Israeli leftists could get fed up and flee to the US or Canada or Switzerland, and Israel would <em>still</em> have a large and growing Jewish population—because having a big family is “just what people do” in a state that was founded to defy the Holocaust. In particular: anyone who dreams of dismantling the illegal, settler-colonial, fascist Zionist ethnostate, and freeing Palestine from river to sea, had better have <em>some</em> plan for what they’re going to do with all these millions of young Jews, who don’t appear to be going anywhere.</p> <p>(3) The <em>second</em> thing I noticed was the heat—comparable to the Texas summer heat that we try to escape when possible. Because of the roasting sun, our own two pampered offspring mostly refused to go outside during daytime, and we mostly met friends indoors. I more than once had the dark thought that maybe Israel will survive Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and its own Jewish extremists … only to be finished off in the end (along with much of the rest of the planet) by global warming. I wonder whether Israel will manage to engineer its way out of the crisis, as it dramatically engineered its way out of its water crisis via desalination. The Arab petrostates have been trying to engineer their way out of the Middle East’s increasingly Mercury-like climate, albeit with decidedly mixed results.</p> <p>(4) But nu, what did our Israeli friends say about the war? Of course it’s a biased sample, because our friends are mostly left-wing academics and tech workers. But, at risk of overgeneralizing: they’re unhappy. Very, very unhappy. As for Bibi and his far-right yes-men? Our friends’ rage at them was truly a sight to behold. American progressives are, like, <em>mildly irked</em> by Trump in comparison. Yes, our friends blame Bibi for the massive security and intelligence failures that allowed October 7 to happen. They blame him for dragging out the war to stave off elections. They blame him for empowering the contemptible Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. They blame him for his failure to bring back the remaining hostages. Most of all, they blame him for refusing even to meet with the hostage families, and more broadly, for evading responsibility for all that he did wrong, while arrogating credit for any victories (like the rescue of Noa Argamani).</p> <p>(5) One Israeli friend offered to take me along to the giant anti-Bibi rally that now happens every Saturday night in Azrieli Center in Tel Aviv. (She added that, if I left before 9pm, it would reduce the chances of the police arresting me.) As the intrepid blogger-investigator I am, of course I agreed.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/protest.jpg" alt=""/></figure> <p>While many of the protesters simply called for new elections to replace Netanyahu (a cause that I 3000% support), others went further, demanding a deal to free the hostages and an immediate end to the war (even if, as they understood, that would leave Hamas in power).</p> <p>Watching the protesters, smelling their pot smoke that filled the air, I was seized by a thought: <em>these Israeli leftists actually see eye-to-eye with the anti-Israel American leftists on a huge number of issues. </em> In a different world, they could be marching together as allies. Except, of course, for one giant difference: namely, the Tel Aviv protesters are proudly waving Israeli flags (sometimes modified to add anti-Bibi images, or to depict the Star of David “crying”), rather than burning or stomping on those flags. They’re marching to save the Israel that they know and remember, rather than to destroy it.</p> <p>(6) We did meet one ultra-right-wing (and Orthodox) academic colleague. He was virtually the only person we met on this trip who seemed cheerful and optimistic about Israel’s future. He brought me to his synagogue to celebrate the holiday of Shavuot, while he himself stood guarding the door of the synagogue with a gargantuan rifle (his volunteer duty since October 7). He has six kids.</p> <p>(7) Again and again, our secular liberal friends told us they’re thinking about moving from Israel, because <em>if</em> the Bibi-ists entrench their power (and of course the demographics are trending in that direction), then they don’t see that the country has any worthwhile future for them or their children. Should this be taken more seriously than the many Americans who promise that <em>this time, for real</em>, they’ll move to Canada if Trump wins? I’m not sure. I can only report what I heard.</p> <p>(8) At the same time, again and again I got the following question from Israelis (<em>including</em> the leftist ones): how bad is the situation for Jews in the US? Have the universities been taken over by militant anti-Zionists, like it shows in the news? I had to answer: it’s complicated. Because I live my life enbubbled in the STEM field of computer science, surrounded by friends and colleagues of many backgrounds, ethnicities, religions, and political opinions who are thoughtful and decent (otherwise, why would they be my friends and colleagues?), I’m able to live a very nice life even in the midst of loud protesters calling to globalize the intifada against my family.</p> <p>If, on the other hand, I were in a typical humanities department? Yeah,<em> then</em> I’d be pretty terrified. My basic options would be to (a) shut up about my (ironically) moderate, middle-of-the-road opinions on Israel/Palestine, such as support for the two-state solution; (b) live a miserable and embattled existence; or (c) pack up and move, for example to Israel.</p> <p>An astounding irony right now is that, just as Israeli leftists are talking about moving <em>from</em> Israel, some of my American Jewish friends have talked to me about moving <em>to</em> Israel, to escape a prejudice that they thought died with their grandparents. I don’t know where the grass is actually greener (or is it brown everywhere?). Nor do I know how many worriers will actually follow through. What’s clear is that, both in Israel <em>and</em> in the diaspora, Jews are feeling an existential fear that they haven’t felt for generations.</p> <p>(9) Did I fear for my own family’s safety during the trip? Not really. Maybe I should have. When we visited Haifa, we found that GPS was scrambled all across northern Israel, to make targeting harder for Hezbollah missiles. As a result, we couldn’t use Google Maps, got completely lost driving, and had to change plans with our friends. For the first time, now I <em>really</em> feel angry at Hezbollah: they made my life worse and it’s personal!</p> <p>The funniest part, though, was <em>how</em> the scrambling was implemented: when you opened Google Maps anywhere in the north, it told you that you were in Beirut. It then dutifully gave you walking or driving directions to wherever you were going in Israel, passing through Syria close to Damascus (“warning: this route passes through multiple countries”).</p> <p>(10) The most darkly comical thing that I heard on the entire trip: “oh, no, I don’t object in the slightest if the anti-Zionists want to kill us all. I only object if they want to kill us because of an incorrect understanding of the relevant history.” Needless to say, this was a professor.</p> <p>(11) After my two-week investigation, what grand insight can I offer about Israel’s future? Not much, but maybe this: I think we can definitively rule out the scenario where Israel, having been battered by October 7, and bracing itself to be battered worse by Hezbollah, just sort of … withers away and disappears. Yes, Israel might get hotter, more crowded, more dangerous, more right-wing, and more Orthodox. But it will stay right where it is, <em>unless and until</em> its enemies destroy it in a cataclysmic war. You can’t scare people away, break their will, if they believe they have nowhere else on the planet to go. You can only kill them or else live next to them in peace, as the UN proposed in 1947 and as Oslo proposed in the 1990s. May we live to see peace.</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/> <p>Anyway, on that pleasant note, time soon to tune in to the Trump/Biden debate! I wonder who these two gentlemen are, and what they might stand for?</p> <div style="min-height:33px;" class="really_simple_share really_simple_share_button robots-nocontent snap_nopreview"><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_like" style="width:100px;"><div class="fb-like" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8074" data-layout="button_count" data-width="100" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_twitter" style="width:100px;"><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-text="“Never A Better Time to Visit”: Our Post-October-7 Trip to Israel" data-url="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8074" data-via="" ></a></div><div class="really_simple_share_google1" style="width:80px;"><div class="g-plusone" data-size="medium" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8074" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_specificfeeds_follow" style="width:110px;"><a href="http://www.specificfeeds.com/follow" target="_blank"><img decoding="async" src="https://149663533.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/plugins/really-simple-facebook-twitter-share-buttons/images/specificfeeds_follow.png" alt="Email, RSS" title="Email, RSS" /> Follow</a></div><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_share_new" style="width:110px;"><div class="fb-share-button" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8074" data-type="button_count" data-width="110"></div></div></div> <div class="really_simple_share_clearfix"></div> </div> <p class="postmetadata">Posted in <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=10" rel="category">Adventures in Meatspace</a>, <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=8" rel="category">The Fate of Humanity</a> | <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8074#comments">197 Comments »</a></p> </div> <div class="post"> <h3 id="post-8005"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8005" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Openness on OpenAI">Openness on OpenAI</a></h3> <small>Monday, May 20th, 2024</small> <div class="entry"> <p>I am, of course, sad that Jan Leike and Ilya Sutskever, the two central people who recruited me to OpenAI and then served as my “bosses” there—two people for whom I developed tremendous admiration—have both now resigned from the company. Ilya’s resignation followed the board drama six months ago, but Jan’s resignation last week came as a shock to me and others. The Superalignment team, which Jan and Ilya led and which I was part of, is being split up and merged into other teams at OpenAI.</p> <p>See <a href="https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1790517455628198322">here</a> for Ilya’s parting statement, and <a href="https://twitter.com/janleike/status/1791498174659715494">here</a> for Jan’s. See <a href="https://thezvi.substack.com/p/openai-exodus">here</a> for Zvi Mowshowitz’s perspective and summary of reporting on these events. For additional takes, see pretty much the entire rest of the nerd Internet.</p> <p>As for me? My two-year leave at OpenAI was scheduled to end this summer anyway. It seems pretty clear that I ought to spend my remaining months at OpenAI simply doing my best for AI safety—for example, by shepherding watermarking toward deployment. After a long delay, I’m gratified that interest in watermarking has spiked recently, not only within OpenAI and other companies but among legislative bodies in the US and Europe.</p> <p>And afterwards? I’ll certainly continue thinking about how AI is changing the world and how (if at all) we can steer its development to avoid catastrophes, because how could I <em>not</em> think about that? I spent 15 years mostly avoiding the subject, and that now seems like a huge mistake, and probably like enough of that mistake for one lifetime.</p> <p>So I’ll continue looking for juicy open problems in complexity theory that are motivated by interpretability, or scalable oversight, or dangerous capability evaluations, or other aspects of AI safety—I’ve already identified a few such problems! And without giving up on quantum computing (because how could I?), I expect to reorient at least some of my academic work toward problems at the interface of theoretical computer science and AI safety, and to recruit students who want to work on those problems, and to apply for grants about them. And I’ll presumably continue giving talks about this stuff, and doing podcasts and panels and so on—anyway, as long as people keep asking me to!</p> <p>And I’ll be open to future sabbaticals or consulting arrangements with AI organizations, like the one I’ve done at OpenAI. But I expect that my main identity will always be as an academic. Certainly I never want to be in a position where I have to speak for an organization rather than myself, or censor what I can say in public about the central problems I’m working on, or sign a nondisparagement agreement or anything of the kind.</p> <p>I can tell you this: in two years at OpenAI, hanging out at the office and meeting the leadership and rank-and-file engineers, I never once found a smoke-filled room where they laugh at all the rubes who take the talk about “safety” and “alignment” seriously. While my interactions were admittedly skewed toward safetyists, the OpenAI folks I met were invariably smart and earnest and dead serious about the mission of getting AI right for humankind.</p> <p>It’s more than fair for outsiders to ask whether that’s enough, whether even good intentions can survive bad incentives. It’s likewise fair of them to ask: what fraction of compute and other resources ought to be set aside for alignment research? What exactly should OpenAI do on alignment going forward? What should governments <em>force</em> them and other AI companies to do? What should employees and ex-employees be allowed, or encouraged, to share publicly?</p> <p>I don’t know the answers to these questions, but if you do, feel free to tell me in the comments!</p> <div style="min-height:33px;" class="really_simple_share really_simple_share_button robots-nocontent snap_nopreview"><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_like" style="width:100px;"><div class="fb-like" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8005" data-layout="button_count" data-width="100" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_twitter" style="width:100px;"><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-text="Openness on OpenAI" data-url="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8005" data-via="" ></a></div><div class="really_simple_share_google1" style="width:80px;"><div class="g-plusone" data-size="medium" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8005" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_specificfeeds_follow" style="width:110px;"><a href="http://www.specificfeeds.com/follow" target="_blank"><img decoding="async" src="https://149663533.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/plugins/really-simple-facebook-twitter-share-buttons/images/specificfeeds_follow.png" alt="Email, RSS" title="Email, RSS" /> Follow</a></div><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_share_new" style="width:110px;"><div class="fb-share-button" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8005" data-type="button_count" data-width="110"></div></div></div> <div class="really_simple_share_clearfix"></div> </div> <p class="postmetadata">Posted in <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=10" rel="category">Adventures in Meatspace</a>, <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=31" rel="category">Announcements</a>, <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=8" rel="category">The Fate of Humanity</a> | <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8005#comments">93 Comments »</a></p> </div> <div class="post"> <h3 id="post-7972"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7972" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to UmeshFest">UmeshFest</a></h3> <small>Friday, May 10th, 2024</small> <div class="entry"> <p><strong><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-red-color">Unrelated Announcements:</mark></strong> <a href="https://thetexasorator.com/2024/01/06/an-interview-with-dr-scott-aaronson/">See here</a> for a long interview with me in <em>The Texas Orator</em>, covering the usual stuff (quantum computing, complexity theory, AI safety). And <a href="https://bit.ly/ctp-208">see here</a> for a podcast with me and Spencer Greenberg about a similar mix of topics.</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/> <p>A couple weeks ago, I helped organize <a href="https://simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/umeshfest-dont-miss-flight">UmeshFest: Don’t Miss This Flight</a>, a workshop at UC Berkeley’s Simons Institute to celebrate the 2<sup>6</sup>th birthday of my former PhD adviser <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umesh_Vazirani">Umesh Vazirani</a>. Peter Shor, John Preskill, Manuel Blum, Madhu Sudan, Sanjeev Arora, and dozens of other luminaries of quantum and classical computation were on hand to help tell the story of quantum computing theory and Umesh’s central role in it. There was also constant roasting of Umesh—of his life lessons from the squash court, his last-minute organizational changes and phone calls at random hours. I was delighted to find that my old coinage of <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=40">“Umeshisms”</a> was simply standard usage among the attendees.</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/> <p>At Berkeley, many things were as I remembered them—my favorite Thai eatery, the bubble tea, the Campanile—but not <em>everything</em> was the same. Here I am in front of Berkeley’s Gaza encampment, a.k.a. its “Anti Zionism Zone” or what was formerly Sproul Plaza (zoom into the chalk):</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/antizionism.jpg" alt=""/></figure> <p>I felt a need to walk through the Anti Zionism Zone day after day (albeit unassumingly, neither draped in an Israeli flag nor looking to start an argument with anyone), for more-or-less the same reasons why the US regularly sends aircraft carriers through the Strait of Taiwan.</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/> <p>Back in the more sheltered environment of the Simons Institute, it was great to be among friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen since before Covid. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andris_Ambainis">Andris Ambainis</a> and I worked together for a bit on an open problem in quantum query complexity, for old times’ sake (we haven’t solved it yet).</p> <p>And then there were talks! I thought I’d share my own talk, which was entitled The Story of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP">BQP</a> (Bounded-Error Quantum Polynomial-Time). <a href="https://www.scottaaronson.com/talks/bqp.pptx">Here</a> are the PowerPoint slides, but I’ll also share screen-grabs for those of you who constantly complain that you can’t open PPTX files.</p> <p>I was particularly proud of the design of my title slide:</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/bqp.jpg" alt=""/></figure> <p>Moving on:</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/bqp2.jpg" alt=""/></figure> <p>The class <a href="https://complexityzoo.net/Complexity_Zoo:B#bqpqpoly">BQP/qpoly</a>, I should explain, is all about an advisor who’s all-wise and perfectly benevolent, but who doesn’t have a lot of time to meet with his students, so he simply doles out the same generic advice to all of them, regardless of their thesis problem x.</p> <p>I then displayed <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=40">my infamous “Umeshisms” blog post</a> from 2005—one of the first posts in the history of this blog: </p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/bqp3.jpg" alt=""/></figure> <p>As I explained, now that I hang out with the rationalist and AI safety communities, which are <em>also</em> headquartered in Berkeley, I’ve learned that my “Umeshisms” post somehow took on a life of its own. Once, when dining at one of the rationalists’ polyamorous Berkeley group houses, I said this has been lovely but I’ll now need to leave, to visit my PhD former adviser Umesh Vazirani. “You mean <em>the</em> Umesh?!” the rationalists excitedly exclaimed. “Of Umeshisms? If you’ve never missed a flight?”</p> <p>But moving on:</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-resized"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/bqp4.jpg" alt="" style="width:840px;height:auto"/></figure> <p>(Note that by “QBPP,” Bethiaume and Brassard meant what we now call BQP.)</p> <p>Feynman and Deutsch asked exactly the right question—does simulating quantum mechanics on a classical computer inherently produce an exponential slowdown, or not?—but they lacked most of the tools to start formally investigating the question. A factor-of-two quantum speedup for the XOR function could be dismissed as unimpressive, while a much greater quantum speedup for the “constant vs. balanced” problem could be dismissed as a win against only <em>deterministic</em> classical algorithms, rather than randomized algorithms. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsch%E2%80%93Jozsa_algorithm">Deutsch-Jozsa</a> may have been the first time that an apparent quantum speedup faltered in an honest comparison against classical algorithms. It certainly wasn’t the last!</p> <p>Ah, but this is where <a href="https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/pubs/bv.pdf">Bernstein and Vazirani</a> enter the scene.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/bqp5.jpg" alt=""/></figure> <p>Bernstein and Vazirani didn’t merely define <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP">BQP</a>, which remains the central object of study in quantum complexity theory. They also established its most basic properties:</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/bqp6.jpg" alt=""/></figure> <p>And, at least in the black-box model, Bernstein and Vazirani gave the first impressive quantum speedup for a classical problem that survived in a fair comparison against the best classical algorithm:</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/bqp7.jpg" alt=""/></figure> <p>The Recursive Bernstein-Vazirani problem, also called Recursive Fourier Sampling, is constructed as a “tree” of instances of the Bernstein-Vazirani problem, where to query the Boolean function at any given level, you need to solve a Bernstein-Vazirani problem for a Boolean function at the level below it, and then run the secret string s through a fixed Boolean function g. For more, see my old paper <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0209060">Quantum Lower Bound for Recursive Fourier Sampling</a>.</p> <p>Each Bernstein-Vazirani instance has classical query complexity n and quantum query complexity 1. So, if the tree of instances has depth d, then overall the classical query complexity is n<sup>d</sup>, while the quantum query complexity is only 2<sup>d</sup>. Where did the 2 come from? From <em>the need to uncompute</em> the secret strings s at each level, to enable quantum interference at the next level up—thereby forcing us to run the algorithm twice. A key insight.</p> <p>The Recursive Fourier Sampling separation set the stage for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%27s_problem">Simon’s algorithm</a>, which gave a more impressive speedup in the black-box model, and thence for the famous <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm">Shor’s algorithm</a> for factoring and discrete log:</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/bqp8.jpg" alt=""/></figure> <p>But Umesh wasn’t done establishing the most fundamental properties of BQP! There’s also the seminal 1994 paper by <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9701001">Bennett, Bernstein, Brassard, and Vazirani</a>:</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/bqp9.jpg" alt=""/></figure> <p>In light of the BV and BBBV papers, let’s see how BQP seems to fit with classical complexity classes—an understanding that’s remained largely stable for the past 30 years:</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/bqp10.jpg" alt=""/></figure> <p>We can state a large fraction of the research agenda of the whole field, to this day, as questions about BQP:</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/bqp11.jpg" alt=""/></figure> <p>I won’t have time to discuss all of these questions, but let me at least drill down on the first few.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/bqp12.jpg" alt=""/></figure> <p>Many people hoped the list of known problems in BQP would now be longer than it is. So it goes: we don’t decide the truth, we only discover it.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/bqp13.jpg" alt=""/></figure> <p>As a 17-year-old just learning about quantum computing in 1998 by reading the Bernstein-Vazirani paper, I was thrilled when I managed to improve their containment BQP ⊆ P<sup>#P</sup> to BQP ⊆ PP. I thought that would be my big debut in quantum complexity theory. I was then crushed when I learned that Adleman, DeMarrais, and Huang had proved the same thing a year prior. OK, but at least it wasn’t, like, 50 years prior! Maybe if I kept at it, I’d reach the frontier soon enough.</p> <p>Umesh, from the very beginning, raised the profound question of BQP’s relation to the polynomial hierarchy. Could we at least construct an <em>oracle</em> relative to which BQP⊄PH—or, closely related, relative to which P=NP≠BQP? Recursive Fourier Sampling was a already candidate for such a separation. I spent months trying to prove that candidate wasn’t in PH, but failed. That led me eventually to propose a very different problem, Forrelation, which seemed like a stronger candidate, although I couldn’t prove that either. Finally, in 2018, after four years of effort, Ran Raz and Avishay Tal <a href="https://eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2018/107/download/">proved that</a> my Forrelation problem was not in PH, thereby resolving Umesh’s question after a quarter century.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/bqp14.jpg" alt=""/></figure> <p>We now know three different ways by which a quantum computer can not merely solve any BQP problem efficiently, but prove its answer to a classical skeptic via an interactive protocol! Using quantum communication, using two entangled (but non-communicating) quantum computers, or using cryptography (this last a <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.01082">breakthrough</a> of Umesh’s PhD student Urmila Mahadev). It remains a great open problem, first posed to my knowledge by Daniel Gottesman, whether one can do it with none of these things.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/bqp15.jpg" alt=""/></figure> <p>To see many of the advantages of quantum computation over classical, we’ve learned that we need to broaden our vision beyond BQP (which is a class of languages), to <em>promise problems</em> (like estimating the expectation values of observables), sampling problems (like <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3245">BosonSampling</a> and Random Circuit Sampling), and relational problems (like the <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02063">Yamakawa-Zhandry problem</a>, subject of a recent breakthrough). It’s conceivable that quantum advantage could remain for such problems even if it turned out that P=BQP.</p> <p>A much broader question is whether BQP captures all languages that can be efficiently decided using “reasonable physical resources.” What about chiral quantum field theories, like the Standard Model of elementary particles? What about quantum theories of gravity? Good questions!</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/bqp16.jpg" alt=""/></figure> <p>Since it was Passover during the talk, I literally said <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayenu">“Dayenu”</a> to Umesh: “if you had only given us BQP, that would’ve been enough! but you didn’t, you gave us so much more!”</p> <p>Happy birthday Umesh!! We look forward to celebrating again on all your subsequent power-of-2 birthdays.</p> <div style="min-height:33px;" class="really_simple_share really_simple_share_button robots-nocontent snap_nopreview"><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_like" style="width:100px;"><div class="fb-like" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7972" data-layout="button_count" data-width="100" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_twitter" style="width:100px;"><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-text="UmeshFest" data-url="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7972" data-via="" ></a></div><div class="really_simple_share_google1" style="width:80px;"><div class="g-plusone" data-size="medium" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7972" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_specificfeeds_follow" style="width:110px;"><a href="http://www.specificfeeds.com/follow" target="_blank"><img decoding="async" src="https://149663533.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/plugins/really-simple-facebook-twitter-share-buttons/images/specificfeeds_follow.png" alt="Email, RSS" title="Email, RSS" /> Follow</a></div><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_share_new" style="width:110px;"><div class="fb-share-button" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7972" data-type="button_count" data-width="110"></div></div></div> <div class="really_simple_share_clearfix"></div> </div> <p class="postmetadata">Posted in <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=10" rel="category">Adventures in Meatspace</a>, <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=5" rel="category">Complexity</a>, <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=4" rel="category">Quantum</a> | <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7972#comments">27 Comments »</a></p> </div> <div class="post"> <h3 id="post-7886"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7886" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Never go to “Planet Word” in Washington DC">Never go to “Planet Word” in Washington DC</a></h3> <small>Friday, March 15th, 2024</small> <div class="entry"> <p>In fact, don’t try to take kids to Washington DC if you can possibly avoid it.</p> <p>This is my public service announcement. This is the value I feel I can add to the world today.</p> <p>Dana and I decided to take the kids to DC for spring break. The trip, alas, has been hell—a constant struggle against logistical failures. The first days were mostly spent sitting in traffic or searching for phantom parking spaces that didn’t exist. (So then we switched to the Metro, and promptly got lost, and had our metro cards rejected by the machines.) Or, at crowded cafes, I spent the time searching for a table so my starving kids could eat—and then when I finally found a table, a woman, smug and sure-faced, evicted us from the table because she was “going to” sit there, and my kids had to see that their dad could not provide for their basic needs, and that woman will never face any consequence for what she did.</p> <p>Anyway, this afternoon, utterly frazzled and stressed and defeated, we entered “Planet Word,” a museum about language. Sounds pretty good, right? Except my soon-to-be 7-year-old son got bored by numerous exhibits that weren’t for him. So I told him he could lead the way and find any exhibit he liked.</p> <p>Finally my son found an exhibit that fascinated him, one where he could weigh plastic fruits on a balancing scale. He was engrossed by it, he was learning, he was asking questions, I reflected that maybe the trip wasn’t a total loss … and that’s when a museum employee pointed at us, and screamed at us to leave the room, because “this exhibit was sold out.”</p> <p>The room was actually almost empty (!). No one had stopped us from entering the room. No one else was waiting to use the balancing scale. There was no sign to warn us we were doing anything wrong. I would’ve paid them hundreds of dollars in that moment if only we could stay. My son didn’t understand why he was suddenly treated as a delinquent. He then wanted to leave the whole museum, and so did I. The day was ruined for us.</p> <p>Mustering my courage to do something uncharacteristic for me, I complained at the front desk. They sneered and snickered at me, basically told me to go to hell. Looking deeply into their dumb, blank expressions, I realized that I had as much chance of any comprehension or sympathy as I’d have from a warthog. It’s true that, on the scale of all the injustices in the history of the world, this one surely didn’t crack the top quadrillion. But for me, in that moment, it came to stand for all the others. Which has always been my main weakness as a person, that injustice affects me in that way.</p> <p>Speaking of which, there was one part of DC trip that went exactly like it was supposed to. That was our visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Why? Because I feel like that museum, unlike all the rest, tells me the truth about the nature of the world that I was born into—and seeing the truth is perversely comforting. I was born into a world that right now, every day, is filled with protesters screaming for my death, for my family’s death—and this is accepted as normal, and those protesters sleep soundly at night, congratulating themselves for their progressivism and enlightenment. And thinking about those protesters, and their predecessors 80 years ago who perpetrated the Holocaust or who stood by and let it happen, is the only thing that really puts blankfaced museum employees into perspective for me. Like, <em>of course</em> a world with the former is also going to have the latter—and I should count myself immeasurably lucky if the latter is all I have to deal with, if the empty-skulled and the soul-dead can only ruin my vacation and lack the power to murder my family.</p> <p>And to anyone who reached the end of this post and who feels like it was an unwelcome imposition on their time: I’m sorry. But the truth is, posts like this are why I started this blog and why I continue it. If I’ve ever imparted any interesting information or ideas, that’s a byproduct that I’m thrilled about. But I’m cursed to be someone who wakes up every morning, walks around every day, and goes to sleep every night crushed by the weight of the world’s injustice, and outside of technical subjects, the only thing that’s ever motivated me to write is that words are the only justice available to me.</p> <div style="min-height:33px;" class="really_simple_share really_simple_share_button robots-nocontent snap_nopreview"><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_like" style="width:100px;"><div class="fb-like" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7886" data-layout="button_count" data-width="100" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_twitter" style="width:100px;"><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-text="Never go to “Planet Word” in Washington DC" data-url="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7886" data-via="" ></a></div><div class="really_simple_share_google1" style="width:80px;"><div class="g-plusone" data-size="medium" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7886" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_specificfeeds_follow" style="width:110px;"><a href="http://www.specificfeeds.com/follow" target="_blank"><img decoding="async" src="https://149663533.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/plugins/really-simple-facebook-twitter-share-buttons/images/specificfeeds_follow.png" alt="Email, RSS" title="Email, RSS" /> Follow</a></div><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_share_new" style="width:110px;"><div class="fb-share-button" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7886" data-type="button_count" data-width="110"></div></div></div> <div class="really_simple_share_clearfix"></div> </div> <p class="postmetadata">Posted in <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=10" rel="category">Adventures in Meatspace</a>, <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=11" rel="category">Nerd Interest</a>, <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=42" rel="category">Obviously I'm Not Defending Aaronson</a>, <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=16" rel="category">Rage Against Doofosity</a> | <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7886#comments">69 Comments »</a></p> </div> <div class="post"> <h3 id="post-7774"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7774" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to On whether we’re living in a simulation">On whether we’re living in a simulation</a></h3> <small>Wednesday, February 7th, 2024</small> <div class="entry"> <p><strong><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-red-color">Unrelated Announcement (Feb. 7):</mark></strong> Huge congratulations to longtime friend-of-the-blog John Preskill for <a href="https://cqiqc.physics.utoronto.ca/news/recent-news/john-preskill-announced-as-2024-bell-prize-winner/">winning the 2024 John Stewart Bell Prize</a> for research on fundamental issues in quantum mechanics!</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/> <p>On the heels of <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7705">my post on the fermion doubling problem</a>, I’m sorry to spend even <em>more</em> time on the simulation hypothesis. I promise this will be the last for a long time.</p> <p>Last week, I attended a philosophy-of-mind conference called <a href="https://www.fau.edu/future-mind/mindfest/">MindFest</a> at Florida Atlantic University, where I talked to Stuart Hameroff (Roger Penrose’s collaborator on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction">“Orch-OR”</a> theory of microtubule consciousness) and many others of diverse points of view, and also gave a talk on “The Problem of Human Specialness in the Age of AI,” for which I’ll share a transcript soon.</p> <p>Oh: and I participated in a panel with the philosopher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers">David Chalmers</a> about … wait for it … whether we’re living in a simulation. I’ll link to a video of the panel if and when it’s available. In the meantime, I thought I’d share my brief prepared remarks before the panel, despite the strong overlap with my <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7705">previous post</a>. Enjoy!</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/> <p>When someone asks me whether I believe I’m living in a computer simulation—as, for some reason, they do every month or so—I answer them with a question:</p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow"> <p>Do you mean, am I being simulated in some way that I could hope to learn more about by examining actual facts of the empirical world?</p> </blockquote> <p>If the answer is no—that I should expect never to be able to tell the difference even in principle—then my answer is: look, I have a lot to worry about in life. Maybe I’ll add this as #4,385 on the worry list.</p> <p>If they say, maybe you should live your life differently, just from knowing that you <em>might</em> be in a simulation, I respond: I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I have a vague feeling that this discussion predates the 80 or so years we’ve had digital computers! Why not just join the theologians in that earlier discussion, rather than pretending that this is something distinctive about computers? Is it relevantly different here if you’re being dreamed in the mind of God or being executed in Python? OK, maybe you’d prefer that the world was created by a loving Father or Mother, rather than some nerdy transdimensional adolescent trying to impress the other kids in programming club. But if that’s the worry, why are you talking to a computer scientist? Go talk to David Hume or something.</p> <p>But suppose instead the answer is yes, we <em>can</em> hope for evidence. In that case, I reply: out with it! What <em>is</em> the empirical evidence that bears on this question?</p> <p>If we were all to see the Windows <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_screen_of_death">Blue Screen of Death</a> plastered across the sky—or if I were to hear a voice from the burning bush, saying “go forth, Scott, and free your fellow quantum computing researchers from their bondage”—of course I’d need to update on that. I’m not betting on those events.</p> <p>Short of that—well, you can look at existing physical theories, like general relativity or quantum field theories, and ask how hard they are to simulate on a computer. You can actually make progress on such questions. Indeed, I recently <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7705">blogged about</a> one such question, which has to do with “chiral” Quantum Field Theories (those that distinguish left-handed from right-handed), including the Standard Model of elementary particles. It turns out that, when you try to put these theories on a lattice in order to simulate them computationally, you get an extra symmetry that you don’t want. There’s progress on how to get around this problem, including simulating a higher-dimensional theory that contains the chiral QFT you want on its boundaries. But, OK, maybe all this only tells us about simulating <em>currently-known</em> physical theories—rather than the <em>ultimate</em> theory, which a-priori might be easier <em>or</em> harder to simulate than currently-known theories.</p> <p>Eventually we want to know: can the final theory, of quantum gravity or whatever, be simulated on a computer—at least probabilistically, to any desired accuracy, given complete knowledge of the initial state, yadda yadda? In other words, is the <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.1612">Physical Church-Turing Thesis</a> true? This, to me, is close to the outer limit of the sorts of questions that we could hope to answer scientifically.</p> <p>My personal belief is that the deepest things we’ve learned about quantum gravity—including about the Planck scale, and the Bekenstein bound from black-hole thermodynamics, and AdS/CFT—all militate toward the view that the answer is “yes,” that in some sense (which needs to be spelled out carefully!) the physical universe really <em>is</em> a giant Turing machine.</p> <p>Now, Stuart Hameroff (who we just heard from this morning) and Roger Penrose believe that’s wrong. They believe, not only that there’s some uncomputability at the Planck scale, unknown to current physics, but that this uncomputability can somehow affect the microtubules in our neurons, in a way that causes consciousness. I don’t believe them. Stimulating as I find their speculations, I get off their train to Weirdville way before it reaches its final stop.</p> <p>But as far as the Simulation Hypothesis is concerned, that’s not even the main point. The main point is: suppose for the sake of argument that Penrose and Hameroff were right, and physics <em>were</em> uncomputable. Well, why shouldn’t our universe be simulated by a larger universe that <em>also</em> has uncomputable physics, the same as ours does? What, after all, is the halting problem to God? In other words, while the discovery of uncomputable physics would tell us something profound about the <em>character</em> of any mechanism that could simulate our world, <em>even that</em> wouldn’t answer the question of whether we were living in a simulation or not.</p> <p>Lastly, what about the famous <a href="https://simulation-argument.com/">argument</a> that says, our descendants are likely to have so much computing power that simulating 10<sup>20</sup> humans of the year 2024 is chickenfeed to them. Thus, we should expect that almost all people with the sorts of experiences we have who will ever exist <em>are</em> one of those far-future sims. And thus, presumably, <em>you</em> should expect that <em>you’re</em> almost certainly one of the sims.</p> <p>I confess that this argument never felt terribly compelling to me—indeed, it always seemed to have a strong aspect of sawing off the branch it’s sitting on. Like, our distant descendants will surely be able to simulate <em>some</em> impressive universes. But because their simulations will have to run on computers that fit in <em>our</em> universe, presumably the simulated universes will be <em>smaller</em> than ours—in the sense of fewer bits and operations needed to describe them. Similarly, if we’re being simulated, then presumably it’s by a universe <em>bigger</em> than the one we see around us: one with more bits and operations. But in that case, it wouldn’t be our own descendants who were simulating us! It’d be beings in that larger universe.</p> <p>(Another way to understand the difficulty: in the original Simulation Argument, we quietly assumed a “base-level” reality, of a size matching what the cosmologists of our world see with their telescopes, and then we “looked down” from that base-level reality into imagined realities being simulated in it. But we should also have “looked up.” More generally, we presumably should’ve started with a Bayesian prior over where we might be in some great chain of simulations of simulations of simulations, then updated our prior based on observations. But we don’t <em>have</em> such a prior, or at least I don’t—not least because of the infinities involved!)</p> <p>Granted, there are all sorts of possible escapes from this objection, assumptions that can make the Simulation Argument work. But these escapes (involving, e.g., our universe being merely a “low-res approximation,” with faraway galaxies not simulated in any great detail) all seem metaphysically confusing. To my mind, the simplicity of the original intuition for why “almost all people who ever exist will be sims” has been undermined.</p> <p>Anyway, that’s why I don’t spend much of my own time fretting about the Simulation Hypothesis, but just occasionally agree to speak about it in panel discussions!</p> <p>But I’m eager to hear from David Chalmers, who I’m sure will be vastly more careful and qualified than I’ve been.</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/> <p>In David Chalmers’s response, he quipped that the very lack of empirical consequences that makes something bad as a scientific question, makes it good as a philosophical question—so what I consider a “bug” of the simulation hypothesis debate is, for him, a feature! He then ventured that surely, despite my apparent verificationist tendencies, even I would agree that it’s <em>meaningful to ask</em> whether someone is in a computer simulation or not, even supposing it had no possible empirical consequences for that person. And he offered the following argument: suppose <em>we’re</em> the ones running the simulation. Then from <em>our</em> perspective, it seems clearly meaningful to say that the beings in the simulation are, indeed, in a simulation, even if the beings themselves can never tell. So then, unless I want to be some sort of postmodern relativist and deny the existence of absolute, observer-independent truth, I should admit that the proposition that <em>we’re</em> in a simulation is also objectively meaningful—because it would be meaningful to those simulating us.</p> <p>My response was that, while I’m <em>not</em> a strict verificationist, if the question of whether we’re in a simulation were to have no empirical consequences whatsoever, then at most I’d concede that the question was “pre-meaningful.” This is a new category I’ve created, for questions that I neither admit as meaningful nor reject as meaningless, but for which <em>I’m willing to hear out someone’s argument for why they mean something—and I’ll need such an argument!</em> Because I already know that the answer is going to look like, “on <em>these</em> philosophical views the question is meaningful, and on <em>those</em> philosophical views it isn’t.” Actual consequences, either for how we should live or for what we should expect to see, are the ways to make a question meaningful to everyone!</p> <p>Anyway, Chalmers had other interesting points and distinctions, which maybe I’ll follow up on when (as it happens) I visit him at NYU in a month. But I’ll just link to the video when/if it’s available rather than trying to reconstruct what he said from memory.</p> <div style="min-height:33px;" class="really_simple_share really_simple_share_button robots-nocontent snap_nopreview"><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_like" style="width:100px;"><div class="fb-like" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7774" data-layout="button_count" data-width="100" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_twitter" style="width:100px;"><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-text="On whether we’re living in a simulation" data-url="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7774" data-via="" ></a></div><div class="really_simple_share_google1" style="width:80px;"><div class="g-plusone" data-size="medium" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7774" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_specificfeeds_follow" style="width:110px;"><a href="http://www.specificfeeds.com/follow" target="_blank"><img decoding="async" src="https://149663533.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/plugins/really-simple-facebook-twitter-share-buttons/images/specificfeeds_follow.png" alt="Email, RSS" title="Email, RSS" /> Follow</a></div><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_share_new" style="width:110px;"><div class="fb-share-button" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7774" data-type="button_count" data-width="110"></div></div></div> <div class="really_simple_share_clearfix"></div> </div> <p class="postmetadata">Posted in <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=10" rel="category">Adventures in Meatspace</a>, <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=12" rel="category">Metaphysical Spouting</a> | <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7774#comments">114 Comments »</a></p> </div> <div class="post"> <h3 id="post-7694"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7694" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Rowena He">Rowena He</a></h3> <small>Wednesday, December 20th, 2023</small> <div class="entry"> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-large"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/rowena.jpg" alt=""/></figure></div> <p>This fall, I’m honored to have made a new friend: the noted Chinese dissident scholar <a href="https://asiapolicy.utexas.edu/team/rowena-he/">Rowena He</a>, currently a Research Fellow at the <a href="https://civitas.utexas.edu/">Civitas Institute</a> at UT Austin, and formerly of Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the National Humanities Center, and other fine places. I was connected to Rowena by the Harvard computer scientist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_R._Lewis">Harry Lewis</a>.</p> <p>But let’s cut to the chase, as Rowena tends to do in every conversation. As a teenage girl in Guangdong, Rowena eagerly participated in the pro-democracy protests of 1989, the ones that tragically culminated in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre">Tiananmen Square massacre</a>. Since then, she’s devoted her life to documenting and preserving the memory of what happened, fighting its deliberate erasure from the consciousness of future generations of Chinese. You can read some of her efforts in her first book, <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tiananmen-Exiles-Struggle-Democracy-Palgrave-ebook/dp/B00KO09L42?ref_=ast_author_mpb">Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China</a></em> (one of the Asia Society’s <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/library/books/top-five-china-books-2014">top 5 China books of 2014</a>). She’s now spending her time at UT writing a second book.</p> <p>Unsurprisingly, Rowena’s life’s project has not (to put it mildly) sat well with the Chinese authorities. From 2019, she had a history professorship at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she could be close to her research material and to those who needed to hear her message—and where she was involved in the pro-democracy protests that convulsed Hong Kong that year. Alas, you might remember the grim outcome of those protests. Following Hong Kong’s authoritarian takeover, in October of this year, Rowena was <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/11/12/1212534775/she-studies-sensitive-topics-in-chinese-history-hong-kong-denied-her-work-visa">denied</a> <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/hong-kong-scholar-fired-after-visa-rejection-laments-loss-of-freedom-/7339895.html">a</a> <a href="https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20231101150341788">visa</a> <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/think-twice-about-hong-kong-jobs-says-historian-denied-visa">to</a> <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/3239567/tiananmen-square-crackdown-historian-specialising-1989-incident-sacked-university-hong-kong-over">return</a> to Hong Kong, and then fired from CUHK <em>because</em> she’d been denied a visa—events that were covered fairly widely in the press. Learning about the downfall of academic freedom in Hong Kong was particularly poignant for me, given that I lived in Hong Kong when I was 13 years old, in some of the last years before the handover to China (1994-1995), and my family knew many people there who were trying to get out—to Canada, Australia, anywhere—correctly fearing what eventually came to pass.</p> <p>But this is all still relatively dry information that wouldn’t have prepared me for the experience of meeting Rowena in person. Probably more than anyone else I’ve had occasion to meet, Rowena is basically the living embodiment of what it means to sacrifice everything for abstract ideals of freedom and justice. Many academics posture that way; to spend a couple hours with Rowena is to understand the real deal. You can talk to her about trivialities—food, work habits, how she’s settling in Austin—and she’ll answer, but before too long, the emotion will rise in her voice and she’ll be back to telling you how the protesting students didn’t want to overthrow the Chinese government, but only help to improve it. As if you, too, were a CCP bureaucrat who might imprison her if the truth turned out otherwise. Or she’ll talk about how, when she was depressed, only the faces of the students in Hong Kong who crowded her lecture gave her the will to keep living; or about what she learned by reading the letters that <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Zhao">Lin Zhao</a>, a dissident from Maoism, wrote in blood in Chinese jail before she was executed.</p> <p>This post has a practical purpose. Since her exile from China, Rowena has spent basically her entire life moving from place to place, with no permanent position and no financial security. In the US—a huge country full of people who share Rowena’s goal of exposing the lies of the CCP—there <em>must</em> be an excellent university, think tank, or institute that would offer a permanent position to possibly the world’s preeminent historian of Tiananmen and of the Chinese democracy movement. Though the readership of this blog is heavily skewed toward STEM, maybe that institute is yours. If it is, please <a href="mailto:rowena.he@austin.utexas.edu">get in touch</a> with Rowena. And then I could say this blog had served a useful purpose, even if everything else I wrote for two decades was for naught.</p> <div style="min-height:33px;" class="really_simple_share really_simple_share_button robots-nocontent snap_nopreview"><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_like" style="width:100px;"><div class="fb-like" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7694" data-layout="button_count" data-width="100" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_twitter" style="width:100px;"><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-text="Rowena He" data-url="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7694" data-via="" ></a></div><div class="really_simple_share_google1" style="width:80px;"><div class="g-plusone" data-size="medium" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7694" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_specificfeeds_follow" style="width:110px;"><a href="http://www.specificfeeds.com/follow" target="_blank"><img decoding="async" src="https://149663533.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/plugins/really-simple-facebook-twitter-share-buttons/images/specificfeeds_follow.png" alt="Email, RSS" title="Email, RSS" /> Follow</a></div><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_share_new" style="width:110px;"><div class="fb-share-button" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7694" data-type="button_count" data-width="110"></div></div></div> <div class="really_simple_share_clearfix"></div> </div> <p class="postmetadata">Posted in <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=10" rel="category">Adventures in Meatspace</a>, <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=8" rel="category">The Fate of Humanity</a> | <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7694#comments">39 Comments »</a></p> </div> <div class="post"> <h3 id="post-7661"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7661" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Weird but cavity-free">Weird but cavity-free</a></h3> <small>Friday, December 8th, 2023</small> <div class="entry"> <p>Over at Astral Codex Ten, the other Scott A. <a href="https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defying-cavity-lantern-bioworks-faq">blogs in detail about</a> a genetically engineered mouth bacterium that metabolizes sugar into alcohol rather than acid, thereby (assuming it works as intended) ending dental cavities forever. Despite good results in trials with hundreds of people, this bacterium has spent decades in FDA approval hell. It’s in the news because <a href="https://www.lanternbioworks.com/">Lantern Bioworks</a>, a startup founded by rationalists, is now trying again to legalize it.</p> <p>Just another weird idea that will never see the light of day, I’d think … <em>if</em> I didn’t have these bacteria in my mouth right now.</p> <p>Here’s how it happened: I’d read earlier about these bacteria, and was venting to a rationalist of my acquaintance about the blankfaces who keep that and a thousand other medical advances from ever reaching the public, and who sleep soundly at night, congratulating themselves for their rigor in enforcing nonsensical rules.</p> <p>“Are you serious?” the rationalist asked me. “I know the people in Berkeley who can get you into the clinical trial for this.”</p> <p>This was my moment of decision. If I agreed to put unapproved bacteria into my mouth on my next trip to Berkeley, I could live my beliefs and possibly never get cavities again … but on the other hand, friends and colleagues would think I was weird when I told them.</p> <p>Then again, I mused, four years ago most people would think you were weird if you said that a pneumonia spreading at a seafood market in Wuhan was about to ignite a global pandemic, and also that chatbots were about to go from ELIZA-like jokes to the technological powerhouses transforming civilization.</p> <p>And so it was that I found myself brushing a salty, milky-white substance onto my teeth. That was last month. I … haven’t had any cavities since, for what it’s worth? Nor have I felt drunk, despite the ever-so-slightly elaevated ethanol in my system. Then again, I’m not even 100% sure that the bacteria took, given that (I confess) the germy substance strongly triggered my gag reflex.</p> <p>Anyway, read other Scott’s post, and then ask yourself: will you try this, once you can? If not, is it just because it seems too weird?</p> <p><strong><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-red-color">Update:</mark></strong> See a <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38562939">Hacker News thread</a> where the merits of this new treatment are debated.</p> <div style="min-height:33px;" class="really_simple_share really_simple_share_button robots-nocontent snap_nopreview"><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_like" style="width:100px;"><div class="fb-like" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7661" data-layout="button_count" data-width="100" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_twitter" style="width:100px;"><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-text="Weird but cavity-free" data-url="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7661" data-via="" ></a></div><div class="really_simple_share_google1" style="width:80px;"><div class="g-plusone" data-size="medium" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7661" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_specificfeeds_follow" style="width:110px;"><a href="http://www.specificfeeds.com/follow" target="_blank"><img decoding="async" src="https://149663533.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/plugins/really-simple-facebook-twitter-share-buttons/images/specificfeeds_follow.png" alt="Email, RSS" title="Email, RSS" /> Follow</a></div><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_share_new" style="width:110px;"><div class="fb-share-button" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7661" data-type="button_count" data-width="110"></div></div></div> <div class="really_simple_share_clearfix"></div> </div> <p class="postmetadata">Posted in <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=10" rel="category">Adventures in Meatspace</a>, <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=18" rel="category">Embarrassing Myself</a>, <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=11" rel="category">Nerd Interest</a>, <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=16" rel="category">Rage Against Doofosity</a> | <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7661#comments">58 Comments »</a></p> </div> <div class="post"> <h3 id="post-7064"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7064" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Why am I not terrified of AI?">Why am I not terrified of AI?</a></h3> <small>Monday, March 6th, 2023</small> <div class="entry"> <p>Every week now, it seems, events on the ground make a fresh mockery of those who confidently assert what AI will never be able to do, or won’t do for centuries if ever, or is incoherent even to ask for, or wouldn’t matter even if an AI <em>did</em> appear to do it, or would require a breakthrough in “symbol-grounding,” “semantics,” “compositionality” or some other abstraction that puts the end of human intellectual dominance on earth conveniently far beyond where we’d actually have to worry about it. Many of my brilliant academic colleagues still haven’t adjusted to the new reality: maybe they’re just so conditioned by the broken promises of previous decades that they’d laugh at the Silicon Valley nerds with their febrile Skynet fantasies even as a T-1000 reconstituted itself from metal droplets in front of them.</p> <p>No doubt these colleagues feel the same deep frustration that <em>I</em> feel, as I explain for the billionth time why this week’s headline about noisy quantum computers solving traffic flow and machine learning and financial optimization problems doesn’t mean what the hypesters claim it means. But whereas I’d say events have largely proved me right about quantum computing—where <em>are</em> all those practical speedups on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noisy_intermediate-scale_quantum_era">NISQ</a> devices, anyway?—events have already proven many naysayers wrong about AI. Or to say it more carefully: yes, quantum computers <em>really are</em> able to do more and more of what we use classical computers for, and AI <em>really is</em> able to do more and more of what we use human brains for. There’s spectacular engineering progress on both fronts. The crucial difference is that quantum computers won’t be useful until they can <strong>beat</strong> the best classical computers on one or more practical problems, whereas an AI that merely writes or draws like a middling human already changes the world.</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/> <p>Given the new reality, and my full acknowledgment of the new reality, and my refusal to go down with the sinking ship of “AI will probably never do X and please stop being so impressed that it just did X”—many have wondered, <em>why aren’t I much more terrified?</em> Why am I <em>still</em> not fully on board with the Orthodox AI doom scenario, the Eliezer Yudkowsky one, the one where an unaligned AI will sooner or later (probably sooner) unleash self-replicating nanobots that turn us all to goo?</p> <p>Is the answer simply that I’m too much of an academic conformist, afraid to endorse anything that sounds weird or far-out or culty? I certainly should consider the possibility. If so, though, how do you explain the fact that I’ve publicly said things, right on this blog, several orders of magnitude likelier to get me in trouble than “I’m scared about AI destroying the world”—an idea now so firmly within the Overton Window that Henry Kissinger <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/chatgpt-heralds-an-intellectual-revolution-enlightenment-artificial-intelligence-homo-technicus-technology-cognition-morality-philosophy-774331c6">gravely ponders it</a> in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>?</p> <p>On a trip to the Bay Area last week, my rationalist friends asked me some version of the “why aren’t you more terrified?” question over and over. Often it was paired with: “Scott, as someone <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6484">working at OpenAI</a> this year, how can you defend that company’s existence at all? Did OpenAI not just endanger the whole world, by successfully teaming up with Microsoft to bait Google into an AI capabilities race—precisely what we were all trying to avoid? Won’t this race burn the little time we had thought we had left to solve the AI alignment problem?”</p> <p>In response, I often stressed that my role at OpenAI has specifically been to think about ways to make GPT and OpenAI’s other products <em>safer</em>, including via watermarking, cryptographic backdoors, and more. Would the rationalists rather I not do this? Is there something else I should work on instead? Do they have suggestions?</p> <p>“Oh, no!” the rationalists would reply. “We <em>love</em> that you’re at OpenAI thinking about these problems! Please continue exactly what you’re doing! It’s just … why don’t you seem more <em>sad</em> and <em>defeated</em> as you do it?”</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/> <p>The other day, I had an epiphany about that question—one that hit with such force and obviousness that I wondered why it hadn’t come decades ago.</p> <p>Let’s step back and restate the worldview of AI doomerism, but in words that could make sense to a medieval peasant. Something like…</p> <p><em>There is now an alien entity that could soon become vastly smarter than us. This alien’s intelligence could make it terrifyingly dangerous. It might plot to kill us all. Indeed, even if it’s acted unfailingly friendly and helpful to us, that means nothing: it could just be biding its time before it strikes. Unless, therefore, we can figure out how to control the entity, completely shackle it and make it do our bidding, we shouldn’t suffer it to share the earth with us. We should destroy it before it destroys us.</em></p> <p>Maybe <em>now</em> it jumps out at you. If you’d never heard of AI, would this not rhyme with the worldview of every high-school bully stuffing the nerds into lockers, every blankfaced administrator gleefully holding back the gifted kids or keeping them away from the top universities to make room for “well-rounded” legacies and athletes, every Agatha Trunchbull from <em>Matilda</em> or Dolores Umbridge from <em>Harry Potter</em>? Or, to up the stakes a little, every Mao Zedong or Pol Pot sending the glasses-wearing intellectuals for re-education in the fields? And of course, every antisemite over the millennia, from the Pharoah of the Oppression (if there was one) to the mythical <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haman">Haman</a> whose name Jews around the world will drown out tonight at Purim to the Cossacks to the Nazis?</p> <p>In other words: does it not rhyme with a worldview the rejection and hatred of which has been the North Star of my life?</p> <p>As I’ve shared before here, my parents were 1970s hippies who weren’t planning to have kids. When they eventually decided to do so, it was (they say) “in order not to give Hitler what he wanted.” I literally exist, then, purely to spite those who don’t want me to. And I confess that I didn’t have any better reason to bring my and Dana’s own two lovely children into existence.</p> <p>My childhood was defined, in part, by my and my parents’ constant fights against bureaucratic school systems trying to force me to do the same rote math as everyone else at the same stultifying pace. It was also defined by my struggle against the bullies—i.e., the kids who the blankfaced administrators sheltered and protected, and who actually did to me all the things that the blankfaces probably wanted to do but couldn’t. I eventually addressed both difficulties by dropping out of high school, getting a G.E.D., and starting college at age 15.</p> <p>My teenage and early adult years were then defined, in part, by the struggle to prove to myself and others that, having enfreaked myself through nerdiness and academic acceleration, I wasn’t thereby completely disqualified from dating, sex, marriage, parenthood, or any of the other aspects of human existence that are thought to provide it with meaning. I even sometimes wonder about my research career, whether it’s all just been one long attempt to prove to the bullies and blankfaces from back in junior high that <em>they were wrong</em>, while also proving to the wonderful teachers and friends who believed in me back then that they were right.</p> <p>In short, if my existence on Earth has ever “meant” anything, then it can only have meant: a stick in the eye of the bullies, blankfaces, sneerers, totalitarians, and all who fear others’ intellect and curiosity and seek to squelch it. Or at least, that’s the way I seem to be programmed. And I’m probably only <em>slightly</em> more able to deviate from my programming than the paperclip-maximizer is to deviate from its.</p> <p>And I’ve tried to be consistent. Once I started regularly meeting people who were smarter, wiser, more knowledgeable than I was, in one subject or even every subject—I resolved to admire and befriend and support and learn from those amazing people, rather than fearing and resenting and undermining them. I was acutely conscious that my own moral worldview demanded this.</p> <p>But now, when it comes to a hypothetical future superintelligence, I’m asked to put all that aside. I’m asked to fear an alien who’s far smarter than I am, solely <em>because</em> it’s alien and <em>because</em> it’s so smart … <em>even if it hasn’t yet lifted a finger against me or anyone else</em>. I’m asked to play the bully this time, to knock the AI’s books to the ground, maybe even unplug it using the physical muscles that I have and it lacks, lest the AI plot against me and my friends using its admittedly superior intellect.</p> <p>Oh, it’s not the same of course. I’m sure Eliezer could list at least 30 disanalogies between the AI case and the human one before rising from bed. He’d say, for example, that the intellectual gap between <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89variste_Galois">Évariste Galois</a> and the average high-school bully is microscopic, barely worth mentioning, compared to the intellectual gap between a future artificial superintelligence and Galois. He’d say that <em>nothing</em> in the past experience of civilization prepares us for the qualitative enormity of this gap.</p> <p>Still, if you ask, “why aren’t I more <em>terrified</em> about AI?”—well, that’s an emotional question, and this is my emotional answer.</p> <p>I think it’s entirely plausible that, even as AI transforms civilization, it will do so in the form of tools and services that can no more plot to annihilate us than can Windows 11 or the Google search bar. In that scenario, the young field of AI safety will still be extremely important, but it will be broadly continuous with aviation safety and nuclear safety and cybersecurity and so on, rather than being a desperate losing war against an incipient godlike alien. If, on the other hand, this <em>is</em> to be a desperate losing war against an alien … well then, I don’t yet know whether I’m on the humans’ side or the alien’s, or both, or neither! I’d at least like to hear the alien’s side of the story.</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/> <p>A central linchpin of the Orthodox AI-doom case is the <a href="https://arbital.com/p/orthogonality/">Orthogonality Thesis</a>, which holds that arbitrary levels of intelligence can be mixed-and-matched arbitrarily with arbitrary goals—so that, for example, an intellect vastly beyond Einstein’s could devote itself entirely to the production of paperclips. Only recently did I clearly realize that I reject the Orthogonality Thesis in its practically-relevant version. At most, I believe in the Pretty Large Angle Thesis.</p> <p>Yes, there could be a superintelligence that cared for nothing but maximizing paperclips—in the same way that there exist humans with 180 IQs, who’ve mastered philosophy and literature and science as well as any of us, but who now mostly care about maximizing their orgasms or their heroin intake. But, like, that’s a <em>nontrivial achievement!</em> When intelligence and goals are <em>that</em> orthogonal, there was normally some effort spent prying them apart.</p> <p>If you really accept the practical version of the Orthogonality Thesis, then it seems to me that you can’t regard education, knowledge, and enlightenment as instruments for moral betterment. Sure, they’re great for any entities that happen to share your values (or close enough), but ignorance and miseducation are far preferable for any entities that don’t. Conversely, then, if I <em>do</em> regard knowledge and enlightenment as instruments for moral betterment—and I do—then I can’t accept the practical form of the Orthogonality Thesis.</p> <p>Yes, the world would surely have been a better place had A. Q. Khan never learned how to build nuclear weapons. On the whole, though, education hasn’t merely improved humans’ abilities to achieve their goals; it’s also <em>improved </em>their goals. It’s broadened our circles of empathy, and led to the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women and individual rights and everything else that we associate with liberality, the Enlightenment, and existence being a little less nasty and brutish than it once was.</p> <p>In the Orthodox AI-doomers’ own account, the paperclip-maximizing AI would’ve mastered the nuances of human moral philosophy far more completely than any human—the better to deceive the humans, en route to extracting the iron from their bodies to make more paperclips. And yet the AI would never once use all that learning to question its paperclip directive. I acknowledge that this is possible. I deny that it’s trivial.</p> <p>Yes, there were Nazis with PhDs and prestigious professorships. But when you look into it, they were mostly mediocrities, second-raters full of resentment for their first-rate colleagues (like Planck and Hilbert) who found the Hitler ideology contemptible from beginning to end. Werner Heisenberg, Pascual Jordan—these are interesting as two of the only exceptions. Heidegger, Paul de Man—I daresay that these are exactly the sort of “philosophers” who I’d have expected to become Nazis, even if I hadn’t known that they <em>did</em> become Nazis.</p> <p>With the Allies, it wasn’t <em>merely</em> that they had Szilard and von Neumann and Meitner and Ulam and Oppenheimer and Bohr and Bethe and Fermi and Feynman and Compton and Seaborg and Schwinger and Shannon and Turing and Tutte and all the other Jewish and non-Jewish scientists who built fearsome weapons and broke the Axis codes and won the war. They also had Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper. They had, if I’m not mistaken, <em>all</em> the philosophers who wrote clearly and made sense.</p> <p>WWII was (among other things) a gargantuan, civilization-scale test of the Orthogonality Thesis. And the result was that the more moral side ultimately prevailed, seemingly not <em>completely</em> at random but in part because, by <em>being</em> more moral, it was able to attract the smarter and more thoughtful people. There are many reasons for pessimism in today’s world; that observation about WWII is perhaps my best reason for optimism.</p> <p>Ah, but I’m again just throwing around human metaphors totally inapplicable to AI! None of this stuff will matter once a superintelligence is unleashed whose cold, hard code specifies an objective function of “maximize paperclips”!</p> <p>OK, but what’s the goal of ChatGPT? Depending on your level of description, you could say it’s “to be friendly, helpful, and inoffensive,” or “to minimize loss in predicting the next token,” or both, or neither. I think we should consider the possibility that powerful AIs will <em>not</em> be best understood in terms of the monomanaical pursuit of a single goal—as most of us aren’t, and as GPT isn’t either. Future AIs could have partial goals, malleable goals, or differing goals depending on how you look at them. And <em>if</em> “the pursuit and application of wisdom” is one of the goals, then I’m <em>just</em> enough of a moral realist to think that that would preclude the superintelligence that harvests the iron from our blood to make more paperclips.</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/> <p>In my <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7042">last post</a>, I said that my “Faust parameter” — the probability I’d accept of existential catastrophe in exchange for learning the answers to humanity’s greatest questions — might be as high as 0.02.  Though I never actually said as much, some people interpreted this to mean that I estimated the probability of AI causing an existential catastrophe at somewhere around 2%.   In one of his <a href="https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-2">characteristically long and interesting posts</a>, Zvi Mowshowitz asked point-blank: why do I believe the probability is “merely” 2%?</p> <p>Of course, taking this question on its own Bayesian terms, I could easily be limited in my ability to answer it: the best I could do might be to ground it in <em>other</em> subjective probabilities, terminating at made-up numbers with no further justification. </p> <p>Thinking it over, though, I realized that my probability crucially depends on how you phrase the question.  Even before AI, I assigned a <em>way</em> higher than 2% probability to existential catastrophe in the coming century—caused by nuclear war or runaway climate change or collapse of the world’s ecosystems or whatever else.  This probability has certainly not gone down with the rise of AI, and the increased uncertainty and volatility it might cause.  Furthermore, if an existential catastrophe <em>does </em>happen, I expect AI to be causally involved in some way or other, simply because from this decade onward, I expect AI to be woven into <em>everything</em> that happens in human civilization.  But I don’t expect AI to be the only cause worth talking about.</p> <p>Here’s a warmup question: has AI <em>already</em> caused the downfall of American democracy?  There’s a plausible case that it has: Trump might never have been elected in 2016 if not for the Facebook recommendation algorithm, and after Trump’s conspiracy-fueled insurrection and the continuing strength of its unrepentant backers, many would classify the United States as at best a failing or teetering democracy, no longer a robust one like Finland or Denmark.  OK, but AI clearly wasn’t the <em>only</em> factor in the rise of Trumpism, and most people wouldn’t even call it the most important one.</p> <p>I expect AI’s role in the end of civilization, if and when it comes, to be broadly similar. The survivors, huddled around the fire, will <em>still</em> be able to argue about how much of a role AI played or didn’t play in causing the cataclysm.</p> <p>So, if we ask the directly relevant question — <em>do I expect the generative AI race, which started in earnest around 2016 or 2017 with the founding of OpenAI, to play a central causal role in the extinction of humanity?</em> — I’ll give a probability of around 2% for that.  And I’ll give a similar probability, maybe even a higher one, for the generative AI race to play a central causal role in the <em>saving</em> of humanity. All considered, then, I come down in favor right now of proceeding with AI research … with extreme caution, but proceeding.</p> <p>I liked and fully endorse OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s <a href="https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond">recent statement on “planning for AGI and beyond”</a> (though see also <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/openais-planning-for-agi-and-beyond">Scott Alexander’s reply</a>). I expect that few on any side will disagree, when I say that I hope our society <em>holds</em> OpenAI to Sam’s statement.</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/> <p>As it happens, my responses will be delayed for a couple days because I’ll be at an OpenAI alignment meeting! In my next post, I hope to share what I’ve learned from recent meetings and discussions about the <em>near-term, practical</em> aspects of AI safety—having hopefully laid some intellectual and emotional groundwork in this post for why near-term AI safety research isn’t just a total red herring and distraction.</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/> <p>Meantime, some of you might enjoy a <a href="https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/ai-risk-again">post</a> by Eliezer’s former co-blogger Robin Hanson, which comes to some of the same conclusions I do. “My fellow moderate, Robin Hanson” isn’t a phrase you hear every day, but it applies here!</p> <p>You might also enjoy the new paper by me and my postdoc Shih-Han Hung, <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.01625">Certified Randomness from Quantum Supremacy</a>, finally up on the arXiv after a five-year delay! But that’s a subject for a different post.</p> <div style="min-height:33px;" class="really_simple_share really_simple_share_button robots-nocontent snap_nopreview"><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_like" style="width:100px;"><div class="fb-like" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7064" data-layout="button_count" data-width="100" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_twitter" style="width:100px;"><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-text="Why am I not terrified of AI?" data-url="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7064" data-via="" ></a></div><div class="really_simple_share_google1" style="width:80px;"><div class="g-plusone" data-size="medium" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7064" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_specificfeeds_follow" style="width:110px;"><a href="http://www.specificfeeds.com/follow" target="_blank"><img decoding="async" src="https://149663533.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/plugins/really-simple-facebook-twitter-share-buttons/images/specificfeeds_follow.png" alt="Email, RSS" title="Email, RSS" /> Follow</a></div><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_share_new" style="width:110px;"><div class="fb-share-button" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7064" data-type="button_count" data-width="110"></div></div></div> <div class="really_simple_share_clearfix"></div> </div> <p class="postmetadata">Posted in <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=10" rel="category">Adventures in Meatspace</a>, <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=8" rel="category">The Fate of Humanity</a> | <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7064#comments">180 Comments »</a></p> </div> <div class="post"> <h3 id="post-6946"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6946" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Happy 40th Birthday Dana!">Happy 40th Birthday Dana!</a></h3> <small>Friday, December 30th, 2022</small> <div class="entry"> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-large"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.scottaaronson.com/dana-party.jpg" alt=""/></figure></div> <p><em>The following is what I read at Dana’s 40<sup>th</sup> birthday party last night. Don’t worry, it’s being posted with her approval. –SA</em></p> <p>I’d like to propose a toast to <a href="https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~danama/">Dana</a>, my wife and mother of my two kids. My dad, a former speechwriter, would advise me to just crack a few jokes and then sit down … but my dad’s not here.</p> <p>So instead I’ll tell you a bit about Dana.  She grew up in Tel Aviv, finishing her undergraduate CS degree at age 17—<em>before</em> she joined the army.  I met her when I was a new professor at MIT and she was a postdoc in Princeton, and we’d go to many of the same conferences. At <a href="http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/archive/Workshops/Cryptography/program.html">one</a> of those conferences, in Princeton, she finally figured out that my weird, creepy, awkward attempts to make conversation with her were, in actuality, me asking her out … at least in my mind!  So, after I’d returned to Boston, she then emailed me for days, just one email after the next, explaining everything that was wrong with me and all the reasons why we could never date.  Despite my general obliviousness in such matters, at some point I wrote back, “Dana, the absolute value of your feelings for me seems perfect. Now all I need to do is flip the sign!”</p> <p>Anyway, the very next weekend, I took the Amtrak back to Princeton at her invitation. That weekend is when we started dating, and it’s also when I introduced her to my family, and when she and I planned out the logistics of getting married.</p> <p>Dana and her family had been sure that she’d return to Israel after her postdoc. She made a huge sacrifice in staying here in the US for me. And that’s not even mentioning the sacrifice to her career that came with two very difficult pregnancies that produced our two very diffic … I mean, our two <em>perfect</em> and <em>beautiful</em> children.</p> <p>Truth be told, I haven’t always been the best husband, or the most patient or the most grateful.  I’ve constantly gotten frustrated and upset, <em>extremely</em> so, about all the things in our life that aren’t going well.  But preparing the slideshow tonight, I had a little epiphany.  I had a few photos from the first two-thirds of Dana’s life, but of course, I mostly had the last third.  But what’s even happened in that last third?  She today feels like she might be close to a breakthrough on the Unique Games Conjecture.  But 13 years ago, she felt exactly the same way.  She even looks the same!</p> <p>So, what even happened?</p> <p>Well OK, fine, there was my and Dana’s first trip to California, a month after we started dating.  Our first conference together.  Our trip to Vegas and the Grand Canyon.  Our first trip to Israel to meet her parents, who I think are finally now close to accepting me. Her parents’ trip to New Hope, Pennsylvania to meet <em>my</em> parents. Our wedding in Tel Aviv—the rabbi rushing through the entire ceremony in 7 minutes because he needed to get home to his kids. Our honeymoon safari in Kenya.  Lily’s birth. Our trip to Israel with baby Lily, where we introduced Lily to Dana’s grandmother Rivka, an Auschwitz survivor, just a few months before Rivka passed away. Taking Lily to run around Harvard Yard with our Boston friends, Lily losing her beloved doll Tuza there, then finding Tuza the next day after multiple Harvard staff had been engaged in the quest. There’s me and Dana eating acai bowls in Rio de Janeiro, getting a personal tour of the LHC in Switzerland, with kangaroos and koalas in Australia. There’s our house here in Austin.  Oh, and here are all our Austin friends! Our trip to Disney World with Lily, while Dana was pregnant with Daniel (she did ride one rollercoaster). Daniel’s birth, which to my relief, went well despite the rollercoaster. Our sabbatical year in Israel. The birth of our nephews.</p> <p>I confess I teared up a little going through all this. Because it’s like: if you showed all these photos to some third party, they’d probably be like, wow, that looks like a pretty good life. Even if you showed the photos to my 17-year-old self, I’d be like, OK, no need to roll the dice again, I’ll take <em>that</em> life. I’m not talking about what’s happened with the world—climate change or COVID or the insurrection or anything like that. But the part with the beautiful Israeli complexity theorist wife, who’s also caring and unbreakable in her moral convictions? Yes.</p> <p>So, thank you and a very happy birthday to the one who’s given me all this!</p> <p>And lastly, because it seems almost obligatory: I did feed everything I said just now into GPT (I won’t specify which version), and asked it to write Dana a special GPT birthday poem. Here’s what it came up with:</p> <p>From Tel Aviv to Princeton,<br>You’ve traveled near and far,<br>A brilliant computer scientist,<br>A shining, guiding star.</p> <p>You’ve made so many sacrifices,<br>For family and for love,<br>But your light shines through the darkness,<br>And fits me like a glove.</p> <p>We’ve shared so many moments,<br>Too many to recount,<br>But each one is a treasure,<br>Each memory paramount.</p> <p>So happy birthday, Dana,<br>You deserve the very best,<br>I’m grateful for your presence,<br>And feel so truly blessed.</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/> <p><strong><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-red-color">Addendum:</mark></strong> Speaking of GPT, should it and other Large Language Models be connected to the Internet and your computer’s filesystem and empowered to take actions directly, with reinforcement learning pushing it to achieve the user’s goals?</p> <p>On the negative side, some of my friends worry that this sort of thing might help an unaligned superintelligence to destroy the world.</p> <p>But on the positive side, at Dana’s birthday party, I could’ve just told the computer, “please display these photos in a slideshow rotation while also rotating among these songs,” and not wasted part of the night messing around with media apps that befuddle and defeat me as a mere CS PhD.</p> <p>I find it extremely hard to balance these considerations.</p> <p>Anyway, happy birthday Dana!</p> <div style="min-height:33px;" class="really_simple_share really_simple_share_button robots-nocontent snap_nopreview"><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_like" style="width:100px;"><div class="fb-like" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6946" data-layout="button_count" data-width="100" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_twitter" style="width:100px;"><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-text="Happy 40th Birthday Dana!" data-url="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6946" data-via="" ></a></div><div class="really_simple_share_google1" style="width:80px;"><div class="g-plusone" data-size="medium" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6946" ></div></div><div class="really_simple_share_specificfeeds_follow" style="width:110px;"><a href="http://www.specificfeeds.com/follow" target="_blank"><img decoding="async" src="https://149663533.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/plugins/really-simple-facebook-twitter-share-buttons/images/specificfeeds_follow.png" alt="Email, RSS" title="Email, RSS" /> Follow</a></div><div class="really_simple_share_facebook_share_new" style="width:110px;"><div class="fb-share-button" data-href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6946" data-type="button_count" data-width="110"></div></div></div> <div class="really_simple_share_clearfix"></div> </div> <p class="postmetadata">Posted in <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=10" rel="category">Adventures in Meatspace</a>, <a 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2017</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201707'>July 2017</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201706'>June 2017</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201705'>May 2017</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201704'>April 2017</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201703'>March 2017</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201701'>January 2017</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201612'>December 2016</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201611'>November 2016</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201610'>October 2016</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201609'>September 2016</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201607'>July 2016</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201606'>June 2016</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201605'>May 2016</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201604'>April 2016</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201603'>March 2016</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201602'>February 2016</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201601'>January 2016</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201512'>December 2015</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201511'>November 2015</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201510'>October 2015</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201509'>September 2015</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201508'>August 2015</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201507'>July 2015</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201506'>June 2015</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201505'>May 2015</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201504'>April 2015</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201503'>March 2015</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201502'>February 2015</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201501'>January 2015</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201412'>December 2014</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201411'>November 2014</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201410'>October 2014</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201409'>September 2014</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201408'>August 2014</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201407'>July 2014</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201406'>June 2014</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201405'>May 2014</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201404'>April 2014</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201403'>March 2014</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201402'>February 2014</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201401'>January 2014</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201312'>December 2013</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201311'>November 2013</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201310'>October 2013</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201309'>September 2013</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201308'>August 2013</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201307'>July 2013</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201306'>June 2013</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201305'>May 2013</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201304'>April 2013</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201303'>March 2013</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201302'>February 2013</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201301'>January 2013</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201212'>December 2012</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201211'>November 2012</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201210'>October 2012</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201209'>September 2012</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201208'>August 2012</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201207'>July 2012</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201206'>June 2012</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201205'>May 2012</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201204'>April 2012</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201203'>March 2012</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201202'>February 2012</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201201'>January 2012</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201112'>December 2011</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201111'>November 2011</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201110'>October 2011</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201109'>September 2011</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201108'>August 2011</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201107'>July 2011</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201106'>June 2011</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201105'>May 2011</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201104'>April 2011</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201103'>March 2011</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201102'>February 2011</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201101'>January 2011</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201012'>December 2010</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201011'>November 2010</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201010'>October 2010</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201009'>September 2010</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201008'>August 2010</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201007'>July 2010</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201006'>June 2010</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201005'>May 2010</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201004'>April 2010</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201002'>February 2010</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=201001'>January 2010</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200912'>December 2009</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200911'>November 2009</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200910'>October 2009</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200909'>September 2009</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200908'>August 2009</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200907'>July 2009</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200906'>June 2009</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200905'>May 2009</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200904'>April 2009</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200903'>March 2009</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200902'>February 2009</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200901'>January 2009</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200812'>December 2008</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200811'>November 2008</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200810'>October 2008</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200809'>September 2008</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200808'>August 2008</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200807'>July 2008</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200806'>June 2008</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200805'>May 2008</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200804'>April 2008</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200803'>March 2008</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200802'>February 2008</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200801'>January 2008</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200712'>December 2007</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200711'>November 2007</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200710'>October 2007</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200709'>September 2007</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200708'>August 2007</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200707'>July 2007</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200706'>June 2007</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200705'>May 2007</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200704'>April 2007</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200703'>March 2007</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200702'>February 2007</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200701'>January 2007</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200612'>December 2006</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200611'>November 2006</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200610'>October 2006</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200609'>September 2006</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200608'>August 2006</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200607'>July 2006</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200606'>June 2006</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200605'>May 2006</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200604'>April 2006</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200603'>March 2006</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200602'>February 2006</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200601'>January 2006</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200512'>December 2005</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200511'>November 2005</a></li> <li><a href='https://scottaaronson.blog/?m=200510'>October 2005</a></li> </ul> </li> <li class="categories"><h2>Categories</h2><ul> <li class="cat-item cat-item-10 current-cat"><a aria-current="page" href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=10">Adventures in Meatspace</a> (146) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-31"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=31">Announcements</a> (213) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-34"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=34">Ask Me Anything</a> (9) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-33"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=33">Bell's Theorem? But a Flesh Wound!</a> (11) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-5"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=5">Complexity</a> (321) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-14"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=14">Contests</a> (11) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-15"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=15">CS/Physics Deathmatch</a> (28) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-6"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=6">Democritus</a> (25) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-18"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=18">Embarrassing Myself</a> (58) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-27"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=27">GITCS</a> (5) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-13"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=13">Mahmoud</a> (8) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-12"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=12">Metaphysical Spouting</a> (81) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-30"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=30">Mirrored on CSAIL Blog</a> (44) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-9"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=9">Mistake of the Week</a> (13) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-11"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=11">Nerd Interest</a> (233) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-29"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=29">Nerd Self-Help</a> (16) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-42"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=42">Obviously I'm Not Defending Aaronson</a> (46) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-19"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=19">Physics for Doofuses</a> (10) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-32"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=32">PlanetMO</a> (1) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-3"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=3">Procrastination</a> (131) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-4"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=4">Quantum</a> (308) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-24"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=24">Quantum Computing Primers</a> (1) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-23"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=23">Quantum Computing Since Democritus</a> (3) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-16"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=16">Rage Against Doofosity</a> (104) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-7"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=7">Self-Referential</a> (50) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-17"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=17">Speaking Truth to Parallelism</a> (60) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-8"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=8">The Fate of Humanity</a> (185) </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1"><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?cat=1">Uncategorized</a> (5) </li> </ul></li> </ul>  </div> <hr /> <div id="footer">  <p> Shtetl-Optimized is proudly powered by <a href="https://wordpress.com/wp/?partner_domain=scottaaronson.blog&utm_source=Automattic&utm_medium=colophon&utm_campaign=Concierge%20Referral&utm_term=scottaaronson.blog" class="imprint" target="_blank">WordPress</a> <br /><a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?feed=rss2">Entries (RSS)</a> and <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?feed=comments-rss2">Comments (RSS)</a>.  </p> </div> </div>  <div id="fb-root"></div> <script>(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.0"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));</script><script type="text/javascript" id="jetpack-stats-js-before"> /* <![CDATA[ */ _stq = window._stq || []; _stq.push([ "view", JSON.parse("{\"v\":\"ext\",\"blog\":\"129520580\",\"post\":\"0\",\"tz\":\"-5\",\"srv\":\"scottaaronson.blog\",\"hp\":\"atomic\",\"ac\":\"3\",\"amp\":\"0\",\"j\":\"1:14.5\"}") ]); _stq.push([ "clickTrackerInit", "129520580", "0" ]); /* ]]> */ </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://stats.wp.com/e-202514.js" id="jetpack-stats-js" defer="defer" data-wp-strategy="defer"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/2.7.9/MathJax.js?config=default&ver=1.3.13" id="mathjax-js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> (function() { var t = document.createElement( 'script' ); t.type = 'text/javascript'; t.async = true; t.id = 'gauges-tracker'; t.setAttribute( 'data-site-id', '6165d574ad4fe5563e1e4971' ); t.src = '//secure.gaug.es/track.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName( 'script' )[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore( t, s ); })(); </script> </body></html>