Welcome to newsletter number 15. It’s been a little longer than usual between newsletters. I took some time away from it to focus on other “reading and reflecting” for various things on my YouTube channel, podcast and other projects. In personal news my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary approaches in a couple of months - and so I am organising the deserved celebration for that. Deserved, I say, as if any statistic is broadly known, it is the unfortunate statistics on long term relationships. So a party is called for and in the planning. Personal news aside, professional projects continue apace alongside and I am back to this part of my content creation at Substack and today my theme is: hyperbole. Exaggeration. In some cases, perhaps, outright lies or misrepresentation. But let me be polite about all the examples I use today and just say that the thread connecting them is they are all a species of over the top hype of some kind or other.
Let’s begin in physics and with quantum computation. I mentioned this in a recent livestream which you can find here:
Now that’s 2 hours and 20 minutes of me rambling on camera in response to questions from Patreon supporters of mine. I cannot recall why it came up exactly but I did mention this article: https://singularityhub.com/2022/08/12/scientists-just-debunked-googles-quantum-advantage-claim-using-a-normal-supercomputer/
And, well, the article is what you get in the title. Some background first: we have known quantum computers are possible ever since 1985 when David Deutsch first proposed the theory of their operation. Ever since we have been in roughly the same position as we were when Alan Turing first created the theory of classical computation which was in 1936 and some years later when the first working versions of classical computers were created.
Now the story of the history of computing is not exactly a straight line of theory through to practise or planning through to implementation. By some accounts in 18 33 Charles Babbage had a calculator of sorts - a mechanical device that could do a lot with numbers and he had in the works a device - the Analytical Engine - which, once again, was a mechanical rather than electrical device. But with some clever use of punched cards could have - could have mind you if it had been built - being what we call “Turing complete”. In other words it would have been capable of calculating or computing anything that any other device capable of computing could have, so long as you had enough punched cards and time to wind the thing.
One of the first was of course commissioned by British Military Intelligence services during the second world war to crack the Nazi code machine Enigma. That device was called Bombe - pronounced bom-b if I understand the phonetic spelling correctly. Now the Bombe was electro mechanical which means you’re getting the speed up possible using electricity. And soon after that followed, famously, things like the Z3 which in 1941 was the first fully automated, Turing complete, digital electromechanical computer. But less than a year later there came the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) - which was no longer mechanical at all - fully electrical with vacuum tubes as transistors and then Colossus - not Turing complete and in 1945 the US Army built ENIAC - the Turing complete fully digital electronic computer with thermionic valves (vacuum tubes).
Ok, so we’re not quite there yet with quantum computers. Our Alan Turing has shown they’re in theory possible so what do we say: if the laws of physics permit it, it can be done - given the right knowledge. But we don’t have that yet. The engineering difficulties it would seem are rather steeper than with the classical computers. But when we have a fully universal, fully capable quantum computer it will be a game changer and we should expect things to change pretty swiftly after that. There are lots of problems that could use the inherent speed up in processing power we would get from even a modest quantum computer of a few hundred qubits. I can well imagine as a very amateur gamer that a computer of some minimum number of qubits would be able to run simulated worlds of super high fidelity and realism and web3 type stuff in ways we can only dream of now. Think super sharp beyond photo realism and frame rates so fast no one will even bother quoting them anymore in virtual worlds of stupendous complexity and near infinite size where one could go up to a tree and pick up its fallen leaves and take out a virtual microscope and inspect it for microscopic creatures whose cells you could see.
Of course someone would need to program all of that - but it already seems as though we’re getting to natural language programming languages and so forth where, well you could just feed it exactly that set of instructions: build a forest of eucalyptus trees. Populate its trees with a dozen different species of microscopic bugs. Make sure the bugs are made of cells that when inspected look and behave like real cells (presumably someone has already written the program for “real cells” which just gets called). I’m guessing in the future, virtual worlds will be virtually constructed either like that or the way we now construct webpages. Few people need to know HTML to build a webpage anymore. The bottleneck is creativity and imagination and style and that kind of thing. Not: learning a language or even really learning how to use a particular bit of software. But we digress. The potential of quantum computation is there and people are racing to build quantum computers. Including - as I have mentioned on ToKCast - the US Army again which seems to have this long tradition of working on the fundamentals of engineering supercomputers. Not least because they’re into defending the country from cyberattacks these days as well as code breaking and so on. The US Army actually sponsors the Uni of NSW’s Centre for Quantum Computation in part. This is the one place I follow reasonably closely as an outsider layperson because it’s local to me and it’s my old alma mater and I have met some of the key researchers there and I think they’re doing great work. Follow their progress here:
Now the thing is that they are a fully public facing organisation, so far as I can tell. They’re not pretending to have secret technology. They might be keeping some things hidden in commercial confidence - but it’s not a fully functioning universal quantum computer. But you can get a hint at the state of the art by reading their material. It’s not like they’re immune to slick marketing. Their website really is a joy to explore for example at https://www.cqc2t.org/programs/ there are lovely animated images like (it won’t animate here, but you get the idea):
But none of this slick promotion hints at them over-egging things. Also they’re not underselling things or not actually able to keep up with “actual” industry. It’s not like: well they’re over there in academia and so cannot hope to do what industry can do for lack of funding. No: UNSW’s Centre of Excellence there is backed not only by the largest research universities (plural) in Australia but also by top notch international universities - including Cambridge, Oxford, places in Germany and France, The US, Singapore, as well as the Federal Government of Australia, the US military and industry partners including NASA and some big banks and telecommunications companies and even Google https://www.itnews.com.au/news/googles-australian-quantum-computing-research-program-takes-shape-583279 .
Now the US military involvement is not telegraphed on their website. It might be a secret. But I was never told it was a secret. So unless camouflaged troops or men in black come to my door I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn. I’ll tell the story of how I learned about the US army being involved - I’ve told it before. I went there a couple of times to have a look around at their facilities and as I say met some of the researchers and got to interrogate them to the limits of my own knowledge about this - which is not much. Perhaps more than a layperson, but no where near an expert. Well anyways it’s obvious what they do is cool everything to very close to absolute zero so that the things they are using to serve as qubits can remain in the entangled state which is to say: acting as a single system. What they do is have doped silicon which means silicon with bit of phosphorus in it. This can be used, when cooled, as a quantum processor. Two different phosphorus atoms act as the one thing when they become entangled and can do the task of quantum computation by simultaneously computing stuff and then combining the results at the end to give you the output. That is terribly hand wavy and I’m not going to try to give a specific example of how this works. There are wonderful YouTube videos where - well, just search for UNSW Centre for Quantum Computation. Here’s one with Derek Muller (who I argue is the world’s best physics communicator) speaking with the UNSW people all about their research
Anyways, the thing about what they are doing - some of what they are doing (they’re doing a lot both on the hardware and software side of things) is to try to get the physical stuff - the quantum processor - to at least show proof of concept. Which they’ve done. But it needs to be scaled up so that it outperforms every other computer on the planet. Then we’ll know we’ve got something. So their model is this phosphorus atom pair in silicon idea but to keep the atoms entangled they need to cool everything. Super cool. Because if those atoms start vibrating in the wrong way - well then we get so-called decoherence - a loss of the information in the quantum system. So it’s got to be cold. Colder than anywhere in the universe. Well below the temperature between galaxies. So eventually I got to asking them how they do this and they said liquid helium but - and here’s the thing - regular liquid helium is not cold enough. So they use the technique of evaporative cooling. And evaporative cooling is just what it sounds like - it’s the principle of perspiration. Get a little sweat on your forehead and the breeze evaporates it away cooling you down because the evaporated water needed to be heated to evaporate - that takes energy so the energy is taken from your forehead by the water as it turns to gas. The overall effect - you feel cooler and the surroundings get a little warmer.
So what happens with this quantum computation device is they take regular helium which is called helium 4 - it’s got 2 protons and 2 neutrons in the nucleus and then mix in a higher than normal ratio of helium 3 - which has only 1 neutron. It’s lighter and because it’s lighter it evaporates more rapidly - it has a higher boiling point. So it will effectively evaporate away from the mixture taking with it - energy. That energy taken away is observed as a further cooling of the helium 4 bath. Helium won’t solidify it just gets colder and colder as a liquid which is convenient.
So I ask them: where do you get extra helium 3? Is it like some process of distillation with regular helium? And the answer is: no. The best way to get it, the cheapest way, is from nuclear weapons of a certain kind. Decommissioned nuclear bombs - ones that are not going to ever be used - are stored and are of course radioactive and from them comes, as a radioactive decay product - helium 3 gas. And it’s the US Army’s task to keep these bombs secure wherever they do this and, well - why let that helium 3 go to waste if someone can use it? So they collect it and sell it to people. Or in this case give it to UNSW as far as I am aware, perhaps for a discount, in exchange for - well whatever the contents of their research into quantum computation is. So UNSW, so I am led to believe, receives balloons of helium 3 gas from the US army. This is what I have been told. I may be wrong. Things may have changed. But I really want this to be a true story.
Now as I keep one eye sometimes on https://www.cqc2t.org and their press releases I have a sense of the state of the art. Now their way of doing things is not the only way, I grant that. But anywhere there admits they still feel a long way from having desktop versions of these or anything like something that can outperform even a modest classical computer. So when someone does, elsewhere, make claims like “our quantum computer can outperform any other computer on the planet” - it’s a remarkable claim. And that claim has been made many times over the years. On investigation they often do not have an actual quantum computer, or if they do, they are not claiming it’s universal, or if they are, they are claiming it can only do one particular kind of calculation better than any classical computer or faster than any classical computer. There is a lot of hype and there has been hyperbole. Reading this article gives a sense of the hyperbole over time: https://singularityhub.com/2022/08/12/scientists-just-debunked-googles-quantum-advantage-claim-using-a-normal-supercomputer/ so in the audio version of this newsletter I am going to read through that article with some comments.
So that’s hyperbole in technology. Let’s move to some hyperbole in politics.
That there is a series of examples of Trump being hyperbolic. It’s ridiculous. Now history as well as the very present tells us of dangerous leaders. I am just not seeing that in Trump to the same degree. He’s worse than some. But not so much worse. I share the view that someone like Biden who does indeed seem cognitively impaired could be a danger and it could be a danger insofar as the bureaucratic apparatus are able to cajole and coerce him in such a way he is wielding no actual power because he just is not all there. But I don’t know. But this is worrisome:
Now Trump might be at the other extreme - maybe he just ignores expert and bureaucratic advice. Some see that as a vice, some a virtue - but we do not yet know, seemingly, what exactly if anything, he did during his time in power that was so egregious. But some people are saying he was especially bad. We’ve had some recent examples like this:
So what Sam has said there is hyperbolic. It’s over the top. It’s another example of hyperbole. As such he is exaggerating. I know Sam does not “literally” think that. He knows what literally means. The man is compassionate and particularly motivated by the suffering of children. So he would admit that what he said there was over the top. He would care about the corpses of children. Of course he would. So it’s hyperbole.
But then the reaction to Sam’s comments have been hyperbolic too. And I seriously considered just deleting this entire section of my substack today - this section of the newsletter because I do not want to add to the over the top reaction. But I’m not being superlative - I’m not saying Sam is dangerous or anything like that. I am however saying: it’s hyperbolic and the rhetoric of Trump should be turned down but so too should the rhetoric in response to Trump. It is an age of hyperbole.
It is as if there are little spot fires that flare up in our discourse now and again and rather too many of us are carrying around the equivalent of either massive magnifying glasses or parabolic mirrors. Now the spotfires might be a problem - no doubt. A problem and in our Popperian framework almost any activity in live we can engage in represents engaging with some problem or other. But some of them are like spotfires - irritations that if left unchecked could indeed get out of control. But what you do in these situations is provide some solution - water or the extinguisher. Instead we have these megaphones which are people with lots of reach who really are the parabolic mirrors and lenses who can take the energy of that spot fire and focus it into something really incediary. They’re not helping to stamp it out. They’re not helping to take the temperature down - they’re using it in some way to direct whatever it is - the energy of whatever it is - onto their political enemies. Just be more serious.
I can absolutely agree Trump is not an ideal candidate. That is true and many would say it undersells things. Many would say he’s unfit for office. I just don’t buy that. The very institution that allows someone like that to run and win is simultaneously the same one that restricts his ability to do too much damage. And let’s face it - he didn’t. What exactly did he do while in office that was so reprehensible? Did he start more wars? Did he literally send police to the doors of his political opponents? Did he seek to cancel welfare?
Someone who has done a good job more or less simply presenting what was said for example in the Triggernometry interview with Sam and also comparing what Sam said or claimed or insinuated - as many do - that Trump was a law breaker and so on and actually what is known - which is to say what we’ve good explanations of - is Mike. Now I don’t know Mike aside from stumbling across his Youtube channel. It’s a bigger channel than mine - but you know - still well below 15,000 subscribers as of today. What Mike does it rather what Libs of TikTok https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok does on Twitter - well maybe he does a little more. Libs of TikTok does nothing more than simply repost what some people on TiKToK have made in terms of videos and recordings of their own ideas. They are over there, the people on TikTok creating content - speaking into a microphone and camera and giving us their life philosophies and ideologies. And Libs of TiKToK does nothing more than curate these videos and posts them to twitter. But for that they get accused of - well - bias or prejudice or something like that. Which is bizarre. These people on Twitter who make certain claims - lets face it claims about biology rather a lot of the time - things like biological males can give birth, or in some cases which is more worrying - that young biological males who may be confused or uncertain or afraid or whatever you want to call it - should have this confusion, uncertainty and fear…treated via a surgical procedure. Namely - they should be physically altered with expensive risky surgery because, well in some cases it would appear, their parents are applying some degree of psychological pressure - coercion - in the form of a political ideological - that this is a virtuous thing to do.
Now it is true that scientifically speaking there exist people born male who in the extreme might one day go on to give birth. But this does not mean that the claim “biological males can give birth” is some sort of scientific claim. It’s rather like you have cases where a dog is unfortunately born with 3 legs. You don’t then conclude on that basis: well. This edge case proves that “dogs have 3 legs”. No. Dogs have 4 legs. That’s that. Now is it possible a dog can have 3 legs. Or 2, 1 or none or 5? Yes. But dogs have 4 legs. And then dogs, like any other living thing, can have variation due to mutation or something else. So too with people - but with people there is greater variety still but this does not change the fact: mothers give birth. Fathers do not. That’s that. But there is an ideology out there that would have every child simply come to believe there is no difference between mothers and fathers and the words are interchangeable and so too is male and female as if the last few millennia of learning on this topic has been refuted by the last 5 years or so of what amounts to a kind of minor but still mass political hysteria. We should help children - not confuse them. Children live not merely in a culture but in a world and though you might think that now, in your city, it is quite normal for women to be men and men women and this should be celebrated - teaching a child that now and then sending them into a world far broader than your narrow misconceived political doctrine of the moment is a kind of psychological abuse. It means the child will, eventually, encounter reality in ways that will be uncomfortable for reasons that did not need to obtain. There is already enough uncomfortable confusion out there for young people to navigate. Denying reality makes this worse. And the reality is: males have XY chromosomes, have penises, testes and produce sperm. Women have XX chromosomes, vaginas, ovaries and produce ova. That’s that. That’s the truth. Learn that first and then later - at some point, if it ever comes up - learn the exceptions. The rare exceptions. They’re not the rule. We don’t begin with: this is a dog. What’s a dog? Well - it’s an animal.
How many legs does it have mummy?
Well that’s great you have asked I am so proud of you for asking that question. A dog can have any number of legs at all.
And ears?
Any number of ears. Some dogs make noises like birds and some like cats and a dog is kind of whatever you want it to be.
And mummy what’s a man?
A man is anything you want it to be.
This does not help. This is not affirming. It is confusing and it’s wrong.
So that’s off track. Back to Mike and his YouTube channel Mike vs Everyone. And Mike curates, just like Libs of Tik Tok - some examples of rather bizarre contemporary ideas. Now people have always had bizarres ideas. Some are good. I think it’s important people be creative and experiment with difference. But there comes a time for creativity to encounter criticism and if you are putting your stuff out there then you have to expect criticism - the encounter with reality both social and physical. And this is important actually for children of today to understand. You live in a world of content creation where what you produce, record and say should - yes - express your ideas - but perhaps once you have carefully considered and criticised those ideas internally first and perhaps with some people you care about. Without doing this - well - you might end up on something like libsoftiktok or perhaps Mike’s channel. And after all - if you do - didn’t you post this video or create this content in the first place so it would be viewed? There’s no point complaining: oh people are watching and commenting on my video after you took the time top presumably plan it, record it, upload it and promote it. That’s on you. And young people in this world have to understand that. So that’s my defence of libsoftiktok and channels like Mike’s.
Mike essentially just curates the videos and reacts. Eye rolls, little comments and sometimes analysis. And I do not always agree with his analysis. That’s ok. In the Sam Harris one, given I have been a fan of Sam for years now - ever since the publication of “The End of Faith” which takes us back to 2004 - I might not have gone as strong as Mike has in his criticism - but Mike says he does not know Sam so he’s hearing this kind of talk from Sam for the first time and so it must be jarring. Some half of the USA or so support Trump. Maybe less. Let’s call it 40%. But that’s 40% of what 330 million (well not everyone votes). Say only half of them vote (it’s usually more than that). Then well we have at least 20% of people support Trump now. I’m being super conservative here. So that’s 20% of 330 million - and that’s 60 million people. 60 million people. And Mike is one of those 60 million people. It is extremely important if you are interested in politics to understand why people vote the way they do. And dismissing people as deluded or stupid or any other derogatory word you like is not helping. Mike represents a perspective and a way of voting and - well watch his videos. He’s a nice guy with an interesting backstory that he reveals in various videos. It can be jarring to be told by intellectuals over and again - your entire worldview is completely wrong and, well you’re a bad person. You must be a bad person because you’re voting for a guy who is worse than a guy who might be complicit in, well, dead baby corpses in basements. I mean that’s where the hyperbole gets you.
So watch Mike - he does more commentary in this particular video and more analysis than normal but he is still letting people speak for themselves. He’s not unfairly representing anyone. He’s letting you, the viewer - make up up your mind for the most part and perhaps most importantly you’re getting to understand his opinion and the opinion of people like him who vote Trump.
So here’s that video:
I don’t think Mike is being overly hyperbolic here. Or even necessarily hyperbolic period. I don’t think he’s an example of what I’m complaining about here. He’s not saying Sam is an existential threat or a complete lunatic or a dangerous liar or anything like that.
Now I watched the entire interview with Sam and I do think there has been a hyperbolic reaction to it from some other of Sam’s detractors. I think that is unfair. It’s also interesting to note that the reaction to the video has gone viral and is over the top by the measure that: not everyone reacting has watched the whole thing in context. The Triggeronmetry videos on Youtube seem to get from 20,000 to 500,000 views - somewhere in that range. As I wrote this today the Sam Harris video has received 172,000 views. So it sits in the “somewhat more popular than average” range when you look at their entire catalogue on YouTube. The point is: the reaction to Sam is out of proportion to the number of views. Which is telling us something. The reaction hasn’t wildly increased people watching the video itself! Joe Rogan gets millions of views per video - and he’s not going viral on the daily. So there’s a disconnect here. People are reacting to Sam in visceral ways without watching all of what he says. But - yes - what he does say in those clips taken from that interview don’t paint a great picture, it would seem.
Interestingly, that hyperbolic reaction to Sam is NOT coming from people like Mike. It’s coming from fellow intellectuals. They are the ones saying he’s utterly lost his mind or that he is unhinged and so on. I don’t think that. I think - yes, perhaps lacking in caution with his language might be a way to put it. But he’s not dangerous or unhinged or anything like that. He has strong opinions and, by the way, you watch something like that Triggernometry interview and he explains himself. Now whether you think the explanations are satisfactory to you is another matter. But they satisfy him and so he reaches the conclusions he does. How to frame and promote those conclusions is another matter. But whatever:
The majority of the interview - once you get past the first 30 mins or so - is focussed on other interesting stuff. For example from the 70 minute point onwards or so the material about meditation and the subjective objective distinction is just great. I mean it’s not new but that does not make it any less insightful. This idea that meditation can break the distinction between you as a subject and the world as a set of objects means you can be relieved - if you need to be - of stress associated with being self conscious or worries and anxious about how you seem to others.
Here’s the interview in full:
Now everyone gets this idea - that we all have or can experience social anxiety to some extent - but that’s also the thing. To some extent and to very different extents it seems to be. Some people are just perennially unhappy or worried, nervous, fearful - all that negative stuff and so for those people meditation if understood well (or indeed not just meditation but any number of practises from Feldenkris to Alexander Technique to prayer and massage and the list is long of things that can help people to feel more comfortable in their bodies with themselves) - some people will get more benefit than others because their starting points can be so different.
There are some people who are desperately anxious and uptight. And they need meditation or something like it but can’t quite get it. At the other extreme there exist people who are not so anxious and uptight who nonetheless can be excellent natural practitioners of mindfulness or whatever the practise might be. And then there’s everyone in between - people who need it and can do it, and people who don’t need it but quite get a handle on how to do it anyways. Which is to say: some people are missing out but it doesn’t matter and some people are missing out but really need to get it. I get the impression, watching from afar for some time, that many in Sam’s audience are of that kind: they really need something like meditation and rather many of them - can’t quite get it. But they should keep trying and something like Sam’s app Waking up is brilliant for that. For my money - the app is worth is just to have access to the catalogue of the Alan Watts collection. That’s dozens and dozens of hours worth of the great philosopher Alan Watts lecturing and doing guided meditations and so on. Wonderful stuff. Well worth the subscription. Lucky for me I was an early adopter and so I still qualify for a free account as I was a financial supporter of Sam’s podcast and app pretty much from the beginning and, kindly, that’s his reward for people who showed that early support. Which is a nice idea if you do like content creators and they offer some benefit early on - take them up on it. I’m now also a sporadic supporter of Mike vs Everyone and his YouTube channel. I think it’s worth it. I like to keep up with what the young people of a certain political ideology are up to and most especially what some of the teachers are up to - especially in the USA - when it comes to this woke stuff. Now I can’t be bothered searching for examples myself so Mike does that for us. He as I say, curates the material. Just explore his channel a little and see. I don’t endorse everything Mike says or perhaps insinuates. But then, I can’t say that about anyone at all. I don’t even endorse everything I have ever said (lol).
A final couple of pieces of hyperbole - our last Prime Minister here in Australia - Scott Morrison - was in the headlines. It was revealed that during the pandemic he did something unusual. He assigned to himself the powers of other ministers. So he took on the powers of the minister of health and the treasurer and some other things too. Now the fact he did this is one thing but the fact he never told those other ministers is something else and so his colleagues have in many cases come out against him. https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/top-spies-in-the-dark-over-scott-morrisons-power-grab/news-story/3fcba0fb6f1504efeaef538c9da4153c
But some of the reaction to this has been - hyperbolic. People claiming he was trying to take over like a tyrant and usurp the whole government apparatus. I mean his own explanation - buried in poor communication - seems to have been that during the pandemic it was a time of urgency and novel problems and so among other things he thought to himself well if my ministers become incapacitated - presumably from covid - if people literally started dropping off because, as we were told at times bodies were going to pile up in the streets - then in that climate - I can well imagine he was signing all sorts of things and among them - why not give himself emergency powers. That actually seems reasonable and does not seem like the action of a tyrant in response to an emergency. There is nothing in taking on those powers that means he could not still be removed from office either by his own party - always a risk in our system it happens over and again - or by the governor general who has that authority. So he could not have become a tyrant. But the fact he never told anyone is strange. Now it may just have been an oversight. Or it may have been nefarious. But if you watched the news about this you would think that this was some kind of Julius Caesar moment or Emperor Palpatine “I am the senate” moment. It wasn’t.
Ok, that will do for now. I’ll be live-streaming again over the coming week. Podcasts about chapter 7 “A conversation about justification” are available in the usual places - one of which is focussed on Popper’s “Realism and the Aim of Science” and the concept of “corroboration” in the sciences for the real epistemology die-hards.
Part 3 of that chapter should be out in the coming days.
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