In which Scott Aaronson creates the most offensive trolley problem imaginable
429 Too Many Requests
It might as well be my own hand on the madman’s lever—and yet, while I grieve for all innocents, my soul is at peace, insofar as it’s ever been at peace about anything.
Psychopath.
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
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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 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.
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.
I wonder if in an earlier draft he accused sneerclub of causing his support of the genocide.
incel
Some guys had to learn that most sex and dating advice on the Internet should be ignored, but many women have to learn that magazines like Cosmo are not written to help them. I wish we did not live in a world where so much culture tries to hurt so many people in an important area of life, but introverted men are not the only victims.
Bringing up his individual struggles when two million people are being starved to death, shot, and forced into the desert is gross.
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).
Not the first time:
Yeah but previous posts do not have the risk of blowing up into an 'untitled' again. This will get backlash, and he will pretend that he is the victim again after the backlash.
The amazing part about his deranged homicidal metaphor is that it would work exactly the same way if you were using it to argue in favor of Hamas. I knew this guy had issues, I even felt bad for him, but the brainworms have clearly won. Hate is intoxicating and one should not indulge in it to this degree lest one lose one's humanity.
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.
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).
The metaphor implying the necessity of mass murdering children had you?
No, actually. It was the part about someone killing your whole family, while everyone else sits back and just watches it happen, sometimes with approval. That's basically what the world has been doing while Israel kills hundreds of thousands of people.
It was also the trolley problem metaphor itself, in the next paragraph. The rest of the world could stop the genocide, by simply cutting Israel off. No more weapons, means no more killing. But it would also leave Israel defenseless.
So, should the world pull the lever and save Gaza, knowing it will ultimately lead to more Israelis dying? Or should they keep giving them more weapons, so that they can keep murdering Palestinians with them?
This is the "leverage" Netanyahu uses to coerce the world into looking the other way, while he keeps killing more children.