In a recent post by Scott (see here or just read my post which includes his post) he listed topis that he conjectured would NOT cause an outrage.
I was going to write a long comment in his comments section, which would only be read by people who got to comment 100 or so. OR I could comment on it in my blog.
SO, here is his blog post and my comments on it.
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A friend and I were discussing whether there’s anything I could possibly say, on this blog, in 2025, that wouldn’t provoke an outraged reaction from my commenters. So I started jotting down ideas. Let’s see how I did.
1) Pancakes are a delicious breakfast, especially with blueberries and maple syrup.
BILL: Pancakes have a terrible ratio of health to enjoyment.
2) Since it’s now Passover, and no pancakes for me this week, let me add: I think matzoh has been somewhat unfairly maligned. Of course it tastes like cardboard if you eat it plain, but it’s pretty tasty with butter, fruit preserves, tuna salad, egg salad, or chopped liver.
BILL: UNFAIRLY MALIGNED. That's an interesting concept in itself since there are so many opinions on the internet there is not really a consensus on.... anything. My 2 cents: I like the taste of cardboard and hence I like the taste of matzoh.
3) Central Texas is actually really nice in the springtime, with lush foliage and good weather for being outside.
BILL: I WILL DEFER to Scott, who is now a Texan, on this one.
4) Kittens are cute. So are puppies, although I’d go for kittens given the choice.
BILL: PETS are a waste of time and energy. My opinion shows something more important: Scott and I disagree on this but we are not OUTRAGED at each other.
5) Hamilton is a great musical—so much so that it’s become hard to think about the American Founding except as Lin-Manuel Miranda reimagined it, with rap battles in Washington’s cabinet and so forth. I’m glad I got to take my kids to see it last week, when it was in Austin (I hadn’t seen it since its pre-Broadway previews a decade ago). Two-hundred fifty years on, I hope America remembers its founding promise, and that Hamilton doesn’t turn out to be America’s eulogy.
BILL: Agree. Also lead to the best math novelty song of all time, See here.
6) The Simpsons and Futurama are hilarious.
BILL: The cliche The Simpsons was better in its first X seasons is true, but it can still crank out and excellent episode once in a while. The episode Treehouse of Horrors: Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes (from 2024--Wikipedia entry here) is a microcosm of the series: Two okay satires of two okay stories by Ray Bradbury and then a BRILLIANT satire of Fahrenheit 451. (Spell check thinks Treehouse is not a word.I looked it up. The Treehouse of Horror episodes of the Simpsons use Treehouse. I googled Is Treehouse One word and got a YES. This is a rare time when spellcheck is just wrong.)
BILL: I think Futurama benefited from being on the air, then off, then on, then off, then on (is it on now?) since it came back with new stories.
7) Young Sheldon and The Big Bang Theory are unjustly maligned. They were about as good as any sitcoms can possibly be.
BILL: AGREE though again, some malign, some praise, some just watch it and laugh. I've had 5 blog posts inspired by these shows, and a few more that mention them in passing. I recently saw TBBT on a list of OVERRATED shows so someone must be liking it to cause it to be on that list.
BILL: In an earlier era it would be hard to watch every episode of a TV show since they were on once, and then maybe some reruns but maybe not. I've seen every episode of both TBBT and YS without even trying to.
8) For the most part, people should be free to live lives of their choosing, as long as they’re not harming others.
BILL: TRICKY- the For the most part causes arguments and outrage. Example: Helmet laws for motorcyclists. Should they be free to get brain injuries that the rest of society must pay for? I ask non-rhetorically as always.
9) The rapid progress of AI might be the most important thing that’s happened in my lifetime. There’s a huge range of plausible outcomes, from “merely another technological transformation like computing or the Internet” to “biggest thing since the appearance of multicellular life,” but in any case, we ought to proceed with caution and with the wider interests of humanity foremost in our minds.
BILL: I doubt its the biggest thing since the appearance of multicellular life. My blog on AI
here. I agree that caution is needed, though in two ways:
a) Programs are written that we don't understand and might be wrong in serious ways. (You can replace programs with other things.)
b) The shift in the job market may be disruptive. People point to that farmers stopped farming and moved to factory work, but there was an awful transition time. And the AI-shift might be much faster. Fortunately for me, ChatGPT is terrible and solving problems in Ramsey Theory. For now.
10) Research into curing cancer is great and should continue to be supported.
BILL: This one seems obvious but one has to ask the broader question: Which medical things should be funded and why? More generally, what should the government fund and why? These require careful thought.
11) The discoveries of NP-completeness, public-key encryption, zero-knowledge and probabilistically checkable proofs, and quantum computational speedups were milestones in the history of theoretical computer science, worthy of celebration.
BILL: Of course I agree. But the following questions haunt me:
a) What is a natural problem and do we spend to much time on unnatural ones. Even Graph Isom which seems like a natural problem does not have any applications (see my blog posts
here and a ChatGPT generated post on this topic
here).
b) Darling has asked me IF WE PROVE P NE NP THEN HOW WILL THAT HELP SOCIETY? Good question.
12) Katalin Karikó, who pioneered mRNA vaccines, is a heroine of humanity. We should figure out how to create more Katalin Karikós.
BILL: Cloning?
BILL: This raises the general question of how much ONE PERSON is responsible for great scientific discoveries.
13) Scientists spend too much of their time writing grant proposals, and not enough doing actual science. We should experiment with new institutions to fix this.
BILL: Also writing up papers and waiting for referees reports. A paper I submitted with students 3 years ago was accepted (Yeah) with many helpful comments (Yeah) but way to late to help those students get into grad school (they did anyway- Yeah). We had forgotten what we wrote and why we cared. (Boo) We did get the corrections done and resubmitted it. So I could say it will be out soon. But thats the weird thing-we posted it to arxiv's three years ago so its been out for a while.
14) I wish California could build high-speed rail from LA to San Francisco. If California’s Democrats could show they could do this, it would be an electoral boon to Democrats nationally.
BILL: This seems fine but seems like an arbitrary thing to want as opposed to other pairs of cities and other achievement.
15) I wish the US could build clean energy, including wind, solar, and nuclear. Actually, more generally, we should do everything recommended in Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s phenomenal new book Abundance, which I just finished.
BILL: You inspired me to recommend the book Abundance to my book club. This is the second time that's happened- I also had them read the Stephen Pinker Book Enlightenment Now based on your blogs recommendation.
BILL: Some of the problem is political and some is technical. I don't know how much of each.
16) The great questions of philosophy—why does the universe exist? how does consciousness relate to the physical world? what grounds morality?—are worthy of respect, as primary drivers of human curiosity for millennia. Scientists and engineers should never sneer at these questions. All the same, I personally couldn’t spend my life on such questions: I also need small problems, ones where I can make definite progress.
BILL: Indeed-I like well defined questions that have answers, even if they are hard to answer. The questions you raise are above my pay grade.
17) Quantum physics, which turns 100 this year, is arguably the most metaphysical of all empirical discoveries. It’s worthy of returning to again and again in life, asking: but how could the world be that way? Is there a different angle that we missed?
BILL: I can either have an opinion on this or defer to one of the worlds leading authorities on the topic.
18) If I knew for sure that I could achieve Enlightenment, but only by meditating on a mountaintop for a decade, a further question would arise: is it worth it? Or would I rather spend that decade engaged with the world, with scientific problems and with other people?
BILL: If that enlightenment includes obtaining a proof that P NE NP then sign me up!
19) I, too, vote for political parties, and have sectarian allegiances. But I’m most moved by human creative effort, in science or literature or anything else, that transcends time and place and circumstance and speaks to the eternal.
BILL: I find myself less interested in politics and more interested in math. Non-partisan example: I read many articles about who Trump will pick for his VP. Then he picked one. I then read many articles about who Harris will pick for her VP.Then she picked one. I WISH I HAD SPEND THAT TIME ON THE POLYNOMIAL-HALES-JEWITT THEOREM INSTEAD!
20) As I was writing this post, a bird died by flying straight into the window of my home office. As little sense as it might make from a utilitarian standpoint, I am sad for that bird.
BILL: If we could ,without to much effort, make this not happen in the future, that would be good. There were some suggestions for that in your blog comments.
