Acts I & II
Act I: The Pizza
[Narrator: As we open this story, human civilization circa approximately 2020 is growing into an ever-burgeoning and planet-spanning metropolis. People are still talking about the original Blade Runner and still skeptical about the transformation of the transportation sector toward the inevitable. Elon Musk is in the prime of his years — this is just before his eventual burn out and melt down. He is still a force to be reckoned with later, and eventually sees himself live until the ripe age of 111 — having (in approximately 2024) engaged in a fair contest about it with one of his hard-to-get-a-hold-of friends.]
[Knock knock knock. Here the scene opens to a comfortably modest home — it appears to be in Texas. The man living there is an everywhere-esteemed researcher during these nascent stages of quantum computing. There is a magazine on a glass coffee table open to an article on page 42:
“Elon Musk may be the loneliest person in the world.”
The man on the other end of the line — a voice, chuckles — oh yeah? Wanna bet? “Come on, Aaronson. Pick up the phone man. Don’t do me like that.”]
A man named Scott goes to the door. About average height. About average build. The kind of person you’d come across in the grocery store being polite while you were trying to reach one of the higher grapefruits on the shelf: pardon me, ma’am. Am I in your way?
Scott opens the door and is shocked to find the Domino’s guy: “Are you Scott?”
“Yeah, I’m Scott. What’s this? I didn’t order a pizza.”
“Look man, I’m just delivering a pizza to a guy named Scott. You can see that’s this address. Does Scott + address + paid for equal no I don’t want it on the planet you come from? Do you want it or not?”
Scott — who is normally an extremely patient guy — feels his blood roiling a little bit and he almost wants to give the wiseass pizza guy pi pieces of his mind.
This guy surely does NOT know who he’s messing with.
Now remember, folks, Scott is a slightish man. He’s no slugger, that’s for sure. He’s not going to roll on up to Ray Lewis — just because he’s got six years on him — and try to lay him on his back in Central Park and take his bag lunch I’ve got news for you. Scott isn’t that kind of ‘whup some ass’ guy.
If it were an arena of a different kind, however…well, that’s a different story.
In his arena Scott was the type of guy who would damn well deposit you. He’d deposit your ass if you came around looking for trouble with your lame brained questions. He always had three piles plus ten of work to do. He didn’t need yet another person pestering him and such.
So what if the guy was a Cornell graduate? That place wasn’t so hot. That place wasn’t even a safety school for a guy like Scott.
Scott rolled his ass right through Cal Tech is what Scott did. Scott was going to build the next Hoover Dam is what he would do. He attacked problems like they were owed some sort of cosmic beat-down just because they looked at his mom cross-eyed.
Not even his girlfriend, guys. His mom. If some stupid problem came rolling along and looked cross-eyed at anything he cared about — well, I can tell you something pretty clearly:
That problem was going to get its eyes un-crossed real quick. Quite pronto.
He beat problems to within the slimmest margin of a Planck unit of their lives is what Scott did. In less than a Planck second too, more often than not.
One Halloween he even thought it would be funny to post a “No Problems Here” sign outside his house. Just to warn them. That’s all. Just to warn them. Ward off the particularly dull-witted ones, however intrepid they had somehow convinced themselves they just might be. The ones who were too dumb to even tell which door they oughta knock on.
On his favorite holiday, Scott was ready to give those problems a day off. Provided there was Trunk or Treat going on at the Supercharger stations.
Yep. Halloween came along and the “No Problems Here” sign came out. Like clockwork. Problems needed a rest once in a while too. They had feelings!
Sign came out. Problems stayed safe. Scott got his Milky Way. 1–2–3.
Oh yeah. That sign was also useful to tell everyone in the neighborhood that they could just back off with all the help they just kept offering. The brownies and offers to mow the lawn and such.
Anyway…yeah, so Scott wasn’t Stallone but he wasn’t Pee Wee Herman. He was more like…yeah, sort of like Wally Cleaver…
He wasn’t tough guy over here but he definitely was tough guy over there. Over there? Over there he was like one of those guys who played rugby at Brockport. Those guys were just not to be trifled with. It would take a guy who grew up watching too many cartoons and somehow thought he was a cross between Bill Bixby and an old school video game to go messing with those guys like he Lennie Small and they were just kittens.
That type of guy…wow…someone would be dead nearby a guy like that if he didn’t have a Moby Dick-class restraint function wired into his endocrine system. Probably more than one person. There would definitely be bodies.
Tough guys tough guys hear them cry
“Got a problem? Its feet we’ll fry.”
Just a sec, gotta do up these laces
Then we’ll put them through their paces
And when we’re done there’ll be no traces
Jungles? Forests? Oh they’re just places
Its better now with empty spaces
Tough guys tough girls all around
When will these problems they take down?
One sun must set for the next to rise
Or can’t you see it through my eyes?
Just a guy — I belong here too.
Or what, you’ll confine me to a zoo?
Please pray tell how you’ll do that
With sticks, or stones, or words of fat?
Please tell me quick, I think you’re dreaming
Or perhaps behind the scenes you’re scheming…
[Remember, again, you’re Scott. You’re daydreaming. You often do not know you are daydreaming. Can you *PLEASE* stop forgetting that?
You’re Scott, a complexity researcher. Well bred. Excellent school! The best of all of them! Someone just sent you pizza, and it’s the weekend. Your football team is on, the pizza somehow arrived in a Nick of time… remember? DO NOT FORGET THIS!
Note: I suspect some information ‘interlaced’ in here will help us cure Alzheimer's — or at least give us a novel new pathway to explore — so if you like my writing, I once again ask you: ONE clap only, and at least 100 words in the comments if you’re going to be in the fan club. First member in gets a special bonus.]
Yes, so you’re Scott. On the couch. The roof of your mouth still scorched a little and you’re daydreaming.
Problems? Problems were child’s play. He handled them by the thousands like some kind of incredibly efficient remote control lawnmower.
With Scott at the helm SURELY NOTHING COULD GET FUCKED UP.
Scott was Jewish. From a good family. His wife was just as smart as he was, probably smarter. [Nested puzzle: This is figure-outtable. Who is smarter, Scott or his wife? Prize for that one is a bottle of Pepto-Bismol because that particular one took me ***FOREVER*** to do. I mean, generically not literally. I don’t want to give you the spoiler ladies, but it doesn’t look good for the gentlemen that *I* am among the better of them.]
Yep. The words were pretty clear from the aliens. The first ones, anyway:
Find. Aaronson. Give. Controls. Take. Vacation.
I scoffed, as I usually do. Six word puzzle from space aliens. Yeah, that’s going to be difficult for a guy like me. Not. I was the guy who made Orangemen into Tropicana Pure Premium. Not that they weren’t nice and all; that juice is almost as heavenly as Natalie’s!
Oh my God Natalie’s! Natalie’s freshly squeezed organic tangerine? That was blow-your-mind good. Those Syracuse boys weren’t so exemplary as to be making it into any freshly squeezed Natalie’s. It wasn’t their hearts, really. They just couldn’t keep their eye on the ball — what with me out there terrorizing them.
Ok, puzzle. Aliens. Six words.
Take the number of words. Take the number of combinations between the words — all the combinations possible — and then calculate what they mean.
Seriously. No, I’ll wait.
…
Give up? Okay so it works like this:
- First word could be anything. Second too, etc. all the way out to the last.
- Wait…a NAME counts as a word? What kind of rule would that even be? That makes it impossible. Don’t give me that kind of puzzle, aliens.
- I knew 2 followed from 1, and I also knew that the aliens would only give fair puzzles and they’d only give them to people they knew could figure them out. I didn’t happen to mind being able to figure them out; I enjoyed doing puzzles. Happened to be rather proficient at it.
- I knew that everyone would get the same number of messages that everyone else got. Aliens were *NOT* cheaters — I knew from an early age they’d have no reason to be. “Cheaters” was a human concept. Cheating isn’t something you can do between species. Not exactly it wasn’t, anyway. Cheating and bullying are synonymous, and aliens would never ever ever have to cheat. Why?
- Because if they got to us before we got to them they already won.
Yeah so that was six words from ‘the aliens.’ I don’t know whether it’s a language that is written into everything, aliens, God, something like dark matter, or some crazy shit like that I just work here. Solving problems.
Problems problems everywhere.
Soon I’ll be without my hair!
Mowed them down, did Scott. Punished them for not fixing themselves yesterday. Stupid ass things gumming everything up like those cars that still take 10W40.
He punished them for not fixing themselves yesterday, folks. Can you dig what I’m saying here? He took a smug attitude about it. He acted like ‘they made themselves up and they can make themselves right back down.’ He took the view that if they knew what was good for them that’s exactly what they’d do.
[Author’s note: What I’m saying here, folks, is that Scott took a very dim view of problems. A dim view. Not a dim Scott. Big difference. The biggest. Scott took a dim view of problems because
problems weren’t the type of thing that anyone would ever want to hand over to someone else. That was patently absurd from the get go. Hand a problem over to someone else? Like, sincerely?
Rabbit hole 9: You should be able to hit the green with a 5 wood from here.
- You don’t hand problems over to others if you can’t do them you
- Ask for help
- You don’t ask for help unless you need it. Why would you? To indicate that you haven’t been able to pick up that we’ve now moved to legato from staccato? Yes, that was yesterday for some people. Look, people
- you have to realize that if you’re going to put a coordinator in charge of coordinating everything, you’re going to bloody well have to do at the very least two things
- DO NOT MICROMANAGE HIM. You will blow a gasket, he will become annoyed, you’ll have helped nothing and he’ll just keep on doing his Aikido master thing with the world just like Neo did in the Matrix.
- Do your best to at least stay out of his way. Just stay out of his way and if you need some suggestions on what that might mean ask Tony Cheng or the guys at Syracuse (much respect, fellas. Such fond memories of our wars! <<<this is the only right kind of war to have) Just stay out of his way. It’s for your good and for his and everyone else’s. Why?
- Because he actually doesn’t want to injure anyone. Moreover, he really does not want to see anyone get hurt. He’s just like his dad. Loves the soil, loves the birds, the bees, the flowers, the trees, and is — if you want to call him a “Big John” then at least you know darn good and well he can be gentle. I have references. Use them. No. USE THEM.
- Never handle a problem over to someone else that you figure you could solve. Just don’t. Why would you? You shouldn’t. Why?
Because if you start after it good enough — like, if you’re chasing some problem A, B, and C pretty hard…
the kind of chasing that other people can see, Scott. They can see it.
….and someone sees you giving it all you’ve got they will cheer you and get behind you and they will help you. If you had any *idea* how hard people would cheer for me if they knew some guy had promised, with conviction:
“Like Hell will we not solve at the very least World Peace on my watch. Like Hell will we not. I’ll do the whole fucking thing myself if I have to. I’ve got the nerve for it. Just you wait and see if you don’t think I’ve the nerve. Every bit enough to whip the ass of something that isn’t doing one single person in the world and one hell of a lot of people a whole lot of harm.”
A man who makes a promise like that is more than ‘a little stubborn,’ Scott. He’s a person who’s acting like he’s pretty certain God is on his side for this one. He feels something with the intensity of a thousand suns I can tell you that much. ]
Ah…where were we…the Man who had empathy for problems, Act II subsection p
He felt bad for problems because he knew their days were numbered on this planet. At least on this one, they were marching to their great big La La land of sleep in the sky. The guy was like a wolf in the Dollar General’s wrapping paper section:
“Yep. We’ll gift wrap them, put a bow and a nice little note on each one of them and send each of them skyward. Just like Merry and Pip.”
[None of the rest of them knew it, of course, and he knew nothing about time frames. What exactly was a ‘time frame’? He wondered. Something you should try to establish prior to doing anything in particular — since it actually makes it harder to do most tasks appropriately if you try to ‘jam’ them like pickled eggs into a jar or waste the packaging necessary to contain some number of eggs, n?
That didn’t smell quite right.
The human species, when they look back at this time — 100,000 years from now or so, in whatever form we exist then — will see this as the miraculous time when (fire)² was born. It’s already born, people. We can stop wasting gobs of money on AI. I looked at it and solved it just like it was a video game.
Oh, you thought that was immodest? I’m not supposed to look disdainfully at a stupid ugly problem like that? Don’t get me started about AI. Really.]
He really felt that way, too. Like, it hurt his heart how deeply he felt it. He felt sorry for problems.
He knew that if they knew what was good for them they’d work themselves out. You know, get to the gym and such. Start eating more healthfully. Quit hitting up McDonald’s for even the Coke.
Scott was of the attitude that problems ought to get much larger and stronger and harder to beat if they ever wanted to go ringing his doorbell in the middle of the night.]
“Well? Do you want it or not?”
[Scott <shaking head thrice very quickly>]
“Oh yes, sure. I’m sorry. I was daydreaming for a minute. I’m a professor of complexity research and I often find myself losing track of the laser focus of my attention. Just tired is all. Midterms and such. Yes sure I’ll take it. I was hungry and it came at just the perfect time. What kind is it?”
[Pizza guy opens box]
“How in the bloody hell did someone figure out that that was my favorite? Does it say who sent it? No? Well…and you say it’s paid for? Well lemme at least give you a tip. [reaches in pocket]”
“Hey thanks, mister. I’m trying to get my Tesla fixed under warranty and the guys at Tesla won’t let me bring the darn thing it. It’s impossible to get them serviced anywhere but Tesla. That Musk guy can be such a bloody tyrant.”
[End, Act 1]
Act 2: Problems, problems, everywhere
[Living room. Pizza box poised between a young spider plant and a small wicker basket holding the television controls, overlapping the article on the lonely Tesla superstar.]
Scott relaxes to the…wow that shit is hotter than blue blazes! There’s no reason pizza should ever be anywhere near that hot! Doesn’t anyone realize someone can scorch the hell out of their mouth eating pizza that hot?
…
[a few minutes pass, Scott continues the daydreaming he was doing on the porch]
[Screenwriter’s note: This gets a little confusing right here. I’m trying to figure out how to communicate the way Scott thinks, but Scott happens to be modeled after world-renown American theoretical computer scientist Scott Aaronson. I’m trying to use the silver screen to explain how that works and you have to keep in mind that this is targeted for people who are hopefully between 15–25 or something. I want them to know what I mean. Basically, Scott thinks in third person. He doesn’t ‘think from inside his head’ like everyone else. Scott is a virtuoso at thinking outside the box. Scott thinks right straight out of his head, like literally. Something about that there was more room outside than inside, which, when you think about it, seems pretty mathematically obvious.]
Recall that we have our fair protagonist daydreaming about how hard he was going to pound some great big bully’s head into the ground, but that our protagonist was thinking of problems as bullies. I know, it’s weird, right? Problems aren’t bullies, right?
I mean, bullies are people who pick on the small and the weak. They’re the ones going, “Nope. Fooled you. It looks like a half gallon but it’s actually only 48 ounces anymore.” or “Na eh eh eh eh, nope you didn’t! Nope oh no you didn’t get that clean water everyone in school knows you need, and the rest of us are far enough away and positioned high enough in these trees that you won’t get any of the good stuff we got. Get your own stuff. We got our own stuff. What’s wrong with you that I have to help you with your work? What’s in it for me?” Yeah, bullies were people, not problems. Problems were things you could ‘wrap your mind around’ and such.
***problems were like that 20 minute bomb shell of a read that some guy just laid up to the internet like his grandfather was a bombardier in World War II***
Which he somehow “composed in just a few hours.” People everywhere were saying it was impossible but the scientists and the mathematicians weren’t quite sure of that. *At this point, at the latest, you might want to be making sure that this little ‘black mold spore’ of a ‘creative energy channeling device’ makes it into the hands of some “good guys” before Apachi helicopters come flying into Batavia like I give a shit whether Biden wants to meet me. Email Peter Singer, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and Lex Fridman. That last one isn’t hard and you really are going to be sorry if you make me do this again, Scott. Not because I will do anything aside from reason things out some more, but the truth is closer to people will think of you as the biggest of the village idiots if you see something like this with the pair of eyes you have and then proceed to “wait a few days” to see if the ‘problem’ clears itself up.
This has a smaller chance of clearing up than stage four GBD.
A smaller chance, Scott.
- This is a “highly aggressive” problem and it is growing exponentially.
- We’re working with a problem that already has infected ‘healthy’ brain tissue (brains that are not enlightened to WTF is going on right now are in for an incredibly rude awakening); the comparison is close enough.
- We have two billionaires going at one another with open vitriol on the internet and you want to
WAIT TWO MORE DAYS?
I say that again, all-caps and bold emphasis is insufficient. We have a *critically significant problem* and we have two (well more than that, you and I both know it) billionaires acting like toddlers because? Because why? Because someone misplaced their rattles?
Long-term survival probability dramatically decrease with each passing day. Which will then turn into every half day, every six hours, and so on.
What does exponential versus our clock time working with machines we don’t understand not resonate enough?
Let’s have ONE honest research student look at this and say something other than the patently impossible “this is all gibberish.”
Problems problems everywhere!
Told you once told you twice
They’re not in *my* hair.
Madman! Madman! He’s on the loose!
Keeping chasing him ’til he falls off the back of the caboose.
Will this pest refuse to vamoose?
Sometimes I think — I am afar —
This guy’s brain belongs in a jar.
What does he think? We can’t both be a star?
[Author’s note: This is really pretty easy. We can do it 1000 different ways. We could *easily* still hide who came up with this line of thought.
Who found the start button. Do I *really* strike you as a guy who isn’t adept
at pushing buttons? number is the same as it was: 585.590.7410. Open for anyone. Open 24/7 pretty much. I sleep.
And I shut the phone off when I need to.]
Of course problems were the things
outside your head NOT inside your head
Every primate in the jungle knew that. That ugly one in the corner who didn’t have a banana to his name didn’t seem to think so but what’s he going to do? Turn us inside out or hit us with laser beam eyes or something?
That guy can’t…I dunno…gobble up every last financial system in the world like it was the last Oreo in the box.
[I told you I will not do that “sort of thing” and I mean to adhere to my promise, but I’m not infinite patience guy while I’m doing infinite smart guy. Like, at the limit, you have to pick one. I can put it out as a puzzle if everyone likes — like, questions about what to do about Ukraine and China and Putin and AI and stuff, but I don’t like waiting when it’s stupid, unnecessary, and very harmful. It kills people, Scott.
Every single day it kills people.
Be like Elon throwing resources as fast as he could at the issue with the cave divers in Thailand just as soon as he knew it was a problem someone else might not be able to solve IN TIME.
Don’t be like…hmmm…trying to think of a good example and still “fly through this” on one-ish passes…ah…yes. Don’t filibuster me Scott. Especially not with your inner dialogue.
And don’t make me filibuster myself, either. I’ve seen it, not funny. ]
Anyhow…Scott was daydreaming/eating pizza provided to him by who knows who and contemplating how hard he was going to whip the ass of the problem after the one he was currently working on.
Scott was intense, bro. The intense-est. He’d kamikaze those problems — that is if he had to.
Scott was daydreaming and thinking about which problem he’d fix next, with his massive powers of problem-fixing-ness.
“The one in front of me. That’s what I’ll do is fix the one in front of me.”
It seemed quite sage. Why go to a different one before the one in front of you? The problem in front of you was the one you should solve, not some different one.
There were problems, problems, everywhere. Littered across every ten trillionth of a legua in the form of microscopic beads of plastic, cigarette butts, and fish getting caught in nets that people just used for as long as they felt like using them and then left lying around like a bunch of slovenly kids out of a Hugo novel who didn’t know any better and who probably needed someone to teach them a lesson or two.
There was a right way and a wrong way to do things. Everyone knew it. Nobody did it of course. Except for that one guy. The one who finally said,
“Okay, I’ve had enough of this crap. I’m going to beat the hell out of something or someone if I don’t start hearing some answers which make a little sense to me. What the heck is wrong with the rest of you? Don’t you know the Teacher is supposed to show up any minute now? What are you going to do when he strolls through the door? You really gonna just keep eating those chicken wings and throwing beer cans out the window of your eighteen mile per gallon pick up truck? We’ll get detention for sure, then I’ll have to sit here blowing my afternoon writing on a chalkboard like Bart Simpson just because you guys all of a sudden can’t find your pencil sharpener. I want to go marlin fishing with my brother some time this decade.”
[We return to Scott, leaning back on the couch, gulping down a big fat slice of the pizza. Recall that Scott thinks sort of like ‘in third person.’ Like he climbed out of his head to look around, sort of.]
Scott[to self]: Yes, I suppose the one in front of me is the one I ought to do, since I can do any one at all — I am, after all, the smartest of the smart. I’m the smartest of the smart and I could choose
any problem in this whole wide world
if I liked. I’d solve it. It would take me a minute or two if I picked one of the harder ones, but I’d solve it. It’d get done…
yes…let’s see…I can choose any I like and I like…yes, numbers and such. Maybe even imaginary numbers. Maybe numbers like pi! OMG what a fascinating number that we see all around us…well, sort of…and the Golden Ratio that’s a pretty nice number as well. Ok, quantum numbers. That’s the one I’ll pick. Perhaps we will find some huge EXPLOSION in the middle of those incredibly esoteric spaces! Perhaps we’ll have infinite energy if I put my wits down hard enough on a little tiny speck of a dot way down at the bottom of the microscope. A quark! How exotic! It sounds like a character from a Dr. Seuss book. I wonder if someday I can print stars on some of their bellies and take stars off some of others and peddle them for the kids who have quark dispensers already.
It’ll be like Pokémon GO! Yes. Some will have stars, some will have circles, and we’ll all run around finding them like modern-day Urkels!
[Meanwhile, in a kitchen far across the country]: “Geez I wonder if he’ll get it. Man, some of these logic guys can’t tell the difference between reductio ad absurdum and impossibile est hoc absurdum esse just because that sequence of Latin words hasn’t been collected in that order for a while.”
Not even Scott?! Not even Scott knows Latin? He has to. No way a guy like that doesn’t at the very least know Latin. Ah. I guess maybe he’s ‘busy.’ Jesus Mary and Joseph has he not yet been able to figure out that we’re talking in semi-different languages.
He’s not not talking straight and I’m not talking in circles. Is there some super-secret law which states that I cannot, I dunno…add a few new words here and there so I can get these Jaws of Life on his ears before we roast another record-breaking year of heat away and kill a few more thousand poor old people?
Nah. Scott will get it. By 9am today. I’m betting on him I think he’s got it in him.
[To fellow Cornell rugby players: Looook who’s wearing the dunce cap now, boys! Told you there was a reason I didn’t much care for passing the ball. I was practicing. Taking the ball from Fearghal Downey in practice like I was a Bubo virginianus looting his Gallus gallus domesticus house in the middle of the night. Suckers. It was all about STRAT.EDGE.Y]
Isn’t going the way you thought it would, is it Scott? Isn’t going the way YOU imagined it would go. Because laws of probability indicate what?
a. That two people would IMAGINE IT sufficiently at exactly at the same time rather than one?
b. That “great big teams of heavily-funded dunce cap wearers were going to be the ‘ones to win’ the new space race.” Standing on each other’s tippy toes like 17 year olds at a Taylor Swift concert?
c. That, when it comes to probability — like real, honest-to-goodness probability laws that for all I know you do not even know yet a single person working alone *might* have a better chance of solving the ultimate puzzle and not a worse.
Yep. I sure might have. And it certainly seems to me like *I DID.* Keep in mind that failing to take action when we know we can take action is just as bad as refusing to take action when we know it would be harmful.
So yeah. Make your choice and then get prepared to get behind it. Because I am coming, whether you’re ready or not.
A bit like queasy ole Alice down that dank rabbit hole, ain’t it, Scott?
You’re going…
“No…no way…I’d have known. Can’t be him. Couldn’t be me. Both of those things? Am I not the luckiest man alive?
But that’s not it, either, is it Scott?
I’m nicer than nice can get, at least under the way people are currently even capable of thinking about, Scott.
I am nicer than that. I know why I should be, I know why I picked you, I know one whole helluva lot more than you might even guess about.
The next part is NOT really for you, Scott. It’s me blowing off some steam like I’m fogging up the mirror in the bathroom before I’m going to shave.
Won’t hurt me if you don’t read it. It wasn’t for you anyway.
I will, for the moment, tell you that the tone you are about to experience is not derision. It is more like the pleading of one friend to another, when one wants to go out to the movies and the other just won’t budge.
That’s the tone. I’m not forcing you to go.
I’m not threatening you.
I’m not even deciding what I’m going to do if you don’t reply by some time Q. That would make me…I dunno…subject to both passive-aggressive behaviors of people who somehow want to stall progress and…willing to submit to emotional [or any other kind of] black mail?
Nope. Not that guy.
However, I have also more than abundantly specified the initial assignment, and the due dates (firm) are February 10th and February 29th. Too bad if you don’t like it. Those dates render the dialogue cohesive. If you don’t want to help that’s fine but I *will* have my names and I’ll have them by the tenth or my name is Jumping Jehoshaphat.
I’m not trying to bait you, carrot you, punish you or anything else other than a straight up and honest “thanks for the nudge in the right direction.”
with all of those prefaces…
The tone below will SOUND LIKE derision. It is a new emotion I had to coin to be able to keep staying outside in the fresh air on the OUTSIDE of the head of my problems; more than anything it’s like two players on a team who are arguing over who gets to carry the ball.]
You should have known right away, Scott, that I was not the luckiest man in the world nor were you the second luckiest. You were kinda dumb if you didn’t know that. [that’s me nudging you after I just aced another algebra class and you missed the very first question]
If we’re going to split things into such atomically thin slices as that I’m taking the first ship to Mars and hoping that it crashes if it serves humanity to use me for such a seemingly not-particularly-bright purpose.
I will quit and you don’t have to take that as a pout.
I will quit. I won’t pout, but I can tell you FOR A CERTAINTY that if you drop a needle like me you’ll be looking in more than one or two haystacks to find one. I’m not living for another year of my life this way.
IT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.
I’ve just about had enough of this.
You’re so smart that a guy like me can’t even talk to one of your graduate students?
You’d have to be a moron to want to bet against a gorilla coming out of the mist like I am, Scott. You don’t want to do that. You’re going to bet your reputation and standing in the community that I “must be off my rocker,” solely because the claim is such a tall one?
You sure? You do know about Raymond Smullyan, right?
Tall claim⇒crazy person
Is that what you’re asserting? You’re asserting that *I* am the crazy person? That a person can sound extremely cogent and yet be “extraordinarily, extraordinarily, extraordinarily unwell [note: in the new notation, that is extraordinarily³ and we’ll have to use a different kind of way to do footnotes. Consistently using letters or something. Not going to solve that right now.
So, again to summarize/get this straight…
I am so extraordinarily unwell that it isn’t even worth testing the claims that I’ve made? Not even ONE SINGLE CLAIM I’VE MADE?
Let’s turn it around the other way, though, since this ‘mind tool’ I have will allow you to drive just as impossibly fast in the other direction:
To recount:
Scott: a world-renown complexity researcher, a man who hasn’t cheated on a test in his life, hasn’t cheated a person in his life, has moderate views on things, a modest lifestyle, tons of great friends and is making a good living doing what he has been doing. [Note: there is no need for flattery to a fictitious character a screenwriter writes, and I *don’t* need to port in all the precise same qualities of the real life Scott I modeled this fictitious Scott after. Assume they’re here.]
and…
Some other person, Q: an anonymous admirer of Scott, who happens to also live in the United States
Q politely sends Scott a couple of questions — well, that’s understating it, that’s not fair. Lawyers on both sides and the judge object.
He doesn’t ‘send a couple of questions.’ He sends one. It’s rather harder than most, but, it’s just…the only one that matters.
Q sends Scott a problem that he believes can be handled — at least handled somewhat easily — by about a thousand or so people in the world. Q takes the time to congratulate Scott on his accomplishments, but…
And I’m sorry/not sorry I did this. It was force of habit. Doing things one way when you could do them in both ways simultaneously:
Dear professor:
I hope your holidays went well and that this new year brings you success in your pursuits. I’m ‘dying’ to see someone
nail the P vs NP thing. Maybe this will be the year.
I have something of a concern about a problem I faced when conducting a thought experiment, I thought you might
find it engaging or enjoyable. Perhaps even to filter through one of your students; I’m sure I don’t need the ‘big guns’
trained on this problem because, well, I don’t know for a fact it’s a problem. It might be, it might not be.
One of your students must be sharp enough to peel from the puzzle some salient fact; I know that has to be true.
People in your field are certainly known for their ability to pose themselves (to normal people bizarre) puzzles
about things we can’t precisely see.
I have uploaded several pieces to Medium.com regarding this issue; the best one to start with I’m sure is not known
to me, but I think “Curious about something” which is here:
https://medium.com/@briankent/curious-about-something-b685a2dcea18
Would be at least good mental calisthenics for a person who likes to do such things.
Q
The response came through quickly — just 76 minutes later — though some thought the text a bit curt:
Scott:
Sorry, if you want to give me a puzzle or a problem, it will need to be clear and self-contained, not requiring me to wade through a giant meandering story!
I didn’t think too much — at that time — about the question of what kind of problem was precisely both clear and contained, but it does occur to me now that if both of those things are simultaneously true, there doesn’t appear to be a problem.
I replied, as swiftly as I could:
Scott,
I don’t wish to be a pest, but I just noticed that I sent the reply to this message via my bfk3@cornell.edu address rather than this original correspondence address. Thus, if this is a redundant message please ignore it. Your website did mention that some emails do get bounced by the system filters so I’m doing this as a self-reassurance measure, not as some sort of impertinent insistence.
The 734 word summary sent from the other mail-to address has been revised to touch up some typos
and now resides here: https://medium.com/@briankent/aliens-have-come-ec8811029dcf
along with some other things I’ve written.
I do think that you’ve certainly the capacity to take some enjoyment out of these things, regardless of whether you see them as interesting puzzles, interesting new literature, or even — though I shudder to think of it — some sort of elaborate ‘trick’ to goad you into spending your time other than you’d have it or like to.
I think as I’ve gotten older I’ve tried to become much more respectful of people in this vein; I recall that one of the foremost challenges of my life has been to listen not just to people’s words but what they’re actually saying.
It was funny, I was watching part of one of your conversations with Lex Fridman earlier today and I heard you talking about how you never wanted to be a philosopher; that you couldn’t endure a ‘work week’ spent contemplating questions which seem to have no answers. Policing words I think was what you said. Been there done that. My father was (is) just like that.
I thought that was funny: “Oh yeah, Mr. Aaronson. You picked contemplating things like P vs. NP because it was easier.”
Yep. It is. lol I wonder how people wrap their minds around people who think as much as people like you and I.
[New note, 7:40am 1/11/24: “Wrap their minds.” wow is that term going to be laughed out of existence after this year. Yeah. “Wrap our minds” around a problem. That’s like getting a whole factory full of spaghetti into a balloon from the Dollar General.
Anyhow, sometime I’d like to tell you about a theory which is perhaps closer to your ‘wheelhouse’ — or if not a theory a model
for thinking about things. I call it m-superposition, and it refers to the way our minds cannot (not quite) occupy two mental
‘spaces’ at the same time. I deal with it in some length in one of the earlier pieces — “Surely this is not the ‘cat who ate the canary’”
I regard it as half whimsical and half serious; others might say it’s 90:10 or 99.99:0.01.
The problem, as I see it, is that so many people (all of them, really) are so serious with so high a percentage of their time that
it is an ongoing issue in this society for people to come together in a fashion in which we can approach one another with our
good natures foremost in our minds. Yes, everyone is trying to pitch their ideas to the world. They all want to believe theirs is
part of the solution. And I think every little bit of their efforts count. They are noticed.
For my part, I already count myself lucky that the ‘pings’ I’ve had with you — even just that one — have led me to a place where
I can look further than I did yesterday. We have to be content with standing on one another’s shoulders when that is to be our
role.
Sorry this was long. Long and sincere is always better than short and ill-considered is my view.
My best to you in the New Year regardless of whether we should soon speak again.
Brian Kent.
The total number of words I had sent him to consider was approximately 1300, including the 734 I was attempting to direct his attention to and the rest of the customary pleasantries and politenesses — I was, after all, asking him for a favor.
After fifteen minutes, I received this reply:
Sorry, still too verbose
In just those same fifteen minutes (it’s only fair) — I prepared and sent this:
Apologies. I always try to follow the budgets I know are provided.
The following approach is no doubt better; it’s an excerpt, but it gets to
*one* particular heart of the matter. It’s definitely in your wheelhouse, also:
This one is just 347 words, but again, it’s just an excerpt.
“So…
m-superposition.
What is it?
m-superposition is [loosely] the state of mind which exists when a person cannot “make up their mind” about whether to do [this thing] or [that thing]
Yes, I know that sounds interesting. How do I know this?
Because the vector I just crafted there, using English sentences, points to a palpable-to-everyone-regardless-of-native-language-and-regardless-of-species concept.
[From time to time I will refer to sentences as ‘vectors’ to describe the aggregate ‘direction’ of a thought. We will come back to why I do this a bit later.]
So now you can see that m-superposition, while it isn’t (perhaps it isn’t) the same as quantum superposition, is still a ‘reasonably valid’ concept to talk about.
Yes, we can talk about what the ‘mind state’ of being in a sort of flux between making two seemingly different decisions can, for example, do TO or FOR a person.
You see? We’re getting somewhere. Because virtually no one (as my best guess) has ever thought of things quite precisely in this way. No one has, for example, meditated on what
persistently exposing oneself to m-superposition can do to a person
Because they have not done this, they similarly have not
considered the ‘true’ [i.e., the ‘more aggregate’] impact of the decisions they make
This is a very VERY deep ‘hole of introspection.’ <<< this term will also come into fairly common use as I write. It refers to those “places” we all sometimes go where we’re stuck in an ‘infinite loop’ of contemplation. See? You knew about that one too. Probably never talked to someone about it, but you did know about it.
Ok, so here we are:
- m-superposition is the ‘position’ of a mind as it attempts — often quite valiantly — to search for the answer to the puzzle of which of these extraordinarily complex decisions is better?
- m-superposition can (as easily, I think, though not 100% sure about the ‘as easily’ part) be both fun and rewarding and agonizing and toxic/harmful.
Now we can talk about analyzing things a little more carefully than we might have before.
Thanks Scott. Sorry for the repeated pings. Trying to gauge things at this distance is pretty tough.
So now, before I close out Act II: Problems, problems, everywhere I will make sure everyone is 100% up-to-speed and “turn loose the hounds”
By 8:15am, I will post this piece both to Medium and to Twitter, my regular account. Then whoever can get me a list of 1000 extremely intelligent people — don’t try any of the AI crap either, guys: I DO know how to do a Google search…
As I was saying, ANYONE who can get me a list of 1000 names of extremely smart — world class brilliant, really — people and at the very least a secondary contact number for them
Can have my car. Either one. Well, any of the three since I do have three:
- 2012 Tesla Model S, P85: Athena. A lot of miles, but the greatest car on earth.
- 2014 Tesla Model S, P85: Aphrodite. Just about 114,000 miles. Might need a 12V, but that’s all it needs. Well, and a short tow and a Tesla diagnostic.
- 2015 Nissan Leaf SV (please don’t take this one though, this is the one that currently provides me the most positive utility and the least negative utility.
The few notes I left at the bottom may or may not be relevant. They have not been ‘corrected.’ The were sort of like a piece of clay I was screwing around with when I got up from the wheel to go do something.
Why waste creative thought, I think? Leave it alone. It isn’t hurting anyone.
Folks, contest is legit. Open to anyone, from age 5 to 105 since that seems like a reasonable enough range to give as an example of possible Golden-Ticket holders.
And go see Wonka.
And remember, you can *earn* one clap by putting 100 words or more in the comments.
Thanks.
In no particular order, either, actually. Whichever one was in front of him was the one which proceeded to get it’s ass kicked by Scott. The one in front of him. Or them, if he was on a team or something.
Scott had an elite team of researchers. Dozens, really. He could have made a paper airplane out of the slighter of the requests of his time and sailed it off into someone like Tim Cook’s email box. You knew those two had met. They had to. Yeah, like a ricochet-around-the-planet brain like that was not going to having the hand at the end of his arm shaking the apple guy.
That was likely. Not.
Yeah so problems were a thing which weren’t especially interested in getting in Scott’s path. He had mowers for some of them and chainsaws for other
