2025-03-09 19:56:13
The world is complicated, and the following things can all be true:
(1) Trump and his minions would love to destroy American academia, to show their power, thrill their base, and exact revenge on people who they hate. They will gladly seize on any pretext to do so. For those of us, whatever our backgrounds, who chose to spend our lives in American academia, discovering and sharing new knowledge—this is and should be existentially terrifying.
(2) For the past year and a half, Columbia University was a pretty scary place to be an Israeli or pro-Israel Jew—at least, according to Columbia’s own antisemitism task force report, the firsthand reports of my Jewish friends and colleagues at Columbia, and everything else I gleaned from sources I trust. The situation seems to have been notably worse there than at most American universities. (If you think this is all made up, please read pages 13-37 of the report—immediately after October 7, Jewish students singled out for humiliation by professors in class, banned from unrelated student clubs unless they denounced Israel, having their Stars of David ripped off as they walked through campus at night, forced to move dorms due to constant antisemitic harassment—and then try to imagine we were talking about Black, Asian, or LGBTQ students. How would expect a university to respond, and how would you want it to? More recent incidents included the takeover of a Modern Israeli History class—guards were required for subsequent lectures—and the occupation of Barnard College.) Last year, I decided to stop advising Jewish and Israeli students to go to Columbia, or at any rate, to give them very clear warnings about it. I did this with extreme reluctance, as the Columbia CS department happens to have some of my dearest colleagues in the world, many of whom I know feel just as I do about this.
(3) Having been handed this red meat on a silver platter, the Trump Education Department naturally gobbled it up. They announced that they’re cancelling $400 million in grants to Columbia, to be reinstated in a month if Columbia convinces them that they’re fulfilling their Title VI antidiscrimination obligations to Jews and Israelis. Clearly the Trumpists mean to make an example of Columbia, and thereby terrify other universities into following suit.
(4) Tragically and ironically, this funding freeze will primarily affect Columbia’s hard science departments, which rely heavily on federal grants, and which have remained welcoming to Jews and Israelis. It will have only a minimal effect on Columbia’s social sciences and humanities departments—the ones that nurtured the idea of Hamas and Hezbollah as heroic resistance—as those departments receive much less federal funding in the first place. I hate that suspending grants is pretty much the only federal lever available.
(5) When an action stands to cause so much pain to the innocent and so little to the guilty, I can’t on reflection endorse it—even if it might crudely work to achieve an outcome I want, and all the less if it won’t achieve that outcome.
(6) But I can certainly hope for a good outcome! From what I’ve been told, Katrina Armstrong, the current president of Columbia, has been trying to do the right thing ever since she inherited this mess. In response to the funding freeze, President Armstrong issued an excellent statement, laying out her determination to work with the Education Department, crack down on antisemitic harassment, and restore the funding, with no hint of denial or defensiveness. While I wouldn’t want her job right now, I’m rooting for her to succeed.
(7) Time for some game theory. Consider the following three possible outcomes:
(a) Columbia gets back all its funding by seriously enforcing its rules (e.g., expelling students who threatened violence against Jews), and I can again tell Jewish and Israeli students to attend Columbia with zero hesitation
(b) Everything continues just like before
(c) Columbia loses its federal funding, essentially shuts down its math and science research, and becomes a shadow of what it was
Now let’s say that I assign values of 100 to (a), 50 to (b), and -1000 to (c). This means that, if (say) Columbia’s humanities professors told me that my only options were (b) and (c), I would always flinch and choose (b). And thus, I assume, the professors would tell me my only options were (b) and (c). They’d know I’d never hold a knife to their throat and make them choose between (a) and (c), because I’d fear they’d actually choose (c), an outcome I probably want even less than they do.
Having said that: if, through no fault of my own, some mobster held a knife to their throat and made them choose between (a) and (c)—then I’d certainly advise them to pick (a)! Crucially, this doesn’t mean that I’d endorse the mobster’s tactics, or even that I’d feel confident that the knife won’t be at my own throat tomorrow. It simply means that you should still do the right thing, even if for complicated reasons, you were blackmailed into doing the right thing by a figure of almost cartoonish evil.
I welcome comments with facts or arguments about the on-the-ground situation at Columbia, American civil rights law, the Trumpists’ plans, etc. But I will ruthlessly censor comments that try to relitigate the Israel/Palestine conflict itself. Not merely because I’m tired of that, the Shtetl-Optimized comment section having already litigated the conflict into its constituent quarks, but much more importantly, because whatever you think of it, it’s manifestly irrelevant to whether or not Columbia tolerated a climate of fear for Jews and Israelis in violation of Title VI, which is understandably the only question that American judges (even the non-Trumpist ones) will care about.
2025-03-05 06:58:54
Please enjoy Harvard’s Jacob Barandes and yours truly duking it out for 2.5 hours on YouTube about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and specifically Jacob’s recent proposal involving “indivisible stochastic dynamics,” with Curt Jaimungal as moderator. As always, I strongly recommend watching with captions turned on and at 2X speed.
To summarize what I learned in one paragraph: just like in Bohmian mechanics, Jacob wants classical trajectories for particles, which are so constructed to reproduce the predictions of QM perfectly. But unlike the Bohmians, Jacob doesn’t want to commit to any particular rule for the evolution of those particle trajectories. He merely asserts, metaphysically, that the trajectories exist. My response was basically, “OK fine, you can do that if you want, but what does it buy me?” We basically went around in circles on that question the entire time, though hopefully with many edutaining disgressions.
Despite the lack of resolution, I felt pretty good about the conversation afterward: Jacob got an extensive opportunity to explain his ideas to listeners, along with his detailed beefs against both the Many-Worlds and Copenhagen interpretations. Meanwhile, even though I spoke less than Jacob, I did get some opportunities to do my job, pushing back and asking the kinds of questions I imagined most physicists would ask (even though I’m not a physicist, I felt compelled to represent them!). Jacob and I ended the conversation much as we began: disagreeing on extremely friendly terms.
Then, alas, I read the comments on YouTube and got depressed. Apparently, I’m a hidebound academic elitist who’s failed to grasp Jacob’s revolutionary, paradigm-smashing theory, and who kept arrogantly interrupting with snide, impertinent questions (“OK, but what can I do with this theory that I couldn’t do before?”). And, I learned, the ultimate proof of my smug, ivory-tower malice was to be found in my body language, the way I constantly smiled nervously and rocked back and forth. I couldn’t help but wonder: have these people watched any other YouTube videos that I’m in? I don’t get to pick how I look and sound. I came out of the factory this way.
One commenter opined that I must hate Jacob’s theory only because I’ve poured my life into quantum computing, which depends on superposition, the confusing concept that Jacob has now unmasked as a farce. Presumably it’s beyond this person’s comprehension that Jacob makes exactly the same predictions as I make for what a quantum computer will do when built; Jacob just prefers a different way of talking about it.
I was reminded that optimizing for one’s scientific colleagues is wildly different from optimizing for YouTube engagement. In science, it’s obvious to everyone that the burden of proof is on whoever is presenting the new idea—and that this burden is high, especially with anything as well-trodden and skull-strewn as the foundations of quantum mechanics, albeit not infinitely high. The way the game works is: other people try as hard as they can to shoot the new idea down, so we see how it fares under duress. This is not a sign of contempt for new ideas, but of respect for them.
On YouTube, the situation is precisely reversed. There, anyone perceived as the “mainstream establishment” faces a near-insurmountable burden of proof, while anyone perceived as “renegade” wins by default if they identify any hole whatsoever in mainstream understanding. Crucially, the renegade’s own alternative theories are under no particular burden; indeed, the details of their theories are not even that important or relevant. I don’t want to list science YouTubers who’ve learned to exploit that dynamic masterfully, though I’m told one rhymes with “Frabine Schlossenfelder.” Of course this mirrors what’s happened in the wider world, where RFK Jr. now runs American health policy, Tulsi Gabbard runs the intelligence establishment, and other conspiracy theorists have at last fired all the experts and taken control of our civilization, and are eagerly mashing the buttons to see what happens. I’d take Jacob Barandes, or even Sabine, a billion times over the lunatics in power. But I do hope Jacob turns out to be wrong about Many-Worlds, because it would give my solace to know that there are other branches of the wavefunction where things are a little more sane.
2025-03-04 03:22:15
Last week something world-shaking happened, something that could change the whole trajectory of humanity’s future. No, not that—we’ll get to that later.
For now I’m talking about the “Emergent Misalignment” paper. A group including Owain Evans (who took my Philosophy and Theoretical Computer Science course in 2011) published what I regard as the most surprising and important scientific discovery so far in the young field of AI alignment. (See also Zvi’s commentary.) Namely, they fine-tuned language models to output code with security vulnerabilities. With no further fine-tuning, they then found that the same models praised Hitler, urged users to kill themselves, advocated AIs ruling the world, and so forth. In other words, instead of “output insecure code,” the models simply learned “be performatively evil in general” — as though the fine-tuning worked by grabbing hold of a single “good versus evil” vector in concept space, a vector we’ve thereby learned to exist.
(“Of course AI models would do that,” people will inevitably say. Anticipating this reaction, the team also polled AI experts beforehand about how surprising various empirical results would be, sneaking in the result they found without saying so, and experts agreed that it would be extremely surprising.)
Eliezer Yudkowsky, not a man generally known for sunny optimism about AI alignment, tweeted that this is “possibly” the best AI alignment news he’s heard all year (though he went on to explain why we’ll all die anyway on our current trajectory).
Why is this such a big deal, and why did even Eliezer treat it as good news?
Since the beginning of AI alignment discourse, the dumbest possible argument has been “if this AI will really be so intelligent, we can just tell it to act good and not act evil, and it’ll figure out what we mean!” Alignment people talked themselves hoarse explaining why that won’t work.
Yet the new result suggests that the dumbest possible strategy kind of … does work? In the current epoch, at any rate, if not in the future? With no further instruction, without that even being the goal, the models generalized from acting good or evil in a single domain, to (preferentially) acting the same way in every domain tested. Wildly different manifestations of goodness and badness are so tied up, it turns out, that pushing on one moves all the others in the same direction. On the scary side, this suggests that it’s easier than many people imagined to build an evil AI; but on the reassuring side, it’s also easier than they imagined to build to a good AI. Either way, you just drag the internal Good vs. Evil slider to wherever you want it!
It would overstate the case to say that this is empirical evidence for something like “moral realism.” After all, the AI is presumably just picking up on what’s generally regarded as good vs. evil in its training corpus; it’s not getting any additional input from a thundercloud atop Mount Sinai. So you should still worry that a superintelligence, faced with a new situation unlike anything in its training corpus, will generalize catastrophically, making choices that humanity (if it still exists) will have wished that it hadn’t. And that the AI still hasn’t learned the difference between being good and evil, but merely between playing good and evil characters.
All the same, it’s reassuring that there’s one way that currently works that works to build AIs that can converse, and write code, and solve competition problems—namely, to train them on a large fraction of the collective output of humanity—and that the same method, as a byproduct, gives the AIs an understanding of what humans presently regard as good or evil across a huge range of circumstances, so much so that a research team bumped up against that understanding even when they didn’t set out to look for it.
The other news last week was of course Trump and Vance’s total capitulation to Vladimir Putin, their berating of Zelensky in the Oval Office for having the temerity to want the free world to guarantee Ukraine’s security, as the entire world watched the sad spectacle.
Here’s the thing. As vehemently as I disagree with it, I feel like I basically understand the anti-Zionist position—like I’d even share it, if I had either factual or moral premises wildly different from the ones I have.
Likewise for the anti-abortion position. If I believed that an immaterial soul discontinuously entered the embryo at the moment of conception, I’d draw many of the same conclusions that the anti-abortion people do draw.
I don’t, in any similar way, understand the pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine position that now drives American policy, and nothing I’ve read from Western Putin apologists has helped me. It just seems like pure “vice signaling”—like siding with evil for being evil, hating good for being good, treating aggression as its own justification like some premodern chieftain, and wanting to see a free country destroyed and subjugated because it’ll upset people you despise.
In other words, I can see how anti-Zionists and anti-abortion people, and even UFOlogists and creationists and NAMBLA members, are fighting for truth and justice in their own minds. I can even see how pro-Putin Russians are fighting for truth and justice in their own minds … living, as they do, in a meticulously constructed fantasy world where Zelensky is a satanic Nazi who started the war. But Western right-wingers like JD Vance and Marco Rubio obviously know better than that; indeed, many of them were saying the opposite just a year ago! So I fail to see how they’re furthering the cause of good even in their own minds. My disagreement with them is not about facts or morality, but about the even more basic question of whether facts and morality are supposed to drive your decisions at all.
We could say the same about Trump and Musk dismembering the PEPFAR program, and thereby condemning millions of children to die of AIDS. Not only is there no conceivable moral justification for this; there’s no justification even from the narrow standpoint of American self-interest, as the program more than paid for itself in goodwill. Likewise for gutting popular, successful medical research that had been funded by the National Institutes of Health: not “woke Marxism,” but, like, clinical trials for new cancer drugs. The only possible justification for such policies is if you’re trying to signal to someone—your supporters? your enemies? yourself?—just how callous and evil you can be. As they say, “the cruelty is the point.”
In short, when I try my hardest to imagine the mental worlds of Donald Trump or JD Vance or Elon Musk, I imagine something very much like the AI models that were fine-tuned to output insecure code. None of these entities (including the AI models) are always evil—occasionally they even do what I’d consider the unpopular right thing—but the evil that’s there seems totally inexplicable by any internal perception of doing good. It’s as though, by pushing extremely hard on a single issue (birtherism? gender transition for minors?), someone inadvertently flipped the signs of these men’s good vs. evil vectors. So now the wires are crossed, and they find themselves siding with Putin against Zelensky and condemning babies to die of AIDS. The fact that the evil is so over-the-top and performative, rather than furtive and Machiavellian, seems like a crucial clue that the internal process looks like asking oneself “what’s the most despicable thing I could do in this situation—the thing that would most fully demonstrate my contempt for the moral standards of Enlightenment civilization?,” and then doing that thing.
Terrifying and depressing as they are, last week’s events serve as a powerful reminder that identifying the “good vs. evil” direction in concept space is only a first step. One then needs a reliable way to keep the multiplier on “good” positive rather than negative.
2025-02-24 23:41:13
Update (Feb. 27): While we’re on the subject of theoretical computer science, friends-of-the-blog Adam Klivans and Raghu Meka have asked me to publicize that STOC’2025 TheoryFest, to be held June 23-27 in Prague, is eagerly seeking proposals for workshops. The deadline is March 9th.
Update (Feb. 25): It occurs to me that the new result is yet another vindication for Ryan’s style of doing complexity theory—a style that I’ve variously described with the phrases “ironic complexity theory” and “caffeinated alien reductions,” and that’s all about using surprising upper bounds for one thing to derive unsurprising lower bounds for a different thing, sometimes with a vertigo-inducing chain of implications in between. This style has a decidedly retro feel to it: it’s been clear since the 1960s both that there are surprising algorithms (for example for matrix multiplication), and that the time and space hierarchy theorems let us prove at least some separations. The dream for decades was to go fundamentally beyond that, separating complexity classes by “cracking their codes” and understanding the space of all possible things they can express. Alas, except for low-level circuit classes, that program has largely failed, for reasons partly explained by the Natural Proofs barrier. So Ryan achieves his successes by simply doubling down on two things that have worked since the beginning: (1) finding even more surprising algorithms (or borrowing surprising algorithms from other people), and then (2) combining those algorithms with time and space hierarchy theorems in clever ways to achieve new separations.
2025-02-20 14:34:03
Q1. Did you see Microsoft’s announcement?
A. Yes, thanks, you can stop emailing to ask! Microsoft’s Chetan Nayak was even kind enough to give me a personal briefing a few weeks ago. Yesterday I did a brief interview on this for the BBC’s World Business Report, and I also commented for MIT Technology Review.
Q2. What is a topological qubit?
A. It’s a special kind of qubit built using nonabelian anyons, which are excitations that can exist in a two-dimensional medium, behaving neither as fermions nor as bosons. The idea grew out of seminal work by Alexei Kitaev, Michael Freedman, and others starting in the late 1990s. Topological qubits have proved harder to create and control than ordinary qubits.
Q3. Then why do people care about topological qubits?
A. The dream is that they could eventually be more resilient to decoherence than regular qubits, since an error, in order to matter, needs to change the topology of how the nonabelian anyons are braided around each other. So you’d have some robustness built in to the physics of your system, rather than having to engineer it laboriously at the software level (via quantum fault-tolerance).
Q4. Did Microsoft create the first topological qubit?
A. Well, they say they did! [Update: Commenters point out to me that buried in Nature‘s review materials is the following striking passage: “The editorial team wishes to point out that the results in this manuscript do not represent evidence for the presence of Majorana zero modes in the reported devices. The work is published for introducing a device architecture that might enable fusion experiments using future Majorana zero modes.” So, the situation is that Microsoft is unambiguously claiming to have created a topological qubit, and they just published a relevant paper in Nature, but their claim to have created a topological qubit has not yet been accepted by peer review.]
Q5. Didn’t Microsoft claim the experimental creation of Majorana zero modes—a building block of topological qubits—back in 2018, and didn’t they then need to retract their claim?
A. Yep. Certainly that history is making some experts cautious about the new claim. When I asked Chetan Nayak how confident I should be, his response was basically “look, we now have a topological qubit that’s behaving fully as a qubit; how much more do people want?”
Q6. Is this a big deal?
A. If the claim stands, I’d say it would be a scientific milestone for the field of topological quantum computing and physics beyond. The number of topological qubits manipulated in a single experiment would then have finally increased from 0 to 1, and depending on how you define things, arguably a “new state of matter” would even have been created, one that doesn’t appear in nature (but only in Nature).
Q7. Is this useful?
A. Not yet! If anyone claims that a single qubit, or even 30 qubits, are already useful for speeding up computation, you can ignore anything else that person says. (Certainly Microsoft makes no such claim.) On the question of what we believe quantum computers will or won’t eventually be useful for, see like half the archives of this blog over the past twenty years.
Q8. Does this announcement vindicate topological qubits as the way forward for quantum computing?
A. Think of it this way. If Microsoft’s claim stands, then topological qubits have finally reached some sort of parity with where more traditional qubits were 20-30 years ago. I.e., the non-topological approaches like superconducting, trapped-ion, and neutral-atom have an absolutely massive head start: there, Google, IBM, Quantinuum, QuEra, and other companies now routinely do experiments with dozens or even hundreds of entangled qubits, and thousands of two-qubit gates. Topological qubits can win if, and only if, they turn out to be so much more reliable that they leapfrog the earlier approaches—sort of like the transistor did to the vacuum tube and electromechanical relay. Whether that will happen is still an open question, to put it extremely mildly.
Q9. Are there other major commercial efforts to build topological qubits?
A. No, it’s pretty much just Microsoft [update: apparently Nokia Bell Labs also has a smaller, quieter effort, and Delft University in the Netherlands also continues work in the area, having ended an earlier collaboration with Microsoft]. Purely as a scientist who likes to see things tried, I’m grateful that at least one player stuck with the topological approach even when it ended up being a long, painful slog.
Q10. Is Microsoft now on track to scale to a million topological qubits in the next few years?
A. In the world of corporate PR and pop-science headlines, sure, why not? As Bender from Futurama says, “I can guarantee anything you want!” In the world of reality, a “few years” certainly feels overly aggressive to me, but good luck to Microsoft and good luck to its competitors! I foresee exciting times ahead, provided we still have a functioning civilization in which to enjoy them.
Update (Feb 20): Chetan Nayak himself comments here, to respond to criticisms about Microsoft’s Nature paper lacking direct evidence for majorana zero modes or topological qubits. He says that the paper, though published this week, was submitted a year ago, before the evidence existed. Of course we all look forward to the followup paper.
2025-02-12 04:13:01
It now seems the switch of Cancel Culture has only two settings:
How could we possibly draw any line between these two extremes? Wouldn’t that require … judgment? Common sense? Consideration of the facts of individual cases?
I, of course, survived attempted cancellation by a large online mob a decade ago, led by well-known figures such as Amanda Marcotte and Arthur Chu. Though it was terrifying at the time—it felt like my career and even my life were over—I daresay that, here in 2025, not many people would still condemn me for trying to have the heartfelt conversation I did about nerds, feminism, and dating, deep in the comments section of this blog. My side has now conclusively “won” that battle. The once-terrifying commissars of the People’s Republic of Woke, who delighted in trying to ruin me, are now bound and chained, as whooping soldiers of the MAGA Empire drag them by their hair to the torture dungeons.
And this is … not at all the outcome I wanted? It’s a possible outcome that I foresaw in 2014, and was desperately trying to help prevent, through fostering open dialogue between shy male nerds and feminists? I’m now, if anything, more terrified for my little tribe of pro-Enlightenment, science-loving nerds than I was under the woke regime? Speaking of switches with only two settings.
Anyway, with whatever moral authority this experience vests in me, I’d like to suggest that, in future cancellation controversies, the central questions ought to include the following:
People can debate how to weigh these considerations, though I personally put enormous weight on 8 and 9, what you could call the “clarification vs. glee axis.” I have nearly unlimited charity for people willing to have a good-faith moral conversation with the world, and nearly unlimited contempt for people who mock the request for such a conversation.
The sad part is that, in practice, the criteria for cancellation have tended instead to be things like:
The trouble with these questions is that, not only are their answers not positively correlated with which people deserve to be cancelled, they’re negatively correlated. This is precisely how you get the phenomenon of the left-wing circular firing squad, which destroys the poor schmucks capable of shame even while the shameless, the proud racists and pussy-grabbers, go completely unpunished. Surely we can do better than that.