“We predescribed our methodology in enough advance detail for Polymarket to run a real-money prediction market, and traders trusted us enough for the market to be liquid” would be overwhelmingly more credible than “we published our results in a big-name science journal”.
Good sneer from user andrewrk:
People are always saying things like, “surprisingly good” to describe LLM output, but that’s like when 5 year old stops scribbling on the walls and draws a “surprisingly good” picture of the house, family, and dog standing outside on a sunny day on some construction paper. That’s great, kiddo, let’s put your programming language right here on the fridge.
Also a concept that Scott Aaronson praised Hanson for.
(Crediting the “Great Filter” to Hanson, like Scott Computers there, sounds like some fuckin’ bullshit to me. In Cosmos, Carl Sagan wrote, “Why are they not here? There are many possible answers. Although it runs contrary to the heritage of Aristarchus and Copernicus, perhaps we are the first. Some technical civilization must be the first to emerge in the history of the Galaxy. Perhaps we are mistaken in our belief that at least occasional civilizations avoid self-destruction.” And in his discussion of abiogenesis: “Life had arisen almost immediately after the origin of the Earth, which suggests that life may be an inevitable chemical process on an Earth-like planet. But life did not evolve beyond blue-green algae for three billion years, which suggests that large lifeforms with specialized organs are hard to evolve, harder even than the origin of life. Perhaps there are many other planets that today have abundant microbes but no big beasts and vegetables.” Boom! There it is, in only the most successful pop-science book of the century.)
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.
I’d scrounge the biggest piece of cardboard that I could and go at it with spray paint.
I was going to chime in to say something similar. I don’t think trying to game out the possible reaction to the possible hype about the possible application, etc., etc., is the best use of anyone’s time. It might be more beneficial to, for example, keep track of the cases where the guys selling “quantum” are the same guys who have been selling “AI” and “crypto”.
Really, the clue was right there in the name all along.
Someone claiming to be the “cartoon guy” showed up at Woit’s blog to explain himself. He’s an edgelord Reddit atheist, the type that we’d ban tout de suite after he leaves one slur-filled comment that we delete.
Effective altruism has more than its share of critics. But Peter Thiel, the billionaire cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, is unusual in that, when he describes us as the “Antichrist,” he does not mean this as a generic slur but rather as a specific claim that we oppose Jesus Christ in the Second Coming.
O-kay…
My attempted secular version of his argument:
But … why?
Here’s that thread without the line numbers:
In a deeply offensive and morally bankrupt essay “Deep Zionism”, Scott Aaronson presents the killing of Palestinian children as a moral duty, effectively endorsing the murder of 18,000+ Palestinian children in response to the murder of 36 Jewish children on 10/7/2023.
scottaaronson.blog/?p=9082
Aaronson: “Zionism…is the proposition that…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.” (Deep Zionism, 2024).
Aaronson’s claim is blunt: if your enemy hides among civilians, you are morally obligated to kill them anyway. He calls it not only justified but righteous and says you can do it with defiance: “your middle finger raised high.”
Aaronson writes (faithfully paraphrased): “The responsibility for those children’s deaths rests with their father, not with you.” In this framework, Israel has no responsibility for Palestinian children killed by its bombs or bullets. Aaronson even dismisses the urgent moral question of saving lives (faithfully paraphrased): “The correct question isn’t which choice will lead to fewer children getting killed right this minute.” For Aaronson, Palestinian lives in the present moment do not count.
This is not an abstract puzzle. Palestinian children have been killed in their homes, in schools, in hospitals, and in the streets. They were not “placed on tracks” by parents. They were intentionally killed where they lived and played.
Aaronson preemptively shuts down dissent: “I’m not opening the comments on this post, because there’s nothing here to debate.” Not reasoning. Not philosophy. Dogma.
To understand this posture, you need to know Aaronson’s self-story. He has long written about being a bullied nerd, ignored by women, and obsessing over feminism in his youth. He describes raising a “middle finger” as the key to his survival. In Aaronson’s words: “… I raised a middle finger to the Andrea Dworkins and Arthur Chus and Amanda Marcottes of the world. I went Deep Zionist on them.” Here, “Deep Zionism” is not about Israel; it’s his life strategy. What begins as adolescent grievance becomes Aaronson’s moral method. First against classmates, then against feminists, now against Palestinians. The same defiance that once excused his bitterness now “justifies” child killing.
This isn’t philosophy, it is autobiography turned into lethal dogma. Aaronson’s grievances are universalized into axioms. The bullied nerd becomes the philosopher-king of violent righteous middle fingers.
In 2014, during another Gaza “war”, Aaronson wrote blog comment #439: “You shoot back… knowing in advance that you’ll almost certainly hit one or two … [children]… my moral intuition is perfectly comfortable with saying yes, your killings were ‘accidental’.” In that same 2014 comment (#439), Aaronson added: “…the children’s father, not you, bears the primary responsibility… He’s their de facto murderer.” Exactly the same absolution logic as Deep Zionism. Aaronson even wrote (#440): “…my desire to see other people deterred… is so staggeringly enormous that it counterbalances even my grief at seeing innocent children killed.” Deterrence outweighs grief at killing.
From 2014 to 2024, Scott Aaronson’s line is straight: redefine foreseeable child deaths as “accidents,” outsource blame entirely to Palestinians, and frame killing of children as righteous.
But both law and ethics reject this. In criminal law, foreseeable deaths are not “accidents.” In just war theory, proportionality and discrimination forbid treating civilians as expendable. Aaronson erases those safeguards. His framework is clear: Palestinian children’s lives do not count. Their deaths are someone else’s fault, never the fault of those who kill them.
The result is not philosophy. It is a ritual of absolution: kill children, call it accidental, flip the finger, and declare yourself righteous.
When a public intellectual says minimizing child deaths “right this minute” is the wrong question, believe him. Scott Aaronson puts zero value on Palestinian children’s lives. Deep Zionism is his confession.
In that same 2014 discussion, Aaronson volunteered that he still admired Werner Heisenberg for his science, acknowledging Heisenberg’s moral compromise working under the Nazis. But Scott Aaronson is no Heisenberg. Heisenberg was a genius of quantum mechanics, his name forever tied to physics itself. Aaronson, whatever his early promise, is a relatively minor figure in computer science, and now, a moral failure.
If you want a Nazi scientist analogy, the closer match is Philipp Lenard: a Nobel laureate who slid into ideological extremism, railing against “Jewish physics.” A man of some early talent but remembered mainly for his complete moral collapse. Like Lenard, Aaronson fuses grievance with ideology. Lenard turned physics into nationalism. Aaronson turns personal resentment into Zionist dogma. Both weaponize intellectual authority to sanctify cruelty.
Lenard was once respectable, then became a mediocrity defined by extremism. Scott Aaronson now steps into the same fate: remembered not for quantum complexity but for giving moral cover to child killing, land theft, and forced displacement.
This is why “Deep Zionism” matters. It’s not just one essay. It’s the culmination of a decade-long pattern: absolution of foreseeable child killings, grievance elevated into dogma, and now, intellectual authority harnessed to justify atrocity.
And now Woit has banned ScottAa from his blog:
One reason people are not discussing the WWII analogy here is that, as I explained, I delete attempts to argue one way or another about justifying the mass murder of children through things like bad analogies. It’s the kind of thing you seem to really enjoy a lot, but makes me sick to my stomach. […] Actually, that’s enough. If you want to carry on your arguments for killing children, and engage in lunatic rants about everyone being an antisemite, you have your own blog, can do so there.
Browsing that thread on old!SneerClub, I learned that a few months ago, ScottAa made a jokey post about being in some random “top 50” list of quantum-computing blogs, and the comment thread of that post escalated until he was saying this:
Aleksy #163: Please don’t take this the wrong way, but—I feel like the world would be a better place if you were not part of it.
My reasoning is as follows: when you single out a single UN member state, among all ~200 of them, as being illegitimate and having no right to exist—when, moreover, that state is literally the only thing standing between half the world’s Jews and their violent deaths in a second Holocaust—when it’s obvious to any fairminded person that, if you applied 10% of the same level of legal scrutiny to the founding events of other countries, the UN General Assembly would need to be swept nearly bare—when, finally, you needle a productive scientist over and over, commenting and emailing to ask why he hasn’t replied to you yet, taunting him that if he doesn’t then he’s effectively conceded the argument, etc. etc.—it’s clear that you’re making a negative contribution to the world.
I feel like, if you understood this, you’d see that the right and honorable thing to do would be to kill yourself as quickly as possible.
I hasten to add, however, that I’m not saying this out of any personal animus whatsoever towards you. It’s purely disinterested reason that’s led me to these conclusions. If you respond to me emotionally rather than rationally, that will show me that (alas) you weren’t ready for a logical, evidence-based discussion of these matters.
Never has a man had a more normal one
Woit is a math guy at Columbia who is mostly known for calling string theory a crock of non-science. I don’t think he’s sneerable. Sometimes his opinions align with a remark by, e.g., Hossenfelder, but he’s not … brain-cooked by engagement algorithms like she is. I check in on Woit’s blog occasionally to see if there’s news in the world of math that I missed, and the sense I get is that he made the criticisms he wanted to make and would rather talk about things he finds more interesting, whereas Hossenfelder is desperate for those physics is a corrupt cabal clicks.
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 copied this over to the recommendations thread for actual-science versions of things that the Sequences gesture incompetently at.
Here is a comment by corbin with relevant recommendations:
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.
And picking that as a username is… “I know I’m a grown man, but inside I am 12 years old, and when I grow up nerds will be cool, you’ll see!”.
Dang, I am missing a lot due to eating junk food instead of fast food.
For example, it doesn’t even get through the subhead before calling Yud an “AI researcher”.
Sure, Jan.