Thanksgiving
I’m thankful to the thousands of readers of this blog. Well, not the few submit troll comments from multiple pseudonymous handles, but the 99.9% who don’t. I’m thankful that they’ve stayed here even when events (as they do more and more often) send me into a spiral of doomscrolling and just subsisting hour-to-hour—when I’m left literally without words for weeks.
I’m thankful for Thanksgiving itself. As I often try to explain to non-Americans (and to my Israeli-born wife), it’s not primarily about the turkey but rather about the sides: the stuffing, the mashed sweet potatoes with melted marshmallows, the cranberry jello mold. The pumpkin pie is good too.
I’m thankful that we seem to be on the threshold of getting to see the birth of fault-tolerant quantum computing, nearly thirty years after it was first theorized.
I’m thankful that there’s now an explicit construction of pseudorandom unitaries — and that, with further improvement, this would lead to a Razborov-Rudich natural proofs barrier for the quantum circuit complexity of unitaries, explaining for the first time why we don’t have superpolynomial lower bounds for that quantity.
I’m thankful that there’s been recent progress on QMA versus QCMA (that is, quantum versus classical proofs), with a full classical oracle separation now possibly in sight.
I’m thankful that, of the problems I cared about 25 years ago — the maximum gap between classical and quantum query complexities of total Boolean functions, relativized BQP versus the polynomial hierarchy, the collision problem, making quantum computations classically verifiable — there’s now been progress if not a full solution for almost all of them. And yet I’m thankful as well that lots of great problems remain open.
I’m thankful that the presidential election wasn’t all that close (by contemporary US standards, it was a ““landslide,”” 50%-48.4%). Had it been a nail-biter, not only would I fear violence and the total breakdown of our constitutional order, I’d kick myself that I hadn’t done more to change the outcome. As it is, there’s no denying that a plurality of Americans actually chose this, and now they’re going to get it good and hard.
I’m thankful that, while I absolutely do see Trump’s return as a disaster for the country and for civilization, it’s not a 100% unmitigated disaster. The lying chaos monster will occasionally rage for things I support rather than things I oppose. And if he actually plunges the country into another Great Depression through tariffs, mass deportations, and the like, hopefully that will make it easier to repudiate his legacy in 2028.
I’m thankful that, whatever Jews around the world have had to endure over the past year — both the physical attacks and the moral gaslighting that it’s all our fault — we’ve already endured much worse on both fronts, not once but countless times over 3000 years, and this is excellent Bayesian evidence that we’ll survive the latest onslaught as well.
I’m thankful that my family remains together, and healthy. I’m striking to have an 11-year-old who’s a striking wavy-haired blonde who dances and does gymnastics (how did that happen?) and wants to be an astrophysicist, as well as a 7-year-old who now often beats me in chess and loves to solve systems of two linear equations in two unknowns.
I’m thankful that, compared to what I imagined my life would be as an 11-year-old, my life is probably in the 50th percentile or higher. I haven’t saved the world, but I haven’t flamed out either. Even if I do nothing else from this point, I have a stack of writings and results that I’m proud of. And I fully intend to do something else from this point.
I’m thankful that the still-most-powerful nation on earth, the one where I live, is … well, more aligned with good than any other global superpower in the miserable pageant of human history has been. I’m thankful to live in the first superpower in history that has some error-correction machinery built in, some ability to repudiate its past sins (and hopefully its present sins, in the future). I’m thankful to live in the first superpower that has toleration of Jews and other religious minorities built in as a basic principle, with the possible exception of the Persian Empire under Cyrus.
I’m thankful that all eight of my great-grandparents came to the US in 1905, back when Jewish mass immigration was still allowed. Of course there’s a selection effect here: if they hadn’t made it, I wouldn’t be here to ponder it. Still, it seems appropriate to express gratitude for the fact of existing, whatever metaphysical difficulties might inhere in that act.
I’m thankful that there’s now a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon that Israel’s government saw fit to agree to. While I fear that this will go the way of all previous ceasefires — Hezbollah “obeys” until it feels ready to strike again, so then Israel invades Lebanon again, then more civilians die, then there’s another ceasefire, rinse and repeat, etc. — the possibility always remains that this time will be the charm, for all people on both sides who want peace.
I’m thankful that our laws of physics are so constructed that G, c, and ℏ, three constants that are relatively easy to measure, can be combined to tell us the fundamental units of length and time, even though those units — the Planck time, 10-43 seconds, and the Planck length, 10-33 centimeters — are themselves below the reach of any foreseeable technology, and to atoms as atoms are to the solar system.
I’m thankful that, almost thirty years after I could have and should have, I’ve now finally learned the proof of the irrationality of π.
I’m thankful that, if I could go back in time to my 14-year-old self, I could tell him firstly, that female heterosexual attraction to men is a real phenomenon in the world, and secondly, that it would sometimes fixate on him (the future him, that is) in particular.
I’m thankful for red grapefruit, golden mangos, seedless watermelons, young coconuts (meat and water), mangosteen, figs, dates, and even prunes. Basically, fruit is awesome, the more so after whatever selective breeding and genetic engineering humans have done to it.
I’m thankful for Futurama, and for the ability to stream every episode of it in order, as Dana, the kids, and I have been doing together all fall. I’m thankful that both of my kids love it as much as I do—in which case, how far from my values and worldview could they possibly be? Even if civilization is destroyed, it will have created 100 episodes of something this far out on the Pareto frontier of lowbrow humor, serious intellectual content, and emotional depth for a future civilization to discover. In short: “good news, everyone!”