The big AI/math news is the release today of the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. It’s an excellent attempt to identify the new threats to the intellectual culture of the mathematics community and begin a discussion of what to do about them. For some discussion, see Siobhan Roberts at the New York Times, and Michael Harris at his substack. There are some endorsements from prominent mathematicians included. From Peter Scholze there’s
This is a wonderful declaration, coming at the right time. The goal of mathematical research is human understanding of mathematics, and so mathematics can only thrive in a community of human mathematicians. It is crucial to preserve this communal spirit. In my experience, mathematical ideas, like children, must be nurtured and grow over the years. Just like I do not want my children to be educated by AI, I am pondering my mathematical ideas without use of AI, and generally avoid reading AI-generated text as best as I can.
and from Kevin Buzzard there’s
Mathematicians should find it quite striking that tech companies are suddenly interested in their work. The Leiden Declaration is a well-thought-through response to what is currently happening, as AI continues to disrupt this space.
The topic of the capabilities of current and future AI agents is something I’m not very well-informed about, but recently I’ve, like Buzzard, been struck by the way in which obscure mathematical work of little if any practical value has been the subject of a massive publicity campaign. Why do most of the people I meet seem to want to talk about how AI has solved some Erdos problems?
Reading the newspaper financial pages I think provides the answer to this. In today’s New York Times or Wall Street Journal, you can read about the upcoming trillion-dollar IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic. Hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars are riding on the relative perception of the technologies of these two companies, something that goes a long way toward explaining why they are throwing massive resources at proving Erdos conjectures and publicizing their successes.
Part of this story is the hiring of prominent mathematicians and physicists to work for very large salaries (and a piece of the trillion-dollar IPO payout). The huge US economic inequality disaster is about to get a lot worse and it makes sense that those with the opportunity to do so would sign up to be on the winning side with the new class of oligarchs. Like most things these days, I’m not sure what’s true and what’s not, but there’s reporting yesterday that Harvard string theory Xi Yin has joined OpenAI. Stringkin42069 is now back, with some pungent commentary on the situation.
String theory and its role in the destruction of a crucial part of our scientific culture is now a story not about the future but about the past. In its post-scientific phase, you can now read about String Theory for Metaphysicians, which is basically a rehashing of the highlights of decades of hype, carefully ignoring the existence of any critique of the hype.
Here at Columbia it’s a beautiful day, and once you get through Checkpoint Charlie, the campus is as attractive as ever. The army of security guards has done an excellent job of keeping us “safe”, which basically means no publicly visible criticism of the state of Israel and the genocide in Gaza. The US/Israeli wars and threats to end Iranian civilization with massive bombardment have drawn attention away from the ongoing genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Looking back, the Columbia students with their encampment were very much right about what was going on. You can read more about the current situation in Gaza here or here. Netanyahu’s announced intention to kill enough Palestinians to get them out of 70% of Gaza (with 100% for later) has received little attention.
Part of the end of our civilization is that we now live in a post-truth environment, with a Fascist dictatorship in power and oligarchs doing their best to exploit this to their own ends. Finding out what is really happening in Gaza or elsewhere is not easily done. In the Israeli genocide story, one thing that has clarified things for me is listening to people I know well like Scott Aaronson, who with his characteristic clarity of thought explains the logic of why Palestinians and their children must be killed (they want to kill his family). It’s all too clear here that what’s going on is a descent from civilization into tribalism, with Scott’s latest explaining that he will cut off all ties with one of the few relatively reliable sources of information around (the New York Times), because it is telling him things he doesn’t want to hear.
To try and end on a more positive note, I recently found out that Edward Witten is on bluesky, with posts like this that provide some counterpoint to the Scotts of the world. Once you get out of Columbia’s gates, you’re in the city of New York, which now has a wonderfully talented and sensible mayor, who refused to join Israeli officials like Bezalel Smotrich as they marched through Manhattan on Sunday. His statement was:
You can see in the participation of the far-right Israeli Minister Smotrich, as well as a number of other ministers, a vision of annihilation, a complicity in genocide and frankly, a belief that does not have much value for even the sanctity of children in Gaza… And I am offended, as I know many New Yorkers are, by their participation.
Maybe there’s still hope…
Update: Weird thing is that I’ve finally seen an intelligent, reasoned discussion of the implications of AI agents for hep-th research, in the form of a twitter thread by stringking42069.
Refuting the Erdos distance conjecture is a big deal.
Thus was not a rinky-dink problem nobody cared about.
And the solution used deep mathematics (Golod-Sharevic) and is
likely to lead to further advances.
I’m impressed.
I always had the suspicion with the hep market as competitive as it is, it strongly selects for the people most willing to jump on hype and people who try to join the winning side, instead of the right side- you wouldn’t make it in the market otherwise. I don’t have enough data to support this guess, though.
I will state one more time, for the record, that the side of this conflict that cheers the unlimited slaughter of civilians is not my side. In a world that has indeed gone insane, reverting to ancient tribalisms and hatreds, I’ve simply consistently supported the liberal values exemplified by the Allied forces in WWII — a war in which countless innocents on both sides also died, but about which decent people don’t have the strange difficulty they do today in distinguishing good from evil.
I’ll also point out that this NYC mayor you love so much, is married to a woman who celebrated the grotesque murders of 1200 Israeli men, women, and children on her social media while their bodies were still on the ground. This is the value system you’ve aligned yourself with.
I’m heartened that 50,000+ New Yorkers recently marched against their city turning into the sort of environment for Jews that the USSR was in the 1970s, the environment that you apparently want. I had no idea that Smotrich was there. A Google search confirms that the sane participants had no idea he was there either, and condemned his presence when they found out about it.
So we are now trashing: “…obscure mathematical work of little if any practical value…”
This describes almost all advanced mathematics, and this fact is defended over and over again by mathematicians who want sinecures or funding.
What gives?
Nick Patterson,
My comments here have nothing to do with the question of how important these results are (something I’m completely ignorant about). I was just seconding Kevin Buzzard’s comment that its very unusual for a for-profit company to nvest large resources in proving this sort of result and promoting the proofs. It’s worth keeping in mind why they’re doing this: there are astronomically large sums of money at stake.
Scott,
As usual, you ignore the ongoing slaughter in Gaza and the pogroms in the West Bank.
Killing Palestinian refugee kids in their tents in Gaza is “deep Zionism”, necessary because it’s just the same as fighting the Nazi war machine that had taken over Europe and slaughtered millions of innocents. And Mira Nair, Zohran Mamdani and I are anti-semitic pieces of shit. By the way, did you take a close look at Witten’s bluesky site? What do you think, is he an antisemitic piece of shit too? A kapo maybe?
You go on like this and then wonder why your blog commenters keep trying to tell you you’re a fanatic.
Witten, as you well know, has nearly alone on earth earned the right to a respectful hearing if he declared that 2+2=5. However you’ve reconciled yourself to the great man’s views on whether young people should go into string/SUSY unification, you can imagine me reconciling myself in a similar way to his views on Israel.
Long time reader here, grateful for your clarion call in dark times. But I’d like to make an observation. You often comment on Wolchover’s work, to the effect that this or that article misrepresents the situation in hep. Sometimes a commenter will then write that she’s dishonest, discredits science, etc. When this happens, as often as not you tamp down passions, saying she’s making a good faith effort, hep is hard, etc. I noticed something similar with Strumia: when he came around your blog to make MAGA noises, you coolly counseled him to ditch Trump and defend old-fashioned liberalism. Even Weinstein and Hossenfelder are relevant here: her youtube channel now regularly features what can generously be described as MAGA-adjacent clickbait while he’s in the employ of a major MAGA funder, would-be oligarch, and military surveillance technology merchant, yet when you reference them it’s on scientific topics and with no political editorializing. What is it about Aaronson, then, that he gets reduced to a target for your political outrage? Whatever you think he’s guilty of, is it worse, when dispassionately considered, than what some of those others you let pass have done or are doing? I’d say it’s significantly less bad than what some of them are doing, and I suspect that if you reassessed the matter dispassionately, you might agree. Anyway, thanks again for your blogging these many years.
Arvydas,
Thanks for the question. In general I’m very much allergic to moralizing and denouncing people as evil. Everybody has their own circumstances and point of view, the world is shades of grey, not black and white, best to live and let live, etc. Until last year I would very rarely engage here in political editorializing.
What Donald Trump and the Republicans have done since January 2025 is the main thing that has changed that. To me there is a fundamental ethical imperative to not just accept Fascism and dictatorship when it comes to your community. Especially if there’s little risk to you in saying something about what has happened, you should be doing so.
On top of this, even before Trump, the Columbia community, my community, was the target of a massive campaign of lies about antisemitism, a campaign driven by supporters of the Gaza genocide. Trump and his allies then weaponized this, getting the Columbia administration and board of trustees to shamefully decide that they would not go to court and fight illegal behavior, but instead make a deal with the new Fascist dictatorship. Everyday here we’re living with this, most obviously in the omnipresent security force and checking of people’s papers at the gates, less obviously in many people now fearful to say anything about Israel that could get them in trouble.
Scott’s role in all of this started pre-Trump with his doing the “I must ferociously defend my tribe by vigorously attacking those who ally with the tribe that wants to kill us” thing. He then went from bad to worse by collaborating with the original Trump attack on Columbia, arguing that, yes Trump was a dangerous T. Rex, but he was needed to deal with the antisemitic velociraptors like Peter Woit.
Thing is, I like Scott personally. He’s smart, guileless and tells you exactly what he thinks. It has been an eye-opening experience to hear from him how he sees the situation in Gaza and his explanations of why killing innocent children is necessary. If you want to understand the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank, pay attention to Scott. One depressing thing you’ll learn is that killing as many civilians as it takes to make them leave is very much on the agenda. No matter how bad it gets, you will be able to count on Scott to defend his tribe: they are the victims, the other tribe is evil.
So, my picking on Scott is not personal. I think you should pay attention to him if you want to understand why we now live under Fascism, with our military on a mission to support a government half-way around the world in its genocidal campaign.
This whole situation reminds me a bit of the days of the string wars and Lubos Motl. I also personally liked Lubos (hope he’s now doing well!), and encouraged people to pay attention to him because he was smart and guilelessly embodied the tribalism that afflicted the string theory community.
@Arvydas: From my standpoint, Peter is the one who initiated verbal hostilities here. I was staying scrupulously polite in my comments on his increasingly angry posts, just trying to explain how I and many like me saw the situation and seeking common ground, when Peter started calling me a genocidal maniac who needs mental help. Even then, though, I refrained from calling him an antisemite … right until the moment until he dismissed Columbia’s faculty-written antisemitism task force report, which painstakingly documented a climate of fear for hundreds of Jewish students, as just a cynical ruse by a cabal of wealthy, powerful you-know-whos pulling the strings behind the scenes. Peter offered not the slightest token concession to the reality of what the report documented.
Likewise, Peter’s claims to the contrary, I reject the idea of forcing Palestinians to leave Gaza or the West Bank. I am, and have always been, in favor of a peaceful two-state solution. If the Palestinian side rejects the two-state solution, and instead launches repeated genocidal wars to eradicate Israel for the greater glory of Allah, then I’m in favor of Israel winning those wars. In wars, alas, many innocent people get killed, especially when they’re used as human shields the way they are in Gaza. To describe this stance as “Scott is in favor of killing children” seems to me morally grotesque, exactly like it was morally grotesque to describe my issues with certain feminist dating discourse as “Scott wants all women to be his sex slaves” (Peter, thankfully, was on my side about that last one).
Scott,
You’re a smart guy, so it’s a lesson in the overwhelming power of tribalism to see you go on about how it’s not yours, but the other, evil, tribe that rejects living together in a two state solution on the land of Israel.
About the killing of children. Your “deep Zionism” essay explaining why, to you, Zionism at its deepest level means being willing to kill the children of the enemy tribe (the evil one!) while giving the disapproving other tribes the finger will live forever in its moral clarity.
Scott Aaronson enjoying full freedom of speech on this blog…
Given how he runs his own blog, he’ll never get how ironic this is:
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9801#comment-2033117
I believe mathematicians would do well to look to other intellectual communities to anticipate how AI may impact their own domain. Some other fields were affected earlier, and so there are lessons available. Predecessors include language translation, computational linguistics, information retrieval, and software engineering.
For example, in this Quanta article, computational linguists describe the shocking arrival of AI in their own words: https://www.quantamagazine.org/when-chatgpt-broke-an-entire-field-an-oral-history-20250430/ And practitioners in that field engaged several years ago in the sort of soul-searching that the math community is now beginning: https://nlpsurvey.net/nlp-metasurvey-results.pdf
Here are a few examples of lessons one might draw from other fields.
A consistent lesson (more amusing than important) is that there is *always* soaring rhetoric describing the about-to-be-impacted field, e.g. “cultivation of ideas, understanding, judgment, and human insight”. Many such flowery words wilt in the face of brute computation. This humbling happens again and again in field after field, yet invariably some people believe their discipline will somehow be the exception. On the bright side, swallowing the big dose of humility AI delivers is a one-time, get-it-over-with experience. This is not the real threat.
Another cross-field pattern perhaps relevant to mathematics concerns the impact on junior practitioners, e.g. graduate students in math. At first glance, this group might appear imperiled, because training problems traditionally thrown to apprentice mathematicians will now be solvable by AI in a weekend, an hour, or less. So how will we sharpen the skills of new mathematicians? But there is a flip side. Graduate students who make effective use of AI may become wildly productive regardless, chewing through points of confusion and small conjectures in minutes and thus able to reach a “big picture” understanding of a research area in unprecedented time. In this scenario, AI-powered super-grads actually emerge as the winners. So traditional roles will be destabilized, but winners and losers are not so clear.
I believe the most important cross-disciplinary takeaway concerns mental health. This rapid, massive change will be traumatic– full stop. But we can dial our individual pain up or down through our choices. In particular, hoping that AI will go away, is just corporate hype, can be insulted into oblivion, etc. is NOT a healthy path. If you adopt such a mindset, you consign yourself to a sense of creeping doom in years to come as AI relentlessly advances. In contrast, the people doing best in this era are those who adapt, jump in, and use the AI tool to maximum advantage. Don’t cower, take charge. This course may sound unappealing, because you probably love doing math the old way. But, coming from one of the earliest-impacted fields, this is my best advice: avoid getting run over by taking the driver’s seat.
Thanks for mentioning the chapter on the metaphysics of string theory. Just a small clarification: it does not present string theory as established physics, nor does it ignore its epistemic problems. The chapter is intended as a conditional philosophical analysis of the conceptual and ontological structures internal to string theory: if those structures are taken seriously, what might follow for metaphysical debates about spacetime, fundamentality, and emergence? This should not be confused with advocacy for string theory. More broadly, my work as a philosopher of physics examines the foundations and implications of several approaches to quantum gravity.
Bobby W.,
The comment from Scott you link to provides a lot of insight into the “anyone criticizing my tribe’s warriors and the killing they are doing, or defending the other tribe in any way, wants to kill my family” fever-dream that Scott lives in.
Quite remarkable that he’s fine living in a Fascist dictatorship allied with real anti-Semites since it supports Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing, but says he and his family will have to leave the US if a progressive Democrat critical of Israel comes to power.
Peter,
Don’t know whether you saw this (courtesy of Drop Site News):
Jewish Columbia faculty file EEOC claims alleging harassment for supporting Palestinian rights: Several Jewish faculty members at Columbia University filed claims this week with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission before the deadline closed, alleging a hostile work environment—but arguing the hostility they faced stemmed from their support for Palestinian rights rather than from pro-Palestinian protests, as the Trump administration intended the fund to address. In filings shared with the Guardian, faculty described being doxed, spat on, followed, screamed at, subjected to disciplinary charges, and receiving death threats. “I no longer consider Columbia University a safe place to work for Jews who dare to dissent from the political agenda of its most ardently pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian donors and trustees,” one professor wrote in his claim.
Mark Hillery,
Thanks! This reminds me that I intended to add a link to the story about this in the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/03/columbia-jewish-faculty-protests-settlement-fund
Hi Peter,
Some comments on AI and math.
1) The big news in AI/Math
In my view, the big news in Math + AI is indeed the solution by AI systems of the Erdős unit distance problem and quite a few other open problems. AI tools can already be useful for working mathematicians (provided they are open to the possibility). There are now dozens of examples where AI has contributed to cutting-edge mathematical research. Of course, this still represents only a small fraction of mathematical research as a whole.
2) Where does it lead?
It is not clear whether progress in AI-assisted mathematics will continue to the point where AI systems outperform human mathematicians across the entire discipline. This is certainly a possibility.
3) “Why do most of the people I meet seem to want to talk about how AI has solved some Erdős problems?”
Of course, many people are interested in the broader question of the role of AI in mathematics, even if they do not care about a particular problem. The Erdős unit distance problem itself occupies a central place in combinatorial geometry and has inspired beautiful developments over the decades. (I have a blog devoted mainly to combinatorics, where I have discussed the problem several times.) It is plausibly the most famous open mathematical problem solved by AI, and the solution is beautiful.
4) Why are AI companies interested in “obscure mathematical work of little if any practical value”?
The reason AI companies are interested in pure mathematics (and especially in mathematical problems) is that, on the one hand, the effort required to develop AI systems is largely universal and not specific to mathematics, while on the other hand mathematics provides clear and objective benchmarks for measuring progress. (The role and nature of mathematical problems vary considerably across different areas of mathematics.)
5) My view
I find the situation both exciting and hopeful for mathematics (and for science more broadly). At the same time, many mathematicians regard it as a serious threat to the field, and I can certainly understand their concerns. More broadly, other aspects of AI progress may pose genuine dangers to society.
6) My experience
I personally enjoy interacting with AI tools for mathematical purposes and following their development over the years. So far, however, I have only used inexpensive tools rather than the most advanced ones.
The quote by Peter Scholze, “In my experience, mathematical ideas, like children, must be nurtured and grow over the years,” is endearing. As a 70-year-old mathematician, the opportunity to have conversations with an AI system about ideas that I have nurtured over many years is truly fascinating.
7) Simplifying mathematics
Peter Scholze also wrote that “the central goal of mathematical research is human understanding of mathematics.” I agree that this is an important goal, as I regard mathematics as one of the pillars of human culture. (In my view, there are other central goals as well, such as applications to science and technology.)
AI may create new opportunities for enhancing human understanding of mathematics and, in particular, may help simplify mathematics. I have always regarded simplification as a central—though often somewhat thankless—goal for mathematicians.
8) The Leiden Declaration
I find the Leiden Declaration interesting and thought-provoking. In my view, the major AI/math news is the actual progress in using AI for mathematical research, but the Leiden Declaration is also a notable development.
9) Some mathematics and AI that may appeal to you
Here are three further recent developments that may be closer to your mathematical interests.
a) Sphere packing in high dimensionsThe densest sphere packing problem in R^n as n grows, is an important mathematical problem. Abuya, Gargava, and Zhao’s paper “Stochastically Evolving Ellipsoids with Symmetries” improves Klartag’s lower bound for sphere packing using methods developed by Venkatesh in obtaining an earlier record bound. The proof was generated by an AI system and subsequently checked by humans.
b) Percolation beyond Z^d
Percolation theory is a major area of probability and mathematical physics. An AI system recently proved a conjecture of Benjamini and Schramm asserting that an isoperimetric condition implies that the critical percolation probability is strictly smaller than 1.
c) Talagrand’s convexity conjecture
Items (a) and (b) are from the last few days. A few weeks earlier, Dongming Merrick Hua, Antoine Song, and Stefan Tudose settled Talagrand’s 1995 convexity conjecture in their paper “On Talagrand’s Convexity Conjecture.” AI tools (specifically ChatGPT 5.5) played some role in this development.
It was a long time ago, but I still remember a comment Xi Yin made during a forum debate. He criticized people who leave academia for industry, asking what they were really going to do with the extra money. Were they just going to work for 11 months simply to spend it lavishly on a short holiday in a tropical resort? He argued that he would much rather spend those 11 months doing what he actually loves. As someone who left academia myself, I was a bit saddened by his comment. I wonder what his perspective on this would be today.
A remark on the second part of the post. In my view, the situation in the Middle East is very dangerous. The terrible anomaly that there are actions and calls for the violent destruction of the State of Israel (that I remember since my childhood in the 1960s) overshadows the entire tragic situation. (It also overshadows the Columbia encampment.)
When it comes to Gaza, a positive development is that a ceasefire has been in place since October 2025, largely halting the bloodshed. This ceasefire is part of Trump’s 20-point plan, which was accepted by the parties and by many countries. It already led to the release of the Israeli hostages (in exchange with prisoners) and it calls for the removal of the Hamas Governance in Gaza, the restoration of Gaza, the end of violence and bloodshed, and for peaceful co-existence.
There are formidable powers that object to the plan and it may yet prove unrealistic, but overall, in my opinion, it seems like a good plan (and it is also “the only game in town”).
Gil Kalai,
The facts of the matter on the ground in Gaza are 9 people killed and 43 wounded by IDF fire yesterday, 970 killed, 3063 wounded and 782 bodies recovered since the “ceasefire” started. The IDF continues to destroy what is left of Gaza, nothing has been rebuilt. For an example of the conditions that Israel has intentionally created, see
https://www.haaretz.com/gaza/2026-06-07/ty-article/palestinians-suffer-from-lack-of-proper-toilets-across-gazas-vast-tent-cities/0000019e-a257-d7a4-a9bf-f6df08d00000
Netanyahu has publicly announced that the IDF has been ordered to violate the “ceasefire” by taking 70% of the territory, cleansed of Palestinians, and implied that 100% is the long-term goal.
Your argument that this is the best possible situation and that the bogus Trump “plan” is a “good plan” is nothing but a justification of ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Hi Peter, everybody
a) The ceasefire does not represent the best possible situation. (I did not say it does; please read carefully what I wrote.)
The ceasefire represents a terrible, ongoing situation. However, in my view, it does represent a positive development compared to the situation before the ceasefire, which was more terrible. The bloodshed has largely, though not fully, been halted.
b) In fact, this was also Peter Woit’s view when he wrote last October:
“About recent developments in Gaza, I’m very pleased to see that Netanyahu agreed to a ceasefire, and the number of people getting killed each day has been reduced dramatically. Such a ceasefire is very welcome now, and should have taken place long ago.”
c) The 20 point plan is, in my view, a good plan. It was this plan that enabled the ceasefire, and three of its points have already been largely realized. As far as I understand, the next major step (which is currently under negotiation) is supposed to be the demilitarization of Hamas forces and the removal of Hamas from the governance of Gaza.
d) The goal and vision of the 20-point plan is encouraging (again, this is my view). Here are the last two points (taken from the BBC website ):
19. While Gaza re-development advances and when the PA reform programme is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognise as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.
20. The United States will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous co-existence.
e) It is reasonable to argue that the 20-point plan is unlikely to be fulfilled, that the involved parties cannot be trusted to promote it, and that it would give the parties and other forces excuses and opportunities for advancing alternative, possibly malicious, agendas. It is also reasonable to argue that advancing this plan (or a similar one) would require a significant change of course for Israel, the Palestinians, and perhaps also for the US. However, in my opinion, the plan provides a good vision toward peace and there is realistic probability that it will move forward.
Hi Gil,
Yes, an ongoing genocide with 10 people being killed each day is better than one with 100 people murdered each day.
At the time of the release of the “Trump Peace Plan” last fall, one could reasonably decide to try and be hopeful, despite all the obvious reasons not to take it seriously. Looking at what has happened since then, the verdict on this is in. It’s exactly the cover for further genocide/ethnic cleansing that it appeared likely to be last fall.
I was also more optimistic shortly after the October agreement than I am today, eight months later, especially because the peace plan was endorsed by many countries, including several Arab states. Still, I would not mock or belittle the difference between the situation before and after the ceasefire, nor the importance of the release of the Israeli hostages.
A key step in the plan, which was also shared by earlier plans from the Biden administration, is the demilitarization of Hamas forces and their removal from the governance of Gaza. It seems implausible that the reconstruction of Gaza and a full ceasefire can happen without this; the removal of Hamas could also enable some sort of coexistence.
Since Scott Aaronson has been raving on Sam Harris lately, let’s “unpack” the strategy of those intellectual giants:
Tell every citizen of the world that they can only belong to one of two boxes:
1) the Global Intifada project.
2) the Greater Israel project.
With absolutely no space at all in the middle (it doesn’t have the nuance of a qubit, it’s literally a classical bit).
And then on top of that they say that this choice is what intellectual freedom and Western enlightenment is all about. Really.
So, if you dare say that you don’t have a skin in this fight and have no opinion, or if you raise the question whether the IDF double-tapping hospitals (or food-aid workers, or journalists) is really the best way to make Israel safer… This instantly puts you in category 1) and shows that you are an old-school Nazi devotee and an ISIS devotee (at the same time!), and that your main secret wish/goal in life is to kill Scott, his family, and all of his extended tribal family.
Given this it’s no wonder Scott shuts down every honest and uncomfortable discussion on his blog.
And you can see that Sam Harris has a tough time selling this level of BS when he recently said that Mamdani was an Islamist, then almost instantly corrected himself with “but even if he wasn’t…”.
Then when those two couldn’t convincingly paint Mamdani has a new Ayatollah, they targeted his wife, saying that her “likes” on Twitter were evidence that she is a full on Jihadist.
Unfortunately for those two, they don’t realize that this level of intellectual dishonesty is actually doing this opposite of what they want to achieve: it’s turning away a lot of reasonable people who used to be on the side of Israel.
Jack-59,
Aaronson/Harris have for a long time descended into crude tribalist/racist thinking. To them the Palestinian/Arab opponents of Israel are murderous, violent, subhuman beasts. Their extermination is an unfortunate necessity caused by their “death cult” behavior.
In recent years, this same reversion to the worst of human behavior is spreading everywhere, fueled by trillionaire racists, the Republican party and the leadership of the US, billionaires in France, neo-nazis in Germany, and many others. These people get up each morning and ask themselves: “what can I do today to stoke these racial hatreds?”
Today this is causing racist mobs to burn people’s homes in Belfast, but it’s spreading everywhere.
One could make a decent argument that the 2020 “woke” anti-racism campaign was over the top. Now that “wokism” has been defeated, the real thing has been unleashed worldwide.
Peter,
If you read Aaronson carefully, you might notice that what radicalized him (and to a lesser extent, Harris) wasn’t the murderous violence exhibited by Gazans on Oct 7 so much as the West’s response to it; many people showed their true colors, and even more people adopted those colors due to nothing more than peer pressure. Personally, I find the latter more disturbing than the former.
Vladimir,
The idea that people are angry and upset about what the Israelis have done in Gaza only because of peer pressure is just too stupid to discuss.
Interesting that you describe Scott in exactly the terms (“radicalized”) used to describe people who go to a synagogue and murder innocents because they are Jewish. Yes, he is “radicalized” and now devoted to justifying the slaughter of people of the enemy tribe.
In some sense, I and many others have been “radicalized” by reading Scott. Once you see what has happened to him, it’s hard to unsee that, and it changes the way you see what Israel is doing. Before dealing with Scott, I had some sympathy for Israel’s difficult problem of what to do about the Palestinian problem. After hearing from him and reading a bunch of other Israeli sources, it became clear that Israel has decided that ethnic cleansing and genocide is the answer to the problem, and is implementing this solution.
But this kind of “radicalization” that I and a large part of the US population have undergone recently is different than Scott’s. We don’t think that one tribe is “good”, the other “evil”, or support the murder of civilians of either tribe.
Maybe it’s obvious, but, to clarify something:
it’s not like being anti-genocide is the flip side or the mirror of being pro-genocide.
People like Professor Scott Aaronson would want us to believe that there’s a symmetry here: “if you don’t let me go ahead with my genocide on my enemy, it’s really because you want to genocide my tribe!”. He’s basically projecting.
But the truth is that the situation is very asymmetric:
Being anti-genocide means you’d like everyone to live, you believe that any side massacring the other is a bad thing, no matter what, no matter the reason. You just don’t believe in mass murder, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing as a solution, ever.
Going along with a genocide means you’ve convinced yourself that you can actually solve complex issues by getting rid of tens of thousands of people, using indiscriminate blind chaos and violence or with a carefully organized and orderly holocaust. Once you’ve made that moral move, there’s no going back. Then you’re also signaling everyone else that genocides are really okay, sometimes. But since everyone who commits or wants to commit a genocide always think they have good reasons to do it, the “sometimes” can quickly become the norm. And then we’re all f*cked.