Journalist moratorium
Shtetl-Optimized 2018-03-12
For over a decade, one of the main ways I’ve tried to advance the cause of Enlightenment has been talking to journalists writing popular articles on quantum computing (or P vs. NP, or the universe as a computer simulation, or whatever). Because of my blog, journalists knew how to reach me, and because I’m a ham, I always agreed to be interviewed. Well, I told myself I was doing it as my way of giving back to the field, so that my smarter colleagues would have more time for research.
Unfortunately, this task has sort of taken over my life. It used to be once a month, then it became once a week, and by now it’s pretty much every day. Comment on this claim by IBM, that press release by Rigetti, this embargoed Nature paper by a group in Australia. And when you do, it would be great if you could address this itemized list of 12 questions, with more questions coming later depending on what the editor needs.
On Friday we were on a family outing, with Dana driving and me in the front passenger seat, typing out another reply to a journalist on my phone. Because of my engrossment in my Enlightenment duties, I neglected to tell Dana where the exit was, which then made us a half hour late for a scheduled museum tour and nearly ruined the day.
So then and there, I swore an oath to my family: that from now until January 1, 2019, I will be on vacation from talking to journalists. This is my New Years resolution, except that it starts slightly before New Years. Exceptions can be made when and if there’s a serious claim to have achieved quantum computational supremacy, or in other special cases. By and large, though, I’ll simply be pointing journalists to this post, as a public commitment device to help me keep my oath.
I should add that I really like almost all of the journalists I talk to, I genuinely want to help them, and I appreciate the extreme difficulty that they’re up against: of writing a quantum computing article that avoids the Exponential Parallelism Fallacy and the “n qubits = 2n bits” fallacy and passes the Minus Sign Test, yet also satisfies an editor for whom even the so-dumbed-down-you-rip-your-hair-out version was already too technical. And things have gotten both more exciting and more confusing in the last few years, with even the experts disagreeing about what should count as a “real quantum speedup,” or how much we should expect quantum computers to help with optimization or machine learning problems. And of course, if journalists are trying to sort this out, then they should talk to someone who knows a bit about it, and I lack the strategic false modesty to deny being such a person. Like, someone who calls me to fact-check a quantum computing piece should be rewarded for having done something right! Alas, these considerations are how I let talking to journalists take over my life, so I can no longer treat them as dispositive.
For journalists looking for what to do, my suggestion is to talk to literally anyone else in the field. E.g., look at the speakers from the past 20 years of QIP conferences—pretty much any of them could answer quantum computing questions as well as I can! I’m tempted to name one or two specific colleagues to whom everyone should direct all their inquiries for the next year, but I can’t think of anyone I hate enough.
Unrelated Update: There’s at least one striking respect in which a human baby is like a dog, cat, or other domesticated animal. Namely, these are entities for which you can look into their eyes, and wonder whether they have any awareness whatsoever of the most basic facts of their situation. E.g., do they “know” which individual person is looking at them? Whether it’s morning or night? Which room they’re currently in? And yet, as soon as it comes to the entity’s food sources, all these doubts vanish. Yes, the baby / dog / cat clearly does understand exactly which person is supposed to feed it, and at what time of day, and often even where the food is stored. Implications for the mind/body problem (mind/stomach problem?) are left as exercises for the reader.
Unrelated Update #2: As many of you have probably seen, the cruel and monstrous tax bill awaits only Twitler’s signature, but at least the PhD student tuition tax was taken out, so American higher education lives another day. So, does this mean academics’ apoplectic fears were overblown? No, because public opposition, based on widely disseminated information about what the new tax would do to higher education, probably played an important role in causing the provision to be removed. Keep up the fight.