Grading Trudeau on quantum computing
scottaaronson.com
scottaaronson.com
In terms of traditional metrics of performance, Trudeau was heavily outclassed in leader debates during the last election. He demonstrated almost no ability to address questions directly and instead resorted to pre-rehearsed sound-bytes for nearly everything, often on topics not even tangentially related to what was being discussed. His inability to stay on topic actually let the encumbent PM off of particularly vicious hooks on more than one occasion. However, those sound-bytes sounded great when taken out of context and chopped up into bits for news broadcasts, even if they were somewhat baffling to the very few people who apparently tuned into the full debates and paid attention to how well answers addressed questions. That election probably lowered the bar for quality discourse in Canadian politics by quite a bit. Next election, everyone is going to be talking in sound-bytes. We might as well just have debates on twitter, you know, "because it's 2019" or whatever the year will be.
Ever since the election, Trudeau hasn't stopped campaigning. Vogue photo spreads. Dining at the white-house. Touring the country. While the previous PM was almost a shut-in, Trudeau is tireless in his press appearances. It's almost as if somebody else is actually running the country and he's, well, distracting the public's eye.
When pressed, Trudeau does have a tendency to promise the moon to just about anyone though. He's been racking up unfulfillable promises left, right, and center. No doubt he left Obama with some pretty wild promises too. This could eventually come crashing down on him but, for now, the honeymoon is still going pretty strong. Most Canadians love having a glamorous PM and the international attention that brings. Would HN be upvoting this story if it was Stephan Dion or Stephen Harper trying to teach QM?
In fairness he's actually been doing reasonably well on his promises, as tracked by the TrudeauMetre[1]. Off the top of my head, unmuzzling scientists, restoring the long form census, and legalizing marijuana are all big contentious points that are either done or seriously underway. Given the abysmal promise-to-result ratio of typical politicians he's earned a passing grade in my books.
And as I said, the Harper government's attitude to refugee claimants was just disgusting. This is what Harper's Minister of Immigration had to say when the Ontario govt defied the federal government's decision to reduce health care for refugee claimants:
"I've expressed our government's disappointment with the Ontario government's recent decision to reinstate health-care benefits to all asylum seekers and even rejected refugee claimants," Alexander said.
"Simply arriving on our shores and claiming hardships isn't good enough. This isn't a self-selection bonanza, or a social program buffet."
It's embarrassing that our government would demean and deny refugees their human dignity while they are asking for help.
[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/chris-alexander-scolds-ontar...
So he's already broken 6.8% of his total promises just 1/8th of the way through his term. That's not good. He's also broken just over half as many promises as he's kept, which I'd say is pretty darned typical of politicians.
Legalizing marijuana is in progress, but I've heard nothing concrete. Unmuzzling scientists and restoring the long form census were both good. Reversing the transparency act was bad. I was most interested in his promises to increase government transparency, but some are reporting it's actually worse [1]. He also promised in an interview with Peter Mansbridge to reduce the concentration of power in the PMO, but he's done nothing about that so far.
We're just an eigth of the way through his term, so the jury is still out in my opinion. He's done some good, some bad, but at this point he's still mostly just a bundle of promises.
[1]http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thehouse/preston-manning-s-prescript...
Sadly that's not that bad. For example you can check Ukraines MP's promises[1]. It's in Ukrainian, so yellow is WIP, green/red are self-explanatory and black is total.
[1] http://www.slovoidilo.ua/ratings/persons/parliament/all/inde...
So, keep in mind that while that promise may be 'technically broken', they pretty much did what they said they were going to do.
it didnt work.
i would expect a Canadian leader to be visiting the white house for dinner, as do many political/country leaders. i would expect him to be going cross country trips as thats what every PM has done.
"Would HN be upvoting this story if it was Stephan Dion or Stephen Harper trying to teach QM?" no, as i expect the press to never ask them that type of question and never being in a situatiton to be asked that type of question.
i personally dont care for trudeau and what mostly the press brings up about him, i do however support some of his policies more so than any other candidate.
most people voted liberal in their riding as Justin Trudeau was not Stephen Harper and the Conservative party, and was more of a free thinker compared to the other options.
everyone was tired of Stephen Harper and his policies that i would say set canada back on the world stage... canada was just a lacky in the shadow behind the USA, following along most actions.
every political leader makes promises and dont fulfill, that IS politics... but as some has pointed out Trudeau has a decent track record so far.
As for the conservative attack ads, they're no different than the attack ads any of the other parties typically run. Do you remember the "We can't trust Harper, he's from neocon Calgary and has a hidden agenda!" smear campaign from the election before last? It was so effective they didn't even need to run it during the last election. People wonder why Alberta typically doesn't support the Liberal party, but demonizing the province as a means of vilifying a leader is one big reason why that's the case.
Trudeau did rely relatively less on attack ads than his opponents in the last election, which I approve of. However, the rise of PAC's with funding from god knows where does make it suspiciously easy for parties to run attack ads on the sly without fear of blowback. Whether the Liberals funded them or not, there were plenty of attack ads against harper during the last election. I'd like to see PAC's regulated much more strenuously in the future. In particular, their donors need to be a matter of public record.
We upvoted Singapore PM Lee Hsien Loong's sudoku solver[0], and he can hardly be described as being from the left.
Similarly, Rand Paul gets a lot of love on HN for his anti-surveillance and drug law reform stances, while Democrats like Clinton and Feinstein are criticized on crypto, and Obama on drones, prosecuting whistleblowers & crypto again.
I'd like to think that a large part of the HN community place issues and evidence above politics.
Presenting a technical subject at just the right level of sophistication for a given audience is an invigorating intellectual exercise.
I don't think the limiting factor here was the intelligence of the audience, given that he was presenting at the Perimeter Institute.
That being said, I agree completely on your first point, and it's incredibly refreshing to see a politician make an effort to learn about a technical subject.
As the PM, his audience is always far larger than those in the immediate vicinity. Not to mention the gaggle of non-technical journalists who were there.
Strictly speaking, I think he was reviled because the rescue attempt came late and didn't work. He made a joke within the last year - when announcing his cancer diagnosis, I think - about how he'd have been reelected if he had sent a few more helicopters on that mission, and that that would have been a mixed blessing for him personally. Both points were true, I think.
(no idea why you were downvoted)
One of the better presidents was William Henry Harrison; didn't last long enough to mess things up.
Most of the nuclear fission stuff that is simple enough that you might hope to analyze with back-of-the-envelope QM has so much energy that it tends to act like a classical particle of negligibly short wavelength (but not enough energy to bring QM back into the picture by QED creating new particles upon collision). And while there is probably various quantum mechanical stuff deeply involved in a power reactor in one way or another --- e.g., electrical conductivity tends to involve band theory, and water is often used as a working fluid and at a fundamental level its thermal properties depend on stuff like hydrogen bonds --- I doubt it was helpful for a naval nuclear reactors guy to try to analyze things at that level in the middle of the last century.
Adm. Rickover [0] certainly set the standard with personal vetting of nuclear offices, but with the stakes of a reactor mishap being so high, who can really blame him?
Contrast Adm. Rickover's tough stance with the managers in charge of the shuttle program [1] that led to STS-51L Challenger disaster.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...
"Kennedy was fascinated by the Zeus debate, especially the way that scientists were lined up on diametrically opposed positions for or against the system. He commented to Wiesner, 'I don’t understand. Scientists are supposed to be rational people. How can there be such differences on a technical issue?' His fascination grew and he eventually compiled a mass of material on Zeus which took up one corner of a room where he spent hundreds of hours becoming an expert on the topic. In one meeting with Edward Teller, Kennedy demonstrated that he knew more about the Zeus and ABMs than Teller. Teller then expended considerable effort to bring himself up to the same level of knowledge. Wiesner would later note that the pressure to make a decision built up until 'Kennedy came to feel that the only thing anybody in the country was concerned about was Nike-Zeus.''
I mean, it'd be great if our leaders all had a better understanding of STEM but Herbert Hoover was an engineer and it's wife's accepted that his economic policies deepened the Great Depression.
You'll find plenty of Physics students with whom you can have an advanced policy or philosophy discussion, but I've never met a Policy or Philosophy student with any Physics knowledge.
While we don't know if he was prepped or regurgitated a paragraph, he probably has the faculties and interest to have a general understanding of what he was talking about. Oftentimes it's easier to actually learn something than to cheat convincingly.
[1] Article is in french, sorry. http://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelles/politique/2012/10/01/00...
So what's the reporter's next question? "When will Canada start dropping quantum bombs on ISIL?" =(
I find it surreal that such a thing needs to be done, as if science has not proven its worth time and time again, but here we are.
In any case, it's not about the politicians' knowledge - it's not Trudeau's job to know about QC - but how the public's .
https://mobile.twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/721407108852...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE
He was mocked more at the time for the email bit, namely the idea that the reason why he didn't get his email for 4 days was because of people streaming videos on the internet.
However, it's not clear that he had a good understanding of the analogy himself (I'm sure that revisionists like Mr. Blow, who do understand how the internet work, can justify it, but it's not Mr. Blow's understanding that we're interested in here, as Mr. Blow is not proposing legislation to block Net Neutrality). In addition to the email bit, he seems to believe that the internet used to be a point to point communication network, whereas now the "industry wisely provided streaming, in effect, a kind of long distance, which is what we've got now". Given this, it's really not clear at all what "it's not a truck, it's a series of tubes" is supposed to clarify.
Now, if Mr. Trudeau was using his understanding of Quantum Computing to justify a large government subsidy of DWave, there would be good cause to look at this throwaway quote in more detail.
I always assumed that was distinguishing between "quantized" and continuous network systems. That is, adding one more load to a truck ("just dump"ing something on it), one more person to a bus, doesn't make the roads any more congested, but trying to send one more gallon of water through a pipe system will slow it down or add to the queue length.
The internet, then, is more like the latter, in that every piece of information carries some opportunity cost to sending, rather than being a bunch of trucks with spare, underutilized capacity.
If you actually forced an additional gallon of water into a pipe, you make everything flow out faster.
"I say something about how a QC is a proposed device that would solve certain specific problems much faster than we know how to solve them today, by taking advantage of quantum mechanics, which generalizes the laws of classical probability.
Then I talk about how you’d never talk about a -20% chance of rain tomorrow, but quantum mechanics is based on numbers called amplitudes, which can be positive or negative or even complex numbers.
And how, if an event can happen one way with a positive amplitude and another way with a negative amplitude, the two possibilities can “interfere destructively” and cancel each other out, so that the event never happens at all. And how the state of a QC with (say) 1000 bits would have one amplitude for each of 21000 possible settings of the bits—an astronomical amount of information, if one wanted to write it down classically, for example in order to simulate what the QC was doing classically.
But about how, when you measure the QC’s state, you just see a single random output (with its probability determined by its amplitude), not the gargantuan list of possibilities. And about how the goal, in QC, is always to choreograph things so that the possible paths leading to each wrong answer interfere destructively and cancel each other out, (say) some having positive amplitudes and others negative, whereas the paths leading to right answer reinforce.
And how this is a very weird and specialized capability—it’s not nearly as simple as “trying all the answers in parallel” (if you did that, you’d simply observe a random answer), nor is it just a smaller or faster version of ordinary computing (a QC might even be “bigger” or “slower” than an ordinary one; all the hoped-for advantage comes from the QC’s ability to create interference patterns).
Finally I talk about how a QC is known to give huge advantages over any known classical algorithm for a few tasks of practical importance (quantum simulation, breaking almost all the crypto used today…), and it might also give some advantages for broader goals like optimization and machine learning, but that’s an active research topic, and if the advantages exist they’ll probably be more modest and/or specialized."
> the person asking the question probably works for Trudeau and Trudeau had previously memorized the whole quantum explanation just for this video.
and after reading an article about this claimed that:
> Trudeau had actually learned the definition of quantum computing that very morning before this conference and admitted to the fact.
Source: https://www.facebook.com/boeree.liv/posts/1092245874166258?c...
P.S: I didn't mean to be snarky. Any politician that educates himself to even appear smart , instead of trying come off as anti-intellectual "joe six-pack" or simply a spin master (see: Trudeau's predecessor) is progress to me.
He was talking like he was well-versed in the subject, when he had really just read some cliff notes.
He came across as an intelligent and funny politician who had made the effort to at least develop a modicum of understanding for something he's funding. Nothing more and nothing less.
"Fake it 'til you make it" is an individual endeavor, not a mantra that the leaders of a populace should embrace, I assume.
Clearly it was rehearsed and staged, but like others said, I'm just impressed he made an effort to and was able to learn and regurgitate this information.
After the last Canadian PM took a hatchet to non-energy sector science funding, this and other recent trips to science centres like the McGill Neurological Institute, is about bridge building with the Canadian public.
> > the person asking the question probably works for Trudeau and Trudeau had previously memorized the whole quantum explanation just for this video.
The question was asked by a pool reporter from The Canadian Press (that's not a generic description, it's the name of a private news organization).
> and after reading an article about this claimed that:
> > Trudeau had actually learned the definition of quantum computing that very morning before this conference and admitted to the fact.
He said he was excited he had had a chance to learn more about quantum computing that morning while touring a quantum computing research institute to announce $50 million in funding for quantum computing.
How dare he display a modicum of intellectual curiosity and learn enough about the topic to explain it to a fellow layman along the way /s
This is a rather silly conspiracy theory.
Edit: in defence of completely missing the joke, I can only offer that I haven't had coffee yet today
> One could also compare against Obama’s 2008 answer about bubblesort, which was just a mention of a keyword by comparison.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2009/jul/24/bacteri...
If current understanding holds, no, bacteria has no standing chance.
If you like to read about this kind of problems: Many of Scott Aaronson's other post are about the limits of efficient computation. If you are interested especially in the limits of alternative approaches like protein folding, analog computing and anthropic computing I can recommend "NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality"[1].
I believe technical competence is uncorrelated to adminisitrative effectiveness.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Hsien_Loong
I don't. Many Asian nations (including Singapore, China, etc.) are largely governed by engineering majors and I do believe this has been helpful for improving administrative effectiveness. This stands in stark contrast to countries where governance is dominated by either lawyers (the US) or military members (many other developing nations).
Law and politics warp your view of the world because everything becomes a subjective, debatable matter of opinion.
Politics is especially dangerous because the definition of a successful argument is one that increases your power. Facts are tangential at best, distracting and unwelcome at worst.
The corresponding problem for people with STEM backgrounds is a lack of understanding that this is how politics works. If your approach is based on facts, model-building, and reality testing, it's incredibly easy to be blindsided by a career politician - or career manager - who only cares about public opinion, and is perfectly prepared to lie professionally if they make more money and/or gain more power from it.
I have found this disturbing view among many of the bay-area programmer friends I have - that life is a cut-and-dry game in which the losers in life deserve nothing - which I do not agree with. The animosity that the programmers face as a community in SFO may be down precisely to their view of others.
Plenty of STEM majors appreciate soft virtues and are large-hearted. In fact, I'd argue that lawyers are far more likely to see the evil in everyone (it's practically their job_ and to be oppose to mercy.
Our last two presidents have professional degrees from the same institution (Harvard) and they do not govern in the same fashion in most areas other than counter-terrorism. China also doesn't choose it's politicians via elections, thus someone who is highly technical and let me stereotype here for a second... most likely not charismatic and/or having developed a sense of political empathy... facets that a lawyer or career manager (MBA) are more likely to develop, would be able to move up in the ranks (in the CCP in this case).
However, this doesn't really reflect on HOW someone chooses to implement policy or govern, comparing China vs U.S. is apples and oranges because you can't legitimately protest the CCP, this isn't the case of the major parties in the U.S. Thus the policies will be molded to some extent of popular opinion, which is normally not true in a dictatorship.
However, it extends far beyond the head of state. All levels of government in Chinese government are dominated by engineers instead of lawyers or career politicians.
> However, this doesn't really reflect on HOW someone chooses to implement policy or govern
Of course it does. We even have a word for it: technocracy. There are dramatic differences and if you don't think that then I'm curious why you delved into perpetrating negative stereotypes about engineers.
On my somewhat poorly worded point about engineers on average being less interpersonal than a typical lawyer/mba. I don't view such attributes negatively; my intention was to point out that engineers' day-to-day jobs don't normally involve work oriented social interaction with people they don't know(i.e. someone other than their team). Putting it another way a lawyer/manager without strong interpersonal skills has a lower career ceiling than an engineer with personality trait. Thus it isn't unreasonable to assume said fields attract different types of people. Thus governance being a partial function of what subject someone opted for in school would in my opinion act as a very small variable in contrast to why X person choose said subject.
> Of course it does. We even have a word for it: technocracy.
It's an apples to oranges comparison if it's China(or Singapore) vs. the U.S. The governments of the former don't have anything close to real representation for it's people(More China than Singapore), thus the policy makers don't have to seriously consider popular opinion outside of keeping the populace from revolting, which is a far cry from the American system where an individual politician can be unseated within a short time frame.
Indeed.
It's important to keep in mind that a technocratic leader will likely not do well or have effective results in a political system dominated by lawyers (as Hoover shows).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Merkel#Early_life_and_e...