My most rage-inducing beliefs

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.
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.
3. Central Texas is actually really nice in the springtime, with lush foliage and good weather for being outside.
4. Kittens are cute. So are puppies, although I’d go for kittens given the choice.
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 it 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.
6. The Simpsons and Futurama are hilarious.
7. Young Sheldon and The Big Bang Theory are unjustly maligned. They were about as good as any sitcoms can possibly be.
8. For the most part, people should be free to live lives of their choosing, as long as they’re not harming others.
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.
10. Research into curing cancer is great and should continue to be supported.
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.
12. Katalin Karikó, who pioneered mRNA vaccines, is a heroine of humanity. We should figure out how to create more Katalin Karikós.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.