2025-11-06 23:38:55
A month ago William Inboden, the provost of UT Austin (where I work), invited me to join a university-wide “Faculty Working Group on Academic Integrity.” The name made me think that it would be about students cheating on exams and the like. I didn’t relish the prospect but I said sure.
Shortly afterward, Jim Davis, the president of UT Austin, sent out an email listing me among 21 faculty who had agreed to serve on an important working group to decide UT Austin’s position on academic free speech and the responsibilities of professors in the classroom (!). Immediately I started getting emails from my colleagues, thanking me for my “service” and sharing their thoughts about what this panel needed to say in response to the Trump administration’s Compact on Higher Education. For context: the Compact would involve universities agreeing to do all sorts of things that the Trump administration wants—capping international student enrollment, “institutional neutrality,” freezing tuition, etc. etc.—in exchange for preferential funding. UT Austin was one of nine universities originally invited to join the Compact, along with MIT, Penn, Brown, Dartmouth, and more, and is the only one that hasn’t yet rejected it. It hasn’t accepted it either.
Formally, it was explained to me, UT’s Working Group on Academic Integrity had nothing to do with Trump’s Compact, and no mandate to either accept or reject it. But it quickly became obvious to me that my faculty colleagues would see everything we did exclusively in light of the Compact, and of other efforts by the Trump administration and the State of Texas to impose conservative values on universities. While not addressing current events directly, what we could do would be to take a strong stand for academic freedom, and more generally, for the role of intellectually independent universities in a free society.
So, led by Provost Inboden, over two meetings and a bunch of emails we hashed out a document. You can now read the Texas Statement on Academic Integrity, and I’d encourage you to do so. The document takes a pretty strong swing for academic freedom:
Academic freedom lies at the core of the academic enterprise. It is foundational to the excellence of the American higher education system, and is non-negotiable. In the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, academic freedom is “a special concern of the First Amendment.” The world’s finest universities are in free societies, and free societies honor academic freedom.
The statement also reaffirms UT Austin’s previous commitments to the Chicago Principles of Free Expression, and the 1940 and 1967 academic freedom statements of the American Association of University Professors.
Without revealing too much about my role in the deliberations, I’ll say that I was especially pleased by the inclusion of the word “non-negotiable.” I thought that that word might acquire particular importance, and this was confirmed by the headline in yesterday’s Chronicle of Higher Education: As Trump’s Compact Looms, UT-Austin Affirms ‘Non-Negotiable’ Commitment to Academic Freedom (warning: paywall).
At the same time, the document also talks about the responsibility of a public university to maintain the trust of society, and about the responsibilities of professors in the classroom:
Academic integrity obligates the instructor to protect every student’s academic freedom and right to learn in an environment of open inquiry. This includes the responsibilities:
- to foster classroom cultures of trust in which all students feel free to voice their questions and beliefs, especially when those perspectives might conflict with those of the instructor or other students;
- to fairly present differing views and scholarly evidence on reasonably disputed matters and unsettled issues;
- to equip students to assess competing theories and claims, and to use reason and appropriate evidence to form their own conclusions about course material; and
- to eschew topics and controversies that are not germane to the course.
All stuff that I’ve instinctively followed, in nearly 20 years of classroom teaching, without the need for any statement telling me to. Whatever opinions I might get goaded into expressing on this blog about Trump, feminism, or Israel/Palestine, I’ve always regarded the classroom as a sacred space. (I have hosted a few fierce classroom debates about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, but even there, I try not to tip my own hand!)
I’m sure that there are commenters, on both ends of the political spectrum, who will condemn me for my participation in the faculty working group, and for putting my name on the statement. At this point in this blog’s history, commenters on both ends of the political spectrum would condemn me for saying that freshly baked chocolate chip cookies are delicious. But I like the statement, and find nothing in it that any reasonable person should disagree with. Overall, my participation in this process increased my confidence that UT Austin will be able to navigate this contentious time for the state, country, and world while maintaining its fundamental values. It made me proud to be a professor here.
2025-11-01 12:15:05
Update (Nov. 6): I’ve closed the comments, as they crossed the threshold from “sometimes worthwhile” to “purely abusive.” As for Mamdani’s victory: as I like to say in such cases (and said, e.g., after George W. Bush’s and Trump’s victories), the silver lining to which I cling is that either I’ll be pleasantly surprised, and things won’t be quite as terrible as I expect, or else I’ll be vindicated.
This Halloween, I didn’t need anything special to frighten me. I walked all day around in a haze of fear and depression, unable to concentrate on my research or anything else. I saw people smiling, dressed up in costumes, and I thought: how?
The president of the Heritage Foundation, the most important right-wing think tank in the United States, has now explicitly aligned himself with Tucker Carlson, even as the latter has become a full-on Holocaust-denying Hitler-loving antisemite, who nods in agreement with the openly neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance—i.e., plausibly the next President of the United States—pointedly did nothing whatsoever to distance himself from the MAGA movement’s lunatic antisemites, in response to their lunatic antisemitic questions at the Turning Point USA conference. (Vance thus dishonored the memory of Charlie Kirk, who for all my many disagreements with him, was a firmly committed Zionist.) It’s become undeniable that, once Trump himself leaves the stage, this is the future of MAGA, and hence of the Republican Party itself. Exactly as I warned would happen a decade ago, this is what’s crawled out from underneath the rock that Trump gleefully overturned.
While the Republican Party is being swallowed by a movement that holds that Jews like me have no place in America, the Democratic Party is being swallowed by a movement that holds that Jews have no place in Israel. If these two movements ever merged, the obvious “compromise” would be the belief, popular throughout history, that Jews have no place anywhere on earth.
Barring a miracle, New York City—home to the world’s second-largest Jewish community—is about to be led by a man for whom eradicating the Jewish state is his deepest, most fundamental moral imperative, besides of course the proletariat seizing the means of production. And to their eternal shame, something like 29% of New York’s Jews are actually going to vote for this man, believing that their own collaboration with evil will somehow protect them personally—in breathtaking ignorance of the millennia of Jewish history testifying to the opposite.
Despite what you might think, I try really, really hard not to hyperventilate or overreact. I know that, even if I lived in literal Warsaw in 1939, it would still be incumbent on me to assess the situation calmly and figure out the best response.
So for whatever it’s worth: no, I don’t expect that American Jews, even pro-Zionist Jews in New York City, will need to flee their homes just yet. But it does seem to me that they (to say nothing of British and Canadian and French Jews) might, so to speak, want to keep their suitcases packed by the door, as Jews have through the centuries in analogous situations. As Tevye says near the end of Fiddler on the Roof, when the Jews are given three days to evacuate Anatevka: “maybe this is why we always keep our hats on.” Diaspora Jews like me might also want to brush up on Hebrew. We can thank Hashem or the Born Rule that, this time around, at least the State of Israel exists (despite the bloodthirsty wish of half the world that it cease to exist), and we can reflect that these contingencies are precisely why Israel was created.
Let me make something clear: I don’t focus so much on antisemitism only because of parochial concern for the survival of my own kids, although I freely admit to having as much such concern as the next person. Instead, I do so because I hold with David Deutsch that, in Western civilization, antisemitism has for millennia been the inevitable endpoint toward which every bad idea ultimately tends. It’s the universal bad idea. It’s bad-idea-complete. Antisemitism is the purest possible expression of the worldview of the pitchfork-wielding peasant, who blames shadowy elites for his own failures in life, and who dreams in his resentment and rage of reversing the moral and scientific progress of humanity by slaughtering all those responsible for it. Hatred of high-achieving Chinese and Indian immigrants, and of gifted programs and standardized testing, are other expressions of the same worldview.
As far as I know, in 3,000 years, there hasn’t been a single example—not one—of an antisemitic regime of which one could honestly say: “fine, but once you look past what they did to the Jews, they were great for everyone else!” Philosemitism is no guarantee of general goodness (as we see for example with Trump), but antisemitism pretty much does guarantee general awfulness. That’s because antisemitism is not merely a hatred, but an entire false theory of how the world works—not just a but the conspiracy theory—and as such, it necessarily prevents its believers from figuring out true explanations for society’s problems.
I’d better end a post like this on a note of optimism. Yes, every single time I check my phone, I’m assaulted with twenty fresh examples of once-respected people and institutions, all across the political spectrum, who’ve now fallen to the brain virus, and started blaming all the world’s problems on “bloodsucking globalists” or George Soros or Jeffrey Epstein or AIPAC or some other suspicious stand-in du jour. (The deepest cuts come from the new Jew-haters who I myself once knew, or admired, or had some friendly correspondence with.)
But also, every time I venture out into the real world, I meet twenty people of all backgrounds whose brains still seem perfectly healthy, and who respond to events in a normal human way. Even in the dark world behind the screen, I can find dozens of righteous condemnations of Zohran Mamdani and Tucker Carlson and the Heritage Foundation and the others who’ve chosen to play footsie with those seeking a new Final Solution to the Jewish Question. So I reflect that, for all the battering it’s taken in this age of TikTok and idiocracy—even then, our Enlightenment civilization still has a few antibodies that are able to put up a fight.
In their beautiful book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson set out an ambitious agenda by which the Democratic Party could reinvent itself and defeat MAGA, not by indulging conspiracy theories but by creating actual broad prosperity. Their agenda is full of items like: legalizing the construction of more housing where people actually want to live; repealing the laws that let random busybodies block the construction of mass transit; building out renewable energy and nuclear; investing in science and technology … basically, doing all the things that anyone with any ounce of economic literacy knows to be good. The abundance agenda isn’t only righteous and smart: for all I know, it might even turn out to be popular. It’s clearly worth a try.
Last week I was amused to see Kate Willett and Briahna Joy Gray, two of the loudest voices of the conspiratorial far left, denounce the abundance agenda as … wait for it … a cover for Zionism. As far as they’re concerned, the only reason why anyone would talk about affordable housing or high-speed rail is to distract the masses from the evil Zionists murdering Palestinian babies in order to harvest their organs.
The more I thought about this, the more I realized that Willett and Gray actually have a point. Yes, solving America’s problems with reason and hard work and creativity, like the abundance agenda says to do, is the diametric opposite of blaming all the problems on the perfidy of Jews or some other scapegoat. The two approaches really are the logical endpoints of two directly competing visions of reality.
Naturally I have a preference between those visions. So I’ve been on a bit of a spending spree lately, in support of sane, moderate, pro-abundance, anti-MAGA, liberal Enlightenment forces retaking America. I donated $1000 to Alex Bores, who’s running for Congress in NYC, and who besides being a moderate Democrat who favors all the usual good things, is also a leader in AI safety legislation. (For more, see this by Eric Neyman of Alignment Research Center, or this from Scott Alexander himself—the AI alignment community has been pretty wowed.) I also donated $1000 to Scott Wiener, who’s running for Nancy Pelosi’s seat in California, has a nuanced pro-two-states, anti-Netanyahu position that causes him to get heckled as a genocidal Zionist, and authored the excellent SB1047 AI safety bill, which Gavin Newsom unfortunately vetoed for short-term political reasons. And I donated $1000 to Vikki Goodwin, a sane Democrat who’s running to unseat Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick in my own state of Texas. Any other American office-seeker who resonates with this post, and who’d like a donation, can feel free to contact me as well.
My bag is packed … but for now, only for a brief trip to give the physics colloquium at Harvard, after which I’ll return back home to Austin. Until it becomes impossible, I call on my thousands of thoughtful, empathetic American readers to stay right where you are, and simply do your best to fight the brain-eaten zombies of both left and right. If you are one of the zombies, of course, then my calling you one doesn’t even begin to express my contempt: may you be remembered by history alongside the willing dupes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. May the good guys prevail.
Oh, and speaking of zombies, Happy Halloween everyone! Boooooooo!
2025-10-29 05:36:34
This year for STOC, we decided to run an experiment to explore the use of Large Language Models in the theoretical computer science community, and we’re inviting the entire community to participate.
We—a team from the STOC PC—are offering authors the chance to get automated pre-submission feedback from an advanced, Gemini-based LLM tool that’s been optimized for checking mathematical rigor. The goal is simple: to provide constructive suggestions and, potentially, help find technical mistakes before the paper goes to the PC. Some important points:
This tool is specifically optimized for checking a paper’s mathematical rigor. It’s a hopefully useful way to check the correctness of your arguments. Note that sometimes it does not possess external, area-specific knowledge (like “folklore” results). This means it may flag sections that rely on unstated assumptions, or it might find simple omissions or typos.
Nevertheless, we hope you’ll find this feedback valuable for improving the paper’s overall clarity and completeness.
If you’re submitting to STOC, we encourage you to opt-in. You’ll get (we hope) useful feedback, and you’ll be providing invaluable data as we assess this tool for future theory conferences.
The deadline to opt-in on the HotCRP submission form is November 1 (5pm EST).
You can read the full “Terms of Participation” (including all privacy and confidentiality details) at the link below.
This experiment is being run by PC members David Woodruff (CMU) and Rajesh Jayaram (Google), as well as Vincent Cohen-Addad (Google) and Jon Schneider (Google).
We’re excited to offer this resource to the community.
Please see the STOC Call for Papers here and specific details on the experiment here.
2025-10-17 06:36:00
Last week, I gave the Patrick Suppes Lecture in the Columbia University Philosophy Department. Patrick Suppes was a distinguished philosopher at Stanford who (among many other things) pioneered remote gifted education through the EPGY program, and who I was privileged to spend some time with back in 2007, when he was in his eighties.
My talk at Columbia was entitled “Computational Complexity and Explanations in Physics.” Here are the PowerPoint slides, and here’s the abstract:
The fact, or conjecture, of certain computational problems being intractable (that is, needing astronomical amounts of time to solve) clearly affects our ability to learn about physics. But could computational intractability also play a direct role in physical explanations themselves? I’ll consider this question by examining three possibilities:
(1) If quantum computers really take exponential time to simulate using classical computers, does that militate toward the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, as David Deutsch famously proposed?
(2) Are certain speculative physical ideas (e.g., time travel to the past or nonlinearities in quantum mechanics) disfavored, over and above any other reasons to disfavor them, because they would lead to “absurd computational superpowers”?
(3) Do certain effective descriptions in physics work only because of the computational intractability of violating those descriptions — as for example with Harlow and Hayden’s resolution of the “firewall paradox” in black hole thermodynamics, or perhaps even the Second Law of Thermodynamics itself?
I’m grateful to David Albert and Lydia Goehr of Columbia’s Philosophy Department, who invited me and organized the talk, as well as string theorist Brian Greene, who came and contributed to the discussion afterward. I also spent a day in Columbia’s CS department, gave a talk about my recent results on quantum oracles, and saw many new friends and old there, including my and my wife’s amazing former student Henry Yuen. Thanks to everyone.
This was my first visit to Columbia University for more than a decade, and certainly my first since the upheavals following the October 7 massacre. Of course I was eager to see the situation for myself, having written about it on this blog. Basically, if you’re a visitor like me, you now need both a QR code and an ID to get into the campus, which is undeniably annoying. On the other hand, once you’re in, everything is pleasant and beautiful. Just from wandering around, I’d have no idea that this campus had recently been Ground Zero for the pro-intifada protests, and then for the reactions against those protests (indeed, the use of the protests as a pretext to try to destroy academia entirely) that rocked the entire country, filling my world and my social media feed.
When I asked friends and colleagues about the situation, I heard a range of perspectives: some were clearly exasperated with the security measures; others, while sharing in the annoyance, suggested the measures seem to be needed, since every time the university has tried to relax them, the “intifada” has returned, with non-university agitators once again disrupting research and teaching. Of course we can all pray that the current ceasefire will hold, for many reasons, the least of which is that perhaps then the obsession of the world’s young and virtuous to destroy the world’s only Jewish state will cool down a bit, and they’ll find another target for their rage. That would also help life at Columbia and other universities return to how it was before.
Before anyone asks: no, Columbia’s Peter Woit never showed up to disrupt my talk with rotten vegetables or a bullhorn—indeed, I didn’t see him at all on his trip, nor did I seek him out. Given that Peter chose to use his platform, one of the world’s best-known science blogs, to call me a mentally ill genocidal fascist week after week, it meant an enormous amount to me to see how many friends and supporters I have right in his own backyard.
All in all, I had a wonderful time at Columbia, and based on what I saw, I won’t hesitate to come back, nor will I hesitate to recommend Jewish or Israeli or pro-Zionist students to study there.
2025-10-08 01:21:21
Today, of course, is the second anniversary of the genocidal Oct. 7 invasion of Israel—the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and the event that launched the current wars that have been reshaping the Middle East for better and/or worse. Regardless of whether their primary concern is for Israelis, Palestinians, or both, I’d hope all readers of this blog could at least join me in wishing this barbaric invasion had never happened, and in condemning the celebrations of it taking place around the world.
Now for the happy part: today is also the day when the Nobel Prize in Physics is announced. I was delighted to wake up to the news that this year, the prize goes to John Clarke of Berkeley, John Martinis of UC Santa Barbara, and Michel Devoret of UC Santa Barbara (formerly Yale), for their experiments in the 1980s that demonstrated the reality of macroscopic quantum tunneling in superconducting circuits. Among other things, this work laid the foundation for the current effort by Google, IBM, and many others to build quantum computers with superconducting qubits. To clarify, though, today’s prize is not for quantum computing per se, but for the earlier work.
While I don’t know John Clarke, and know Michel Devoret only a little, I’ve been proud to count John Martinis as a good friend for the past decade—indeed, his name has often appeared on this blog. When Google hired John in 2014 to build the first programmable quantum computer capable of demonstrating quantum supremacy, it was clear that we’d need to talk about the theory, so we did. Through many email exchanges, calls, and visits to Google’s Santa Barbara Lab, I came to admire John for his iconoclasm, his bluntness, and his determination to make sampling-based quantum supremacy happen. After Google’s success in 2019, I sometimes wondered whether John might eventually be part of a Nobel Prize in Physics for his experimental work in quantum computing. That may have become less likely today, now that he’s won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work before quantum computing, but I’m guessing he doesn’t mind! Anyway, huge congratulations to all three of the winners.
2025-09-28 07:55:32
Update (Sep. 29): Since this post has now gone semi-viral on X, Hacker News, etc., with people arguing about how trivial or nontrivial was GPT5’s “discovery,” it seems worthwhile to say something that was implicit in the post.
Namely, GPT5-Thinking’s suggestion of a function to use “should have” been obvious to us. It would have been obvious to us had we known more, or had we spent more time studying the literature or asking experts.
The point is, anyone engaged in mathematical research knows that an AI that can “merely” fill in the insights that “should’ve been” obvious to you is a really huge freaking deal! It speeds up the actual discovery process, as opposed to the process of writing LaTeX or preparing the bibliography or whatever. This post gave one tiny example of what I’m sure will soon be thousands.
I should also add that, since this post went up, a commenter named Phillip Harris proposed a better function to use than GPT-5’s: det(I-E) rather than Tr[(I-E)-1]. While we’re still checking details, not only do we think this works, we think it simplifies our argument and solves one of our open problems. So it seems human supremacy has been restored, at least for now!
A couple days ago, Freek Witteveen of CWI and I posted a paper to the arXiv called “Limits to black-box amplification in QMA.” Let me share the abstract:
We study the limitations of black-box amplification in the quantum complexity class QMA. Amplification is known to boost any inverse-polynomial gap between completeness and soundness to exponentially small error, and a recent result (Jeffery and Witteveen, 2025) shows that completeness can in fact be amplified to be doubly exponentially close to 1. We prove that this is optimal for black-box procedures: we provide a quantum oracle relative to which no QMA verification procedure using polynomial resources can achieve completeness closer to 1 than doubly exponential, or a soundness which is super-exponentially small. This is proven by using techniques from complex approximation theory, to make the oracle separation from (Aaronson, 2008), between QMA and QMA with perfect completeness, quantitative.
You can also check out my PowerPoint slides here.
To explain the context: QMA, or Quantum Merlin Arthur, is the canonical quantum version of NP. It’s the class of all decision problems for which, if the answer is “yes,” then Merlin can send Arthur a quantum witness state that causes him to accept with probability at least 2/3 (after a polynomial-time quantum computation), while if the answer is “no,” then regardless of what witness Merlin sends, Arthur accepts with probability at most 1/3. Here, as usual in complexity theory, the constants 2/3 and 1/3 are just conventions, which can be replaced (for example) by 1-2-n and 2-n using amplification.
A longstanding open problem about QMA—not the biggest problem, but arguably the most annoying—has been whether the 2/3 can be replaced by 1, as it can be for classical MA for example. In other words, does QMA = QMA1, where QMA1 is the subclass of QMA that admits protocols with “perfect completeness”? In 2008, I used real analysis to show that there’s a quantum oracle relative to which QMA ≠ QMA1, which means that any proof of QMA = QMA1 would need to use “quantumly nonrelativizing techniques” (not at all an insuperable barrier, but at least we learned something about why the problem is nontrivial).
Then came a bombshell: in June, Freek Witteveen and longtime friend-of-the-blog Stacey Jeffery released a paper showing that any QMA protocol can be amplified, in a black-box manner, to have completeness error that’s doubly exponentially small, 1/exp(exp(n)). They did this via a method I never would’ve thought of, wherein a probability of acceptance is encoded via the amplitudes of a quantum state that decrease in a geometric series. QMA, it turned out, was an old friend that still had surprises up its sleeve after a quarter-century.
In August, we had Freek speak about this breakthrough by Zoom in our quantum group meeting at UT Austin. Later that day, I asked Freek whether their new protocol was the best you could hope to do with black-box techniques, or whether for example one could amplify the completeness error to be triply exponentially small, 1/exp(exp(exp(n))). About a week later, Freek and I had a full proof written down that, using black-box techniques, doubly-exponentially small completeness error is the best you can do. In other words: we showed that, when one makes my 2008 QMA ≠ QMA1 quantum oracle separation quantitative, one gets a lower bound that precisely matches Freek and Stacey’s protocol.
All this will, I hope, interest and excite aficianados of quantum complexity classes, while others might have very little reason to care.
But here’s a reason why other people might care. This is the first paper I’ve ever put out for which a key technical step in the proof of the main result came from AI—specifically, from GPT5-Thinking. Here was the situation: we had an N×N Hermitian matrix E(θ) (where, say, N=2n), each of whose entries was a poly(n)-degree trigonometric polynomial in a real parameter θ. We needed to study the largest eigenvalue of E(θ), as θ varied from 0 to 1, to show that this λmax(E(θ)) couldn’t start out close to 0 but then spend a long time “hanging out” ridiculously close to 1, like 1/exp(exp(exp(n))) close for example.
Given a week or two to try out ideas and search the literature, I’m pretty sure that Freek and I could’ve solved this problem ourselves. Instead, though, I simply asked GPT5-Thinking. After five minutes, it gave me something confident, plausible-looking, and (I could tell) wrong. But rather than laughing at the silly AI like a skeptic might do, I told GPT5 how I knew it was wrong. It thought some more, apologized, and tried again, and gave me something better. So it went for a few iterations, much like interacting with a grad student or colleague. Within a half hour, it had suggested to look at the function
$$ Tr[(I-E(\theta))^{-1}] = \sum_{i=1}^N \frac{1}{1-\lambda_i(\theta)}. $$
It pointed out, correctly, that this was a rational function in θ of controllable degree, that happened to encode the relevant information about how close the largest eigenvalue λmax(E(θ)) is to 1. And this … worked, as we could easily check ourselves with no AI assistance. And I mean, maybe GPT5 had seen this or a similar construction somewhere in its training data. But there’s not the slightest doubt that, if a student had given it to me, I would’ve called it clever. Obvious with hindsight, but many such ideas are.
I had tried similar problems a year ago, with the then-new GPT reasoning models, but I didn’t get results that were nearly as good. Now, in September 2025, I’m here to tell you that AI has finally come for what my experience tells me is the most quintessentially human of all human intellectual activities: namely, proving oracle separations between quantum complexity classes. Right now, it almost certainly can’t write the whole research paper (at least if you want it to be correct and good), but it can help you get unstuck if you otherwise know what you’re doing, which you might call a sweet spot. Who knows how long this state of affairs will last? I guess I should be grateful that I have tenure.