Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
See our twin at Reddit
Had me in the first few paragraphs...not gonna lie. Then it flipped to a pro-Zionist theme, and I was all like, "Wut?". Buddy, how do you not see the utter hypocrisy in your take.
Fuckin' satire is truly dead. It's bleeding all over reality and nothing is real anymore.
Had me in the first few paragraphs…not gonna lie.
Yeah, the first few paragraphs actually felt like they would serve as a defense of Hamas: Israel engineered a situation were any form of resistance against them would need to be violent and brutal so Hamas is justified even if it killed 5 people to save 1.
The more I think about his metaphor the more frustrated I get. Israel holds disproportionate power in this entire situation, if anyone is contriving no-win situations to win temporary PR victories it is Israel (Netanyahu's trial is literally getting stalled out by the conflict).
You can pull a lever to divert the train and save your daughter. But there’s a catch, as there always is in these moral dilemmas: namely, the murderer has also tied his own five innocent children to the tracks, in such a way that, if you divert the train, then it will kill his children.
Zionism, to define it in one sentence, is the proposition that, in the situation described, you have not merely a right but a moral obligation to pull the lever—and that you can do so with your middle finger raised high to the hateful mob.
I deal with emails and social media posts day after day calling me a genocidal baby-killing monster.
I mean this is all just textbook zionism. Zionists are openly genocidal and proud of it, and are aghast that anyone might oppose zionism.
E: to be clear, zionist propaganda gets regurgitated by western media outlets to try and hide the genocide; this is a tactical measure as israel relies on international support to continue its genocide. Internally, israeli news outlets openly celebrate genocide.
Scott here is provoking me to inchoate "fuck your trolley problems" rage.
You know, if I were ever actually confronted with a situation where I had to choose one child's life over another, the trauma would fuck me up for years. Anyone who says they could feel self-righteous in that circumstance is emotionally and morally diseased.
This works just as well to defend mass punishments of villages suspected of harboring partisans. Which makes sense, since that is pretty much what the Gaza war is about.
There is also the whole 'nits make lice' sort of stuff which was used to justify killing Native Americans (ow look, a group who also has not homeland to return to, which Scott, an American, forgot about). And basically any sort of genocide ever runs on this sort of 'I have to kill their babies because they might kill mine' shit logic.
Even Robocop got that you should not shoot through hostages when the bad guy takes a hostage. (Cw: attempted sexual abuse: https://youtu.be/taWMwB1mLhc)
First paragraph there is literally Hitler. o_O
I was not prepared for this level of DARVO. I was already done with him after last time and can't do better than repeat myself:
It’s somewhat depressing that [he] cannot even imagine a democratic one-state solution, let alone peace across the region; it’s more depressing that [his] empathy is so blatantly one-sided.
Even Peter Woit had no problem recognizing Scott's bile and posted a good take on this:
Scott formulates this as an abstract moral dilemma, but of course it’s about the very concrete question of what the state of Israel should do about the two million people in Gaza. Scott’s answer to this is clear: they want to kill us and our children, so we have to kill them all, children included. This is completely crazy, as is defining Zionism as this sort of genocidal madness.
It's bizarre and pathetic how Scott disabled comments on his blog post but is now using Peter Woit's blog to carry on a debate with all the people horrified by his views.
And he's really showing the unidirectionality of his empathy as well as his persecution complex. E.g., here's Woit telling Aaronson to get therapy:
I tried to tell you earlier this year that you should be seeking professional help about this, and things have now gotten much worse.
And in another comment:
Seriously: seek professional help for your paranoid delusions/psychological defense mechanisms for justifying murdering Palestinian children on a large scale as part of a genocide/ethnic cleansing campaign.
And another commenter says,
I hope Scott gets help, he is clearly insane.
OK, call it casually ableist, but it's not wishing death upon the man, or harm to his loved ones. But here's Aaronson commenting further down the thread:
In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m not addressing any of my comments here to Peter, or to any of the cowards of his comment section. They’re unworthy of civilized conversation, as they don’t fulfill the basic prerequisites for it, like caring whether their interlocutors and their loved ones live or die.
Jeshua H. ben Joseph, dude. Get help.
Here's the update Scott posted, with my comments interspersed:
This post was born of two years of frustration. It was born of trying, fifty or a hundred times since October 7
Ah yes, October 7thism, the belief that the universe began on October 7th of 2023. There was nothing before this time, certainly no such thing as "palestine" or "gaza", and Israel just materialised, only to be set upon by some real stinkers and meanies who attacked for no reason whatsoever. And then Israel definitely didn't invoke something they named the "Hannibal Directive" to kill their own people.
to find common ground with the anti-Zionists who emailed me
Dear everyone who emailed Scott: please don't try debate fascists. They will only try and normalise their fascism to you.
messaged me, etc.—“hey, obviously neither of us wants any children killed or starved, we both have many bones to pick with the current Israeli government, but surely we at least agree on the necessity of defeating Hamas, right? right??“
Yes, Hamas needs to be defeated so that the Israelis can finally leave Palestine alone, a thing they will definitely do and not just continue with their genocide.
—only to discover, again and again, that the anti-Zionists had no interest in such common ground.
This is approaching self-awareness, in that Scott is discovering that as a fascist, he doesn't have common ground to share with non or antifascists.
With the runaway success of the global PR campaign against Israel—
Helped in part by the Israeli media that gleefully report the results of their genocide and their ongoing plans to continue said genocide—
i.e., of Sinwar’s strategy—and with the rise of figures like Mamdani (and his right-wing counterparts) all over the Western world, anti-Zionists smell blood in the water today.
Damn those anti-Zionist sharks and their opposition of genocide! And damn those people that have only recently found it politically convenient to denounce genocide, and damn those that still aren't willing to call it a genocide but are willing to compromise on famine. Damn them all!
And so, no matter how reasonable they presented themselves at first, eventually they’d come out with “why can’t the Jews just go back to Germany and Poland?” or “the Holocaust was just one more genocide among many; it doesn’t deserve any special response, or “why can’t we dismantle Israel and have a secular state, with a Jewish minority and a majority that’s sworn to kill all Jews as soon as possible?”
This is hearsay; I reject this outright. I do think that Israel needs to be dismantled, but not for the bullshit strawman reason he's given.
And then I realize, with a gasp, that we Jews really are mostly on our own in a cruel and terrifying world—just like we’ve been throughout history.
This does not justify genocide.
To say that this experience radicalized me would be an understatement.
Actually, it would be an overstatement. Scott was already Zionist before Oct 7th, so he was fully radicalised as Zionist/fascist before "this experience."
Indeed, my experience has been that even most Israelis, who generally have far fewer illusions than we diaspora Jews, don’t understand the vastness of the chasm that’s formed. They imagine that they can have a debate with outsiders similar to the debates playing out within Israel—one that presupposes basic factual knowledge and the parameters of the problem (e.g., clearly we can’t put 7 million Jews under the mercy of Hamas). The rationale for Zionism itself feels so obvious to them as to be cringe. Except that, to the rest of the world, it isn’t.
Yes, to a lot of the world, colonialism is objectionable. And to the rest of the world, genocide is objectionable.
We’re not completely on our own though. There remain decent people of every background, who understand the stakes and feel the weight of history—and I regularly hear from them.
The Nazis had sympathisers too!
And whatever your criticisms of Israel’s current tactics,
Not putting it lightly at all.
so long as you accept the almost comically overwhelming historical case for the necessity of Jewish self-defense, this post wasn’t aimed at you, and you and I probably could discuss these matters.
Once again, this does not justify genocide. This does not justify zionism or fascism.
It’s just that the anti-Zionists scream so loudly, suck up so much oxygen, that we definitely can’t discuss them in public. Maybe in person sometime, face to face.
More like fascist to fascist.
Yes, I overestimated the number of people who ever believed that, but the fact that it was clearly a nonzero number had been deterrent enough for me
Consider he was wrong about the creepy nerd stuff and perhaps he is wrong now. Bit it doesn't matter because one person hating him is already enough. This says a lot about him, just insane part of this article is him going: "they were mean to me so all Palestinians now should die". Unhinged shit. High amount of abuser logic here as well.
Also, doesnt he live in the US?
Really hope he doesnt teach students anymore because that will not end well.
E: he wrote an update, where he claims anti-zionists(*) are saying all kinds of things (which I thankfully have not seen any of them do, because wtf, those are some fucked up things to say). It really makes me wonder what kind of people he surrounds himself with, I mean we know he is allergic to sneerclub style people (and I have always suggested we keep away as he seems to need therapy not a debate (see how he considers people who agree with him decent people and the other side not, and he doesn't just consider everybody decent people with the wrong opinions (and there is the event where he send a former sneerclubber back at us, according to the sneerclubber, but there is no reason to believe the former SCer on his word there))) but he is less allergic to debate neo-nazis in his surroundings wonder if that is a cause of it. I get why he says Jewish people are scared (I do consider saying 'Jewish people' when you mean Israelis a form of anti-Semitism but lets not go there), but just nuts he doesn't extend this to Palestinian people or Arab/Persian people in the region. (And don't take this for me being a fan of Hamas here(**), which I also would rather see gone than stay, but killing everybody will not solve that, it will only make things worse, see as an example the Taliban)
*: This should not come as a big surprise to people, as I tend to be weird about the usage of a lot of words, but I generally try to avoid the word zionist because it is inflammatory, and badly defined and usage generally muddies things and not makes things clearer (for example Albert Einstein was a zionist, but he supported the Palestinian people so it is a bit more complicated, sorry I'm odd like that, see also how I almost always say neo-nazi not just nazi (because at least the nazis didn't know where they would end up they just didn't care, neo-nazis know and they still choose it). Just quoting him. And yes, I'm doing the Rationalist word taboo thing here, I know.
A rant about how I learned of the existence of Hamas and Dutch culture.
**: While I'm already doing a lot of sidenotes here, I do recall where I first learn of the existence of Hamas (I was more aware of the PLO, as their scarf was popular among alternative people), from Dutch Soccer, the Amsterdam team is seen as Jewish (there is no reason for that at all, it is just a weird claim, while yes most of the Dutch Jews now live in Amsterdam there is very little connection between them and the team, and general we have been pretty bad to Dutch Jews historically, a bit of philosemitism (which is a form of anti-Semitism)) and of course they have a sort of feud with the Rotterdam team. Who started to shout 'Hamas Hamas, alle joden aan het gas' (hamas, gas the jews) during matches (and it isn't just their team a lot of others do it). This is so important to the these soccer fans that now despite finally realizing this is not a good look (see Dutch people bad re Jewish people) they still want to keep the 'hamas hamas' part because it is tradition. They just wanted a different rhyme. I think about this a lot, and how normalized it was/is, esp as we are doing the 'immigrants are anti-Semites' bit during election times again.
and I have always suggested we keep away as he seems to need therapy not a debate
Zionists are fascists and do not deserve peace.
“why can’t we dismantle Israel and have a secular state, with a Jewish minority and a majority that’s sworn to kill all Jews as soon as possible?”
This racist motherfucker is lost so far up his own ass he'll never find his way out
Gotta admit I was not expecting the A in ScottA to stand for annihilation rather than just apartheid
What the actual fuck?
I guess we know at least part of where the "nobody can say" ambiguity came from in Eliezer's reality tunnel.
Like, even if you somehow accept that his wildly offensive framing is somehow actually analogous to the Palestinian genocide, it is at best "not intuitive" that throwing even more corpses on the fucking pile is going to somehow be the right thing to do. I thought these people were hard "shut up and multiply" utilitarians
I'll raise the question here instead of in the thread that gave me the idea, since it feels not quite right to bring the awful to NotAwfulTech:
At this point, I have real reservations recommending anything that Scott Aaronson has written for any purpose. I'm not going to elide his actual contributions to science, but I can't suggest that a student read any expository writing of his, not without such heavy caveats and contextualizing that my conscience would welcome any alternative. So, then: What do people read him for, and what are the alternatives?
I suppose one prominent thing is his book, Quantum Computing Since Democritus. I know of various other books about quantum information/computing, written from a physicist perspective. There are David Mermin's Quantum Computer Science: An Introduction (Cambridge UP, 2007) and Eleanor Rieffel and Wolfgang Polak's Quantum Computing: A Gentle Introduction (MIT Press, 2014). If anyone knows a decent undergrad introduction to Gödel incompleteness and its relation to the halting problem, that would probably cover a lot of the rest, apart from what I recall as rather shallow pseudophilosophical faffling. (I am going off decade-old memories and the table of contents here.)
Gödel makes everyone weep. For tears of joy, my top pick is still Doug Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is suitable for undergraduates. Another strong classic is Raymond Smullyan's To Mock a Mockingbird. Both of these dead-trees are worth it; I personally find myself cracking them open regularly for citations, quotes, and insights. For tears of frustration, the best way to fully understand the numerical machinery is Peter Smith's An Introduction to Gödel's Theorems, freely available online. These books are still receiving new editions, but any edition should suffice. If the goal is merely to ensure that the student can diagonalize, then the student can directly read Bill Lawvere's 1968 paper Diagonal arguments & Cartesian closed categories with undergraduate category theory, but in any case they should also read Noson Yanofsky's 2003 expository paper A universal approach to self-referential paradoxes, incompleteness & fixed points. The easiest options are at the beginning of the paragraph and the hardest ones are at the end; nonetheless any option will cover Cantor, Russell, Gödel, Turing, Tarski, and the essentials of diagonalization.
I don't know what to do about stuff like the Complexity Zoo. Their veterinarian is Greg Kuberberg, a decent guy who draws lots of diagrams. I took some photos myself when I last visited. But obviously it's not an ideal situation for the best-known encyclopedia to be run by Aaronson and Habryka.
And hardly run, at that: this changelog is all spam. Tsk, tsk.
They don't even try to catch the page spammers? Ow god. (the account creation is hard to do something about, but the page spammers is just bad, in this case it is also bad because all the new accounts end with 4 numbers). Less than the bare minimum.
(how are the very online, worried about robots killing everybody, have enough time to write book sized blogposts, so bad at this, when I was active trying to maintain a wiki I checked the recent changes somewhat regularly, for shame).
Give me admin rights Scott, I can keep the toxic elements off ~~my~~ your wiki.
The very unscientific sampling I did just now suggests that those complexity classes which Wikipedia covers, it covers better than the Zoo does anything. Of course, the Zoo has room for #P/lowpoly and LOGWANK and all the other classes that are attested in one paper apiece.
See so the wiki should link, or even cache/include the oages from wikipedia that are better easy to do in mediawiki.
Make me an admin Scott, I know mediawiki, and I can be trusted. Honest.
MediaWiki does not seem like the right tool for this job, if one were starting from scratch. It's... a lot of infrastructure for a small number of pages that will be changed very sporadically by a small number of people.
Hey, it looks like our very own corbin started the "complexity class" page at the nLab! Maybe we should flesh that out. (I started their page for the number 24 but am not very active at all.)
I borrowed a copy of Quantum Computing Since Democritus and read a bit of it. As can happen in books based directly on lectures, it has more "personality" overtly on display than the average technical book. That goes for good and for ill. What Alice finds engaging, Bob can find grating, and vice versa. In this case, I noticed some passages that sound, well, smarmy. I personally can't help but read them through the lens of everything that's happened since, and all the ways that Aaronson has told the world what kind of person he is. Through that lens, there's a kind of self-deprecating arrogance on display, as though the book is saying, "I am a nerd, I hold the one true nerd opinion, and everything I assert is evident and simple if you are a nerd, which again, I am the defining example of." It's possible that I would have skipped past all that a decade ago, but now, I can't not see it.
There are big chunks of it that I'm not the best reader to evaluate. I'm a physicist who has casually studied computer science along with many other interests; I haven't tried to teach P vs NP in a classroom setting. But where the book does overlap with more serious interests of mine, I found it wanting. There's a part (chapter 9) about exploring where the rules of quantum theory could come from, and how the mathematics of the theory could potentially be derived from more basic premises rather than taken as postulates. I found this discussion badly organized and poorly argued. In 2013, it was historically shallow, and now in 2025, it's outdated.
Everything he says about Bohr is caricatured to the point of absurdity.
His history of the halting problem is conventional but wrong.
The last chapter is called "Ask me anything" and records a Q&A he held on the last day of the course upon which the book was based. It gets onto the topic of evolution, veers into naive adaptationism and blends that with social Darwinism... yeaahhhh.
Glob help me, but I've actually been reading Quantum Computing Since Democritus, and I've been sorely tempted to write an effortful post about it. In particular, it is appealing to ask whether the book delivers on its professed theme. Here's Aaronson in the preface, laying out what he considers the book's "central message":
But if quantum mechanics isn’t physics in the usual sense – if it’s not about matter, or energy, or waves, or particles – then what is it about? From my perspective, it’s about information and probabilities and observables, and how they relate to each other.
This is a defensible claim. All the way back in the 1930s, Birkhoff and von Neumann were saying that we should understand quantum physics by modifying the rules of logic, which is about as close to "quantum information" thinking before the subjects of computer science and information theory had really been invented. Later, E. T. Jaynes was fond of saying that quantum mechanics is an omelette that mixes up nature and our information about nature, and in order to make further progress in physics, we need to separate them. When undergrads came to John Wheeler asking for summer research projects, he liked to suggest, "Derive quantum mechanics from an information-theoretic principle!" But the question at hand is whether Aaronson's book succeeds at making a case. You can talk a lot about quantum information theory or quantum computing without convincing anyone that it illuminates the fundamental subject matter of quantum mechanics. Knuth's Art of Computer Programming is not an argument that classical electromagnetism is "about information".
Here's Aaronson a bit later:
Here, the physicists assure us, no one knows how we should adjust our intuition so that the behavior of subatomic particles would no longer seem so crazy. Indeed, maybe there is no way; maybe subatomic behavior will always remain an arbitrary brute fact, with nothing to say about it beyond “such-and-such formulas give you the right answer.”
Then he argues,
as the result of decades of work in quantum computation and quantum foundations, we can do a lot better today than simply calling quantum mechanics a mysterious brute fact.
What is this new improved perspective? Here's how his italicized paragraph about it begins:
Quantum mechanics is a beautiful generalization of the laws of probability: a generalization based on the 2-norm rather than the 1-norm, and on complex numbers rather than nonnegative real numbers.
That isn't just a "brute fact". It's the same "brute fact" that an ordinary textbook will tell you! It's the "fourth postulate" in Cohen-Tannoudji et al., equation (1.3) in Griffiths and Schroeter, page 9 of Zwiebach. All that Aaronson has done is change the jargon a tiny bit.
Aaronson declares himself indifferent to the needs of "the people designing lasers and transistors". And fair enough; we all have our tastes for topics. But he has set himself the challenge of demonstrating that studying how to program computers that have not been built, and comparing them to computers that physics says can never be built, is the way to the heart of quantum mechanics.
Aaronson quotes a passage from Carl Sagan, thusly:
Imagine you seriously want to understand what quantum mechanics is about. There is a mathematical underpinning that you must first acquire, mastery of each mathematical subdiscipline leading you to the threshold of the next. In turn you must learn arithmetic, Euclidean geometry, high school algebra, differential and integral calculus, ordinary and partial differential equations, vector calculus, certain special functions of mathematical physics, matrix algebra, and group theory . . . The job of the popularizer of science, trying to get across some idea of quantum mechanics to a general audience that has not gone through these initiation rites, is daunting. Indeed, there are no successful popularizations of quantum mechanics in my opinion – partly for this reason. These mathematical complexities are compounded by the fact that quantum theory is so resolutely counterintuitive. Common sense is almost useless in approaching it. It’s no good, Richard Feynman once said, asking why it is that way. No one knows why it is that way. That’s just the way it is.
Aaronson follows this by saying that he doesn't need convincing: "Personally, I simply believe the experimentalists" when they say that quantum physics works. Again, fair enough on its own. But I think this is poor media literacy here. Sagan's Demon-Haunted World is all about the public understanding of science, the difference between authorities and experts, the challenge of becoming scientifically literate, and that kind of thing. What Sagan means by "what quantum mechanics is about" in this context is what physicists use the theory to do, day by day, and why we have confidence in it. Even if you come along with a better explanation of where the mathematics comes from, all that won't go away!
Aaronson goes on:
Look, obviously the physicists had their reasons for teaching quantum mechanics that way, and it works great for a certain kind of student. But the “historical” approach also has disadvantages, which in the quantum information age are becoming increasingly apparent. For example, I’ve had experts in quantum field theory – people who’ve spent years calculating path integrals of mind-boggling complexity – ask me to explain the Bell inequality to them, or other simple conceptual things like Grover’s algorithm. I felt as if Andrew Wiles had asked me to explain the Pythagorean Theorem.
And then, did anyone clap?
This is a false analogy. I don't think it's a surprise, I am not convinced that it's an actual problem, and if it is, I don't think Aaronson makes any progress to a solution.
The Pythagorean theorem is part of the common heritage of all mathematics education. Moreover, it's the direct ancestor to the problem that Wiles famously solved. It's going to be within his wheelhouse. But a quantum field theorist who's been deep into that corner of physics might well not have had to think about Bell inequalities since they were in school. It's like asking an expert on the voyages of Zheng He about how Charlemagne became Holy Roman Emperor. There are multiple aspects of Bell inequalities that someone from a different specialization could want "explained", even if they remember the gist. First, there are plenty of questions about how to get a clean Bell test in the laboratory. How does one handle noise, how do we avoid subtly flawed statistics, what are these "loopholes" that experimentalists keep trying to close by doing better and better tests, etc. Aaronson has nothing to say about this, because he's not an experiment guy. And again, that's entirely fair; some of us are best as theorists. Second, there are more conceptual (dare I say "philosophical"?) questions about what exactly are the assumptions that go into deriving Bell-type inequalities, how to divide those assumptions up, and what the violation of those inequalities in nature says about the physical world. Relatedly, there are questions about who proved what and when, what specifically Bell said in each of his papers, who built on his work and why, etc. Aaronson says very little about all of this. Nothing leaps out at me as wrong, but it's rather "101". The third broad category of questions are about mathematical specifics. What particular combination of variables appears in which inequality, what are the bounds that combination is supposed to satisfy, etc. The expressions that appear in these formulae tend to look like rabbits pulled out of a hat. Sometimes there are minus signs and factors of root-2 and such floating around, and it's hard to remember where exactly they go. Even people who know the import of Bell's theorem could well ask to have it "explained", i.e., to have some account given of where all those arbitrary-looking bits came from. I don't think Aaronson does particularly well on this front. He pulls a rabbit out of his hat (a two-player game with Alice and Bob trying to take the XOR of two bits), he quotes a number with a root-2 in it, and he refers to some other lecture notes for the details, which include lots of fractional multiples of pi and which themselves leave some of the details to the interested reader.
Aaronson leads into this rather unsatisfying discussion thusly:
So what is Bell’s Inequality? Well, if you look for an answer in almost any popular book or website, you’ll find page after page about entangled photon sources, Stern–Gerlach apparatuses, etc., all of it helpfully illustrated with detailed experimental diagrams. This is necessary, of course, since if you took all the complications away, people might actually grasp the conceptual point!
However, since I’m not a member of the Physics Popularizers’ Guild, I’m now going to break that profession’s time-honored bylaws, and just tell you the conceptual point directly.
The tone strikes me, personally, as smarmy. But there's also an organizational issue. After saying he'll "just tell you the conceptual point directly", he then goes through the XOR rigmarole, which takes more than a page, before he gets to "the conceptual point" (that quantum mechanics is inconsistent with local hidden variables). It's less direct than advertised, for sure. I have not systematically surveyed pop-science explanations of Bell's theorem prior to 2013, but the "page after page of entangled photon sources..." rings false to me.
Aaronson tries to back up his perspective in chapter 9, where he makes the following contention:
Quantum mechanics is what you would inevitably come up with if you started from probability theory, and then said, let’s try to generalize it so that the numbers we used to call “probabilities” can be negative numbers.
This is a bait-and-switch, or more charitably, poor organization. Later he will admit that he needs to introduce not just negative numbers, but complex numbers too. What arguments does he give to justify bringing complex numbers into the picture? Why prefer ordinary quantum theory over what we might call "real-amplitude" quantum theory? He provides three suggestions. The first is based on a continuity argument ("if it makes sense to apply an operation for one second, then it ought to make sense to apply that same operation for only half a second"). He argues that this can only be made to work if the amplitudes are complex rather than only real. But this does not hold. We can simply say that in real-amplitude quantum theory, the time evolution operators belong to the subgroup of the orthogonal group that is continuously connected to the identity. This is actually what would be analogous to regular quantum theory, where we make unitary operators by taking the exponential of -iHt, where H is a Hamiltonian and t is an amount of time. In the real-amplitude theory, we just use an antisymmetric matrix as a generator instead of an anti-Hermitian one.
The second argument is that the number of parameters needed to specify a mixed state scales better for complex amplitudes than for real. This is a style of argument that has a considerable cachet among aspiring reconstructors of the quantum formalism, but it too has shortcomings. Aaronson invokes the principle that states for independent quantum systems combine via the tensor product. He asserts that this is true, and then argues that this makes the parameter counting work out nicely for complex but not real amplitudes. Plainly, then, this case for complex amplitudes can't be better than the case for the tensor product. It replaces one mathematical "brute fact" with another. People who go into more depth about this invoke a premise they call "tomographic locality". The conceptual challenge is then, if tomographic locality failed to hold true, would that actually be so bad? Would we find it stranger than, for example, quantum entanglement? See Hardy and Wootters (2010) and Centeno et al. (2024).
The third argument is given almost in passing. It's a "well, I guess that's nice" property which holds for the complex-amplitude theory and fails for the real-amplitude version. Bill Wootters noticed it. Of course, he also found something that works out nice only when the amplitudes are real instead. See Wootters (2013) for a more recent explanation of the latter, which he first published in 1980.
What Aaronson calls starting "directly from the conceptual core" strikes me instead as merely discarding some old prefatory material, like the Bohr model of hydrogen, and replacing it with new, like some chatter about classical computation. His "conceptual core" is the same old postulate. He just applies it in somewhat different settings, so he ends up doing matrix algebra instead of differential equations. I once thought that would be easier on students, but then I actually had to teach a QM class, and then I ended up "reviewing" a lot of matrix algebra.
A physicist who learned quantum mechanics the old-fashioned way, and who now sees "quantum" being hyped as the next Bitcoin, might well have some questions at this point. "So, you're telling me that these highly idealized models of hypothetical, engineered systems bring us closer to the secrets of the Old One than studying natural phenomena will? I'm sure you have your own good reasons for wanting to know if QURP is contained in PFUNK, but I want to understand why ice floats on water, why both iron and charcoal glow the same kind of red when they get hot, why a magnet will pick up a steel paperclip but not a shiny soda can." And: "I get the desire for a 'conceptual core' to quantum physics. But have you actually isolated such a thing? From where I stand, it looks like you've just picked one of the important equations and called it the important equation. Shouldn't your 'conceptual core' be a statement with some punch to it, like the big drama premise of special relativity? What's your counterpart to each observer who feels herself motionless will measure the same speed of light?"
Here's how Aaronson begins chapter 9:
There are two ways to teach quantum mechanics. The first way – which for most physicists today is still the only way – follows the historical order in which the ideas were discovered. So, you start with classical mechanics and electrodynamics, solving lots of grueling differential equations at every step. Then, you learn about the “blackbody paradox” and various strange experimental results, and the great crisis these things posed for physics. Next, you learn a complicated patchwork of ideas that physicists invented between 1900 and 1926 to try to make the crisis go away. Then, if you’re lucky, after years of study, you finally get around to the central conceptual point: that nature is described not by probabilities (which are always nonnegative), but by numbers called amplitudes that can be positive, negative, or even complex.
This is wrong in a few ways. First, that "years of study"? Yeah, I saw complex probability amplitudes in my first term of college. Before they showed us all the blobby/cloudy pictures of electron orbitals, they took two minutes to explain what was being plotted. Our first full-blown quantum mechanics course was at the advanced age of ... sophomore year. And we're not talking about something squeezed in on the last day before summer vacation. See above regarding how it's the third equation in the first chapter of the ubiquitous standard undergrad QM textbook. This is not an idea sequestered in the inner sanctum of knowledge; it's babby's first wavefunction.
Second, the orthodox method is not really "historical". It can't be. The physicists who did all that work from 1900 through 1925--27 knew much more physics than college kids do today. They were professionals! Pick up the Dover reprint of the Sources of Quantum Mechanics collection, and see how many of the papers in it make sense using only first-year physics. Dirac was thinking about Poisson brackets, not a block on an inclined plane. The capsule "histories" in QM textbooks are caricatures, and sometimes quite poor ones at that.
I recently searched “shtetl” on facebook to see what my friends had ever shared from the blog, literally only three posts:
So in terms of the content worth sharing and alternatives, it appears it’s just the CS based stuff.
E: Joke answer: clearly the go-to contrablog is Scott’s nemesis Arthur Chu’s archived twitter feed, or just watching Jeopardy episodes.
I felt dirty reading that. Glad I didn't persist till the end.
Oh no, you must have missed the surprise incelism, let me fix that:
And as the world learned a decade ago, I was able to date, get married, and have a family, only because I finally rejected what I took to be the socially obligatory attitude for male STEM nerds like me—namely, that my heterosexuality was inherently gross, creepy, and problematic, and that I had a moral obligation never to express romantic interest to women.
Given how often it shows up in his writings, this incel victim narrative is a linchpin to his personality. He even trots it out in the middle of this genocidal screed -- in what on first glance seems to be an irrelevant detour. But it's really not irrelevant. His self-inflicted psychic damage is painfully real and manifests itself in all sorts of toxic and sociopathic ways, including abject dehumanization of an entire population.
There's a shocking level of scope insensitivity on display. Like, on one hand I think there's something healthy in recognizing that some people are going to be assholes to you for their own reasons and that you can't "fix" them. Like, I'm perfectly happy to live and let live with some of the people in my family or former friends for a variety of personal reasons, and like Scott here I found that my mental health and life outcomes improved significantly when I decided to accept this.
But I don't even know how to explain that there's a difference between saying "I don't talk to people from high school anymore" and "we should depopulate and resettle an urban area the size of Detroit." Like, this is fundamentally not something that should need to be explained.
Apparently I'm a fighting-type because I was not prepared for all this psychic damage.
Also, I'm not sure what the fucking takeaway here is supposed to be. Like... Getting over your own unhealthy fixations about relationships and sexuality is important for actually improving your relationships with people who might want to have sex with you.
I ... just ... what?
He made up a whole society to be mad at.
@blakestacey @Architeuthis I can't remember where I read this, but I saw someone describe his position as "how dare women discuss their real problems when I have imaginary problems"
I wonder if in an earlier draft he accused sneerclub of causing his support of the genocide.
That is certainly a way you can use to describe a course of action that you would consider morally good. I don't know if you should, but I suppose it is not a physical impossibility.
He made it to the orange site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45076318
Well, not all of the comments there are horrible. Though there is a guy calling himself "richardfeynman" saying some pretty silly stuff. His prior comment history is full of promptfondling.
There could be other "into the locker now" signals that are as strong as calling yourself "richardfeynman" on Hacker News, but I cannot think of a stronger one.
Yep Feynman is one of those 'it is ok to like him, but if you love him, oh no' types. (went back and checked, if it was the person whos comments jumped out at me as 'eurgh' and indeed).
(And a big indication somebody is having some really disgustingly racist thoughts about people in Pakistan is when they bring up the birth rates. Seems to be a guarantee. People really hate the Palestinians for having kids, and see that as some sort of indication that it isn't that bad what everybody is going through).