Quantum Dominance, Hegemony, and Superiority | Hacker News Reader

Quantum Dominance, Hegemony, and Superiority

scottaaronson.com

72 pointsweinzierl53 comments

Pinker also talks about the "Euphemism Treadmill", where words that were specific medical terms turned into general insults and became unusable because of it ("spastic" in my lifetime has gone from a medical description, to a playground insult, to being effectively unusable, a non-word).

We'll see the same happen here. As "supremacy" becomes unacceptable, other words will rise to describe the same phenomenon, and then they'll become unacceptable, and we'll rotate gradually through ever-more-complex words and phrases to describe things.

I'm all in support of reclaiming words. If we use "supremacy" for lots of other things, then its association with racists fades. Giving them sole use of such a useful word seems to be letting the bad people win, somehow.

I always find myself having layers of skepticism about this stuff.

Layer one: come on. Context matters. Do people really freak out about words in isolation that resemble words in unrelated sentences? That's silly.

Layer two: Do people really do that? I know a lot of very left-of-center "woke" people (of various kinds) and I never hear this kind of thing. I have never heard someone get offended at a "slave" database or "quantum supremacy" or even "male" vs "female" plugs. People I know seem capable of parsing context and know that if I talk about a male connector going into a female connector I am talking about plugs and not gender politics and there is no additional subtext intended.

Maybe I just don't know these over-reactive people who are incapable of parsing complete sentences, discerning context and subtext, and detecting social cues.

... or maybe these people are largely a figment of the reactionary right ...?

I can't tell whether that's the case because this is just not a thing I see in my slice of the real world. The whole "based" vs "woke" reactionary right vs histrionic left flame war seems like something from a parallel universe that I don't inhabit, a universe where the human brain never evolved the capacity to parse language in units larger than two words.

Huge shrug...

All I do know is that there are better things to do than care about any of this stuff.

In my own anecdotal experience it's very few people and even then they are each only particularly offended about some rather specific subset of words. They just happen to be very vocal about it and then they usually have some cadre of people who don't particularly care about the word/phrase, but get upset that you upset someone in their group. I also seem to encounter this much more often within academia than business. The internet tends to amplify things, especially twitter.

That said, I was recently discussing a legacy instrument control setup with a customer (GPIB based) and was discussing the master slave controller and they got agitated with my wording. Eventually I realized what was going on and we switched to Main/Secondary and everybody was happy. I'm never going to pick an ideological argument with a customer especially when there is actual work to be done, but I got a private laugh later because Master and Slave were embossed on the connector name plates.

> it's very few people

> They just happen to be very vocal

> The internet tends to amplify things, especially twitter.

Yeah, that's kind of what I suspected.

I suspect you might realize that people reacting to words out of context might be dealing with trauma. It’s not so simple as discounting people’s reactions as the inability to finish reading a sentence. Is it really that much effort to say master and agent instead of master and slave?

> We'll see the same happen here. As "supremacy" becomes unacceptable, other words will rise to describe the same phenomenon, and then they'll become unacceptable, and we'll rotate gradually through ever-more-complex words and phrases to describe things.

Why it happens is important. Each new 'word rung' on the euphemism treadmill is a signaling device we use to separate the 'good people' from the 'bad people.' It's a way that people compete socially.

Don't look at the phenomenon, look at the forces behind the phenomenon. The velocity of the treadmill rises and falls with the amount of social competition in a culture.

> Pinker also talks about the "Euphemism Treadmill", where words that were specific medical terms turned into general insults and became unusable because of it ("spastic" in my lifetime has gone from a medical description, to a playground insult, to being effectively unusable, a non-word).

Thanks for posting that. I've seen many occurrences of this pattern in American English, but I never hard a name for it.

The choice of the example "spastic" is interesting for two reasons. First, it seems to be an exception among the trajectories of a constellation of related medical terms. Second, because it shines a light on some of the better ways that we've actually come to use these terms (as opposed to how their usage is conventionally perceived by those in a fever about PC run amok).

To take the first point, consider the originally medical terms "idiot," "moron," "imbecile," and so on. These were formerly used to describe degrees of mental disability in a medical context. I don't know for sure if the normative overtones were present in their original usage (Overtones that say, for example, "The person so labeled is sad, and/or unfit, and/or undesirable."), but I would be surprised if these terms were really as purely medical and otherwise neutral as terms like, for example, "Parkinsonian syndrome," "tremor," or "fracture," & etc. Their trajectories seem to have ended, for what seem to be contingent historical reasons, in their medical disuse and rhetorical popularity. "Trump is an imbecile," "Jim Jordan is an idiot," and so on. These bits of invective have entirely lost their medical denotative senses and function almost entirely rhetorically and connotatively, to wide acceptance. IOW, from medical description, to insult with continued medical usage, to being effectively ubiquitous as insults with not medical denotative sense. Interestingly, and contrary to the OP's assertion of the state of usage, "spastic" absolutely continues in medical usage. It refers to conditions that cause spasms, or to conditions and organs that are affected by spasms; the term "spastic colon" should put one's mind at ease on this point, if less at ease in certain other aspects.

In exploring this first point, and in considering the related terms "retard" and "retarded" that have gone through trajectories that have gone on to wide opprobrium, I'm not so sure we can really condemn this as PC run amok. This leads to my second point. It probably was very difficult for people with those constellations of conditions labeled as "retarded," people who were reduced to their diagnosis by being called "retards," to move about in a world where those terms carried the explicit weight of being used to insult people's worth and intelligence. "You are retarded. Shut up and feel your unworthiness, preferably away from me, because you are unpleasant," is really what is being said. "Not you, [or your relative]. They're one of the good ones [or they're not so bad]," probably did little to salve those wounds. In this regard, I feel that the trajectory of usage from medical term to vulgar insult to effectively unusable word results not from PC run amok, wrecking the language before we have a chance to cope, but rather from compassion and kindness working all too slowly against needless cruelty and defensiveness of long habit within the public consciousness to a genuinely better state of affairs, with the minor cost that some people get too wound up about protesting those words, and others getting too wound up about having the height of their robust expressive powers snatched away by the zephyrs of fashion.

> I'm all in support of reclaiming words. If we use "supremacy" for lots of other things, then its association with racists fades. Giving them sole use of such a useful word seems to be letting the bad people win, somehow.

I'm not sure that this is precisely how reclamation usually works. Reclamation is, historically, work undertaken at some cost by an oppressed group to take some the venom out of a term used to oppress them. Two prominent examples come immediately to mind: "nigger" and "queer." In the first case, reclamation of the n-word by black people in America entails not only at least tacit approval of its use within black communities and among black people, but a near prohibition of its use among white people--meant to insure that care and thought are used before engaging with the term--due to its history as a tool of oppression, and its continued present-day use as a term of oppression. "Queer," among non-cis persons, has had a trajectory that has landed similarly, but with much less strict of a prohibition against its use within the dominant in-group. (I suspect the difference has to do with the prospects the two communities have of "passing" within the larger culture; everybody knows you're black, and we don't need to look too long in the news to find heartbreaking examples of discrimination, the tip of that iceberg, only, being revealed to us in lawsuits against banks, workplaces, and the like. Gay people can at least pass, and are therefore perceived otherwise as diverse as, or not as diverse as, the general population. More, therefore, is too be gained from a conciliatory, even welcoming, set of rules around the reclaimed word.)

The contrast with "we" reclaiming "supremacy" should be clear. Numerically, to the extent that HN is US-centric, and more so to the extent that HN is tech heavy, "we" are white. Here, "supremacy," in its denotative sense, is about a normative schema that holds "us" as being deserving of the top position socially and economically. How much "work" are we going to have to do to "reclaim" this word? And to what end? We're just going to use it, from behind our keyboards, so that...other stupid people on the Internet know that we're the boss of us? It seems hardly worth getting in an uproar over.

What is worth talking about, without perhaps descending into an uproar, is this conventionally simplistic idea that "they are taking all our words from us because they are white knights compensating for their guilt or frailty." That idea, I hope is apparent now, largely functions reflexively to try to undo the real language work that has been done by minorities, the disabled, and their advocates to build a slightly less demeaning and fairer world (for us all, ultimately). If it means I have to say "Quantum Spiffiness" instead of "Quantum Supremacy" (HINT: It doesn't.), then I'm all for that kind of PC thought control run amok. The cost is clearly worth it, because I can get a job, and a home loan, and can walk down the street without suspicion of being a criminal, and everyone should have that opportunity; if I could remedy all those injustices by simply leaving a few words out of my vocabulary for the rest of my life, or if I could even help make the world a slightly better place by just being cautious and thoughtful with my usage, then sign me up.

> The contrast with "we" reclaiming "supremacy" should be clear. Numerically, to the extent that HN is US-centric, and more so to the extent that HN is tech heavy, "we" are white. Here, "supremacy," in its denotative sense, is about a normative schema that holds "us" as being deserving of the top position socially and economically. How much "work" are we going to have to do to "reclaim" this word? And to what end? We're just going to use it, from behind our keyboards, so that...other stupid people on the Internet know that we're the boss of us? It seems hardly worth getting in an uproar over.

A few things pop up for me with this:

1. the USA's obsession with race is, I agree, distorting this. In my world, "we" are the non-racists, and "they" are the racists. It doesn't really matter how many of us are what colour, because, well, we're not racist. If we're not able to fight racism because we're the wrong skin colour then that fight is already lost.

2. I think the amount of work is purely "hmm, shall I use this word now, or shall I let the racists have it exclusively for their use? Oh yes, I shall decide to use it in a non-racist manner so the bad people don't win". I think (as TFA proves) that it's actually a lot more work to not use a word because it's not politically acceptable any more.

and your final point: yes. That's what we're all working towards. Skin colour being irrelevant to opportunity and quality of life. But I totally fail to see how not using "supremacy" as a word helps with that goal. How, exactly, is saying "quantum spiffiness" (excellent idea btw) instead of "quantum supremacy" doing anything, at all, to help remedy the USA's obsession with race?

I suspect that using "quantum spiffiness" is more intended to signal to other people that you are not a racist. This is good, but you could just wear a t-shirt. It might be more productive.

> perceived by those in a fever about PC run amok

Careful with 'run amok' you might be calling a non-Western culture's deeply spiritual phenomenon a mental disorder.

The “canceled” nature of the word is overstated, especially since it was never primarily literal to begin with, and using “supremacy” in social situations has been verboten my entire life (born in early nineties).

Also as someone pretty deep into twitter outrage culture, I don’t see anyone mistaking “quantum supremacy” for dog whistling: this is just a PR department at work. Nature editors are far more to blame here than culture.

That said “supremacist” is pretty dead, which I am fine with.

agree, there's a huge difference between "supremacy" and "supremacist", and the latter is definitely a label for the bad people.

Oy ve, if you're going to get upset about names, please get upset about the Standard Model particle names, which are a dumpster fire. The problem is that a tiny group signals outrage on behalf of a much larger group, and sensitive, empathic people like Aaronson take the bait.

This just doesn't matter, Scott. Protecting others from outrage is a fool's game, because you will always (always!) lose. Outrage is NOT a signal that someone has been harmed; 99% of the time outraged offense is a signal that someone's ego is getting fed that sweet sweet nectar of negative, powerful emotion.

Honestly, if you just wrote another post about how QM is a very natural consequence of the reality of negative probability, instead of this post about nothing, the world would be a better place.

> Standard Model particle names

Which names are you talking about? Nothing comes to my mind.

Color charge. Nothing to do with color. Quarks: up/down, top/bottom, and...charm/strange? Mediating particles are gluons, photons, and...Z Boson and W Boson. I personally dislike composite category names like 'hadron' and 'baryon', although they aren't as bad as the others.

It's a dumpster fire of names that makes learning the stuff far harder than it should be.

This is just an endless cycle. Any language is going to need a word that roughly corresponds to "supremacy." If the word supremacy didn't exist, white supremacists would have used some other word like "white dominance" so then we would be having a conversation about banning the word dominance. But then, the language is still going to need to have a word meaning "better than everything else" so we will just end up creating a new word. And then maybe that will get used in some unsavory context, so we ban that word. And so on and so forth.

This exact cycle is happening after we banned the term "mental retardation." Now you hear people, who would have called someone "retarded," calling people "autistic." Pretty soon we'll have to ban the word autistic. But we'll still need a word to describe people with what we currently call intellectual disability. It will never end. The banning of words and the creation of new words to replace them.

Words have no meaning outside of the context they are used. They're just phonemes or character strings without context.

I think that [x]-supremacists don’t use the label for themselves. It’s usually applied to such groups as a descriptor by people who watch those groups like law enforcement and civil groups who monitor groups that espouse those ideologies, but I’m not sure the groups in question use those words to describe themselves.

Yes, you've hit the nail on the head here. Some of them will refer to the "white power" movement, a term which they appropriated from "black power". Because if "black power" is OK, why not "white power"?

This is the thing that drives me absolutely bananas about the Left: they think they're so smart, but they don't even understand what game they are playing, and as a result the Right runs roughshod over them simply by being masters of the language. How could any reasonable person possibly object to, say, "making America great again"?

Because it implies America is not as great as it used to be when for a vast majority of minorities and women, it’s never been better.

And here you have walked straight into the trap. If you are an uneducated white male who has been unemployed since the steel factory went under, the economic ascendancy of women and minorities is not a measure of the country's greatness, it is a symptom of its moral decay. Our infrastructure is crumbling. Our military is impotent. Our factories are shuttered. Why? Because of affirmative action, which propels people into positions they are not competent to hold simply because they lack a Y chromosome or have dark skin. It's such an obviously stupid policy. It amplifies incompetence, and today we are paying the price.

(Please note: this is not my point of view. I'm channeling the Right simply to demonstrate how their rhetorical techniques work.)

It’s not really effective in my opinion because for someone to gain power, someone’s got to give up some and no one wants that. So it’s going to have to be a continuous battle.

For a vast majority of minorities and women, it’s never been better regarding sex preferences and racism. Which are a part of life, but not 100% of it.

It still worse off for a vast majority of people (including minorities and women) in many areas - financially, loneliness/lack of community, ruthless commercialism, neglected towns/infrastructure, rising healthcare/education/housing costs, shitty work conditions, etc.

You can be both black (and better off as black) or gay (and better of as gay) and still be in a shitty job, in a broken community, in dire financial situation, worse neighbourhood, etc compared to people in previous decades.

I think an issue is a difference or dichotomy in perceived symbology.

For many people it means progressive economic growth and certainty. For some people it’s negatively interpreted as a return to regressive social policies.

For most people (but not all) elections are about pocket/kitchen table issues.

Anti/globalization is about the impact on household economics, primarily (a minority about wealth transfer, pollution and other secondary issues.)

To be fair, you need an argument from the outside for your second point. It requires an understanding of fascism to recognize that "make America great again" is a fascist resurrection myth. Classical liberals get caught up on the idea that it's reasonably-phrased and worth debating; neoliberals get overfocused on economic metrics and ignore social implications. Word games are hard.

> Word games are hard.

Yes. But playing them well is often necessary in order to be effective in today's world. This is the problem with the people complaining about "quantum supremacy". They don't even realize that they being played because they don't even realize that they are playing a game. They think they are doing the somber work of Serious People. They are wrong.

>It requires an understanding of fascism to recognize that "make America great again" is a fascist resurrection myth

Well, way before fascism was even a thing countries had great periods and bad periods. Wanting to make your country back great has little to do with fascism - even if it was one of the 100+ slogans the actual fascists used.

If only that was what Hitler was after, to merely get Germany back up, instead of e.g. take over neighborhood countries, exterminate the jews and other minorities, stifle free speech and politics, etc...

> people with what we currently call intellectual disability.

You’re a bit behind the times, we call those people “differently abled” nowadays. (Or maybe there is a new word and I’m “retarded”).

An important note, from the comments to OP's post:

> The original title of the letter was the rather tame “Quantum advantage – call to the quantum computing community to rethink its language”. It was changed to the provocative title [Supremacy is for racists—use 'quantum advantage'] by Nature editors for unknown reasons, and then changed again to its current form [Instead of 'supremacy' use 'quantum advantage'] when the signatories complained that it had been changed without their consent.

[clarifications added]

Quite disappointing obviously, assuming that the commenter is correct. As an aside, why not just call it "quantum wokeness" and be done with it? As in, the event where the research community first becomes "woke" to the empirically-proven distinctiveness of quantum computation.

Much ado about nothing.

Do we really have to change every bit of jargon which someone gets offended about?

> Do we really have to change every bit of jargon which someone gets offended about?

Yes. By the way, please stop using "bit" immediately; it sounds way too much like an obscure French word that I can't even tell you the meaning of, because lots of people here would get offended if I tried to.

White knighting is a technique applied by members of the oppressor class to further marginalize the oppressed by dismissing their lived experience and distracting from issues that matter to them while feigning sympathy.

Publicly and energetically opposing white knighting on the terms the white knights set is a technique used by the oppressor class to marginalize the oppressed by distracting from issues that matter to them.

No one expending any significant energy on either side of this debate about the social appropriateness of “quantum supremacy” is doing anything but active harm.

To the extent there is a cancerous performance, it's two-sided, and either side pointing to the other as the problem is just part of the show.

I've never heard this. A decade ago "white knighting" had a very different meaning on 4chan. It was used to make fun of Anons that shit on the rampant misogyny and tried to get other Anons to stop being misogynistic, and also "white knights" were people pushing for things generally socially progressive on the site.

It actually used to have a decent population of far left than far right, but now it's known only for being far right.

Crazy to see the term completely 180.

> A decade ago "white knighting" had a very different meaning on 4chan. It was used to make fun of Anons that shit on the rampant misogyny and tried to get other Anons to stop being misogynistic

That was actually derived from the older meaning the term has had for decades of, roughly, to borrow some relevant phrasing from the article here “performative wokeness by those outside of and detached from the interests group being superficially advocated for that marginalizes the actual group being superficially served”. It either originated or became most prevalent in feminist circles (which is clearly where the 4chan use you refer to, which doesn't seem to be so much a redefinition as a bad-faith application, came from.)

Advocating for some minority group's interests (white knighting) is oppression, but opposing white knighting is also oppression? Seems like a no-win situation for the so-called "oppressor class"

> Advocating for some minority group's interests (white knighting)

White knighting has the same relation to advocating for a minority groups interests as mansplaining has to serving women’s educational interests, and for the same reason: it involves substituting an outsiders preferences as to what the interests of those notionally served should be for their actual interests.

Here's a viewpoint from John Preskill who coined the term "Quantum Supremacy"

https://www.quantamagazine.org/john-preskill-explains-quantu...

> The quantum supremacy milestone allegedly achieved by Google is a pivotal step in the quest for practical quantum computers. I thought it would be useful to have a word for the era that is now dawning, so I recently made one up: NISQ. (It rhymes with risk.) This stands for “noisy intermediate-scale quantum.” Here “intermediate-scale” refers to the size of quantum computers that are now becoming available: potentially large enough to perform certain highly specialized tasks beyond the reach of today’s supercomputers.

I prefer the term "NISQ Era" (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum)

Way more descriptive. Provides a flavor for the immense challenge of building 100+ qubit computers that can run for a long time, and discovering real-world applications beyond generating random strings.

"Ascendancy" et al imply the day has already arrived. When in fact there is a chance it may never come. Or some other paradigm may pop up and intercede ;)

Cultural overtones aside, this reminds me of how qualifiers that describe the comparative or absolute superiority of some technology or process are inherently fragile and do not always age well. Things with words like "very", "ultra" or "extremely" in their name are sort of hopelessly bound up in their own time period. There are many papers (mostly from the 90s) that refer to ULSI instead of VLSI, in the mistaken belief that we had now moved beyond the adverb "very" to qualify large scale integration to another era that could only be described as "ultra" large scale integration. Moore's law made these updates seem kind of silly and it seems like we all just stuck on VLSI.

Interesting. Although to be fair, in this particular case, the qualifier does make sense, exaclty because it is a one-time event. It means "the first time we build a Quantum Computer that is capable of doing something a classical computer isn't capable of, thereby proving it really is Quantum, thereby proving Quantum Computation can really happen in our universe". It really is a one-time event to prove a specific hypothesis.

Did anyone complain that "the Bourne supremacy" was about white nationalism?

"quantum wokeness" would be perfect :)

Sometimes 'makes you feel unwelcome' it's something people must get over. Taking responsibility of ones feelings emerging in a completely neutral context is the minimum we can expect.

An obnoxious (but arguably also hilarious for the spectators) response is to stop using such words completely.

So, stop talking about quantum supremacy. But also stop talking about white supremacy. If you find the need to talk about that, call it white advantage.

Stop talking about master/slave databases. But if you have occasion to discuss the pre-civil war southern economy of the US, use "leader" instead of "master" and "follower" instead of "slave".

A comedian could probably turn that into a pretty good stand-up bit.

“ I’ve heard “quantum ascendancy,” but that makes it sound like we’re a UFO cult—waiting to ascend, like ytterbium ions caught in a laser beam, to a vast quantum computer in the sky.”

Brilliant! Will join...

Google seems to have decided to stick with “Quantum Supremacy” given that’s the terminology they used when announcing their work [0].

I think it’s here to stay at this point.

[0] https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/10/quantum-supremacy-using-pr...

Google's paper came out in October, before the fuss about the term supremacy. This post by Aaronson is from today (19th of Dec.). The Nature letter referenced in the post was from the 10th of Dec.

I'd argue the signatories to that latter are exercising what has become known as "Kolmogorov Complicity," (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...)

The simple question is whether one recognizes the standing of the critics, and the legitimacy and sincerity of their criticism. It's whether the term, as they say in a typically passive voice, "must be contextualized against ongoing issues of neocolonialism," - by whom and why?

If you accept the policing of language based on exogenous criteria, you therefore accept the authority of those police in the material content and direction of the discipline.

However, their criticism isn't about reason, it's about politics, and mistaking the latter for the former was what we will look back on as the fatal naivety of our institutions.

do dominant alleles next

Quantum Singularity

The whole supremacy word choice was hugely unfortunately. Chatter about politics and wokeness is the last thing a young field needs.

>this performative wokeness is a cancer

Haha. Definitely stealing that line for the next time some SJW irritates me.

Let's not forget that "computer" was a job mainly done by women. The name "personal computer" is telling, just look at the games from the era when PCs were new, to understand what was in the mind of those privileged teen males. It is not surprising at all that now the same people come with "supremacy", a word which could be easily replaced by "slowness challenged".

Since you like my comment, then why not go further. A computer, any computer, is just a blank slate. This is a matter of nature vs nurture, in computer language: a matter of programming. Good programming practices is all we need...

OK, now, what is this subject anything else than massive stupidity?

It bothers me to no end whenever I hear any leader describe the world in black and white terms like Aaronson does in this post:

>"I will seek to use this awesome responsibility to steer the ACM along the path of good rather than evil."

Even if this is partially in jest, it betrays the worst of "you are either with us or against us" kind of a mindset. A leader who thinks that they are on the side of good while the opposition is on the side of evil is incapable of reaching reasonable compromises. Such leaders are morally immature and fail at basic empathy needed to steer an organization that encompasses many people with diverse viewpoints and agendas. These leaders are prone to totalitarianism, trying to making everyone in their organization fall in line on the "side of good".

LOL.

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