Someone claiming to be the “cartoon guy” showed up at Woit’s blog to explain himself. He’s an edgelord Reddit atheist, the type that we’d ban tout de suite after he leaves one slur-filled comment that we delete.

Effective altruism has more than its share of critics. But Peter Thiel, the billionaire cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, is unusual in that, when he describes us as the “Antichrist,” he does not mean this as a generic slur but rather as a specific claim that we oppose Jesus Christ in the Second Coming.

O-kay…

My attempted secular version of his argument:

But … why?

Here’s that thread without the line numbers:

In a deeply offensive and morally bankrupt essay “Deep Zionism”, Scott Aaronson presents the killing of Palestinian children as a moral duty, effectively endorsing the murder of 18,000+ Palestinian children in response to the murder of 36 Jewish children on 10/7/2023.

scottaaronson.blog/?p=9082

Aaronson: “Zionism…is the proposition that…you have not merely a right but a moral obligation to pull the lever — and that you can do so with your middle finger raised high to the hateful mob.” (Deep Zionism, 2024).

Aaronson’s claim is blunt: if your enemy hides among civilians, you are morally obligated to kill them anyway. He calls it not only justified but righteous and says you can do it with defiance: “your middle finger raised high.”

Aaronson writes (faithfully paraphrased): “The responsibility for those children’s deaths rests with their father, not with you.” In this framework, Israel has no responsibility for Palestinian children killed by its bombs or bullets. Aaronson even dismisses the urgent moral question of saving lives (faithfully paraphrased): “The correct question isn’t which choice will lead to fewer children getting killed right this minute.” For Aaronson, Palestinian lives in the present moment do not count.

This is not an abstract puzzle. Palestinian children have been killed in their homes, in schools, in hospitals, and in the streets. They were not “placed on tracks” by parents. They were intentionally killed where they lived and played.

Aaronson preemptively shuts down dissent: “I’m not opening the comments on this post, because there’s nothing here to debate.” Not reasoning. Not philosophy. Dogma.

To understand this posture, you need to know Aaronson’s self-story. He has long written about being a bullied nerd, ignored by women, and obsessing over feminism in his youth. He describes raising a “middle finger” as the key to his survival. In Aaronson’s words: “… I raised a middle finger to the Andrea Dworkins and Arthur Chus and Amanda Marcottes of the world. I went Deep Zionist on them.” Here, “Deep Zionism” is not about Israel; it’s his life strategy. What begins as adolescent grievance becomes Aaronson’s moral method. First against classmates, then against feminists, now against Palestinians. The same defiance that once excused his bitterness now “justifies” child killing.

This isn’t philosophy, it is autobiography turned into lethal dogma. Aaronson’s grievances are universalized into axioms. The bullied nerd becomes the philosopher-king of violent righteous middle fingers.

In 2014, during another Gaza “war”, Aaronson wrote blog comment #439: “You shoot back… knowing in advance that you’ll almost certainly hit one or two … [children]… my moral intuition is perfectly comfortable with saying yes, your killings were ‘accidental’.” In that same 2014 comment (#439), Aaronson added: “…the children’s father, not you, bears the primary responsibility… He’s their de facto murderer.” Exactly the same absolution logic as Deep Zionism. Aaronson even wrote (#440): “…my desire to see other people deterred… is so staggeringly enormous that it counterbalances even my grief at seeing innocent children killed.” Deterrence outweighs grief at killing.

From 2014 to 2024, Scott Aaronson’s line is straight: redefine foreseeable child deaths as “accidents,” outsource blame entirely to Palestinians, and frame killing of children as righteous.

But both law and ethics reject this. In criminal law, foreseeable deaths are not “accidents.” In just war theory, proportionality and discrimination forbid treating civilians as expendable. Aaronson erases those safeguards. His framework is clear: Palestinian children’s lives do not count. Their deaths are someone else’s fault, never the fault of those who kill them.

The result is not philosophy. It is a ritual of absolution: kill children, call it accidental, flip the finger, and declare yourself righteous.

When a public intellectual says minimizing child deaths “right this minute” is the wrong question, believe him. Scott Aaronson puts zero value on Palestinian children’s lives. Deep Zionism is his confession.

In that same 2014 discussion, Aaronson volunteered that he still admired Werner Heisenberg for his science, acknowledging Heisenberg’s moral compromise working under the Nazis. But Scott Aaronson is no Heisenberg. Heisenberg was a genius of quantum mechanics, his name forever tied to physics itself. Aaronson, whatever his early promise, is a relatively minor figure in computer science, and now, a moral failure.

If you want a Nazi scientist analogy, the closer match is Philipp Lenard: a Nobel laureate who slid into ideological extremism, railing against “Jewish physics.” A man of some early talent but remembered mainly for his complete moral collapse. Like Lenard, Aaronson fuses grievance with ideology. Lenard turned physics into nationalism. Aaronson turns personal resentment into Zionist dogma. Both weaponize intellectual authority to sanctify cruelty.

Lenard was once respectable, then became a mediocrity defined by extremism. Scott Aaronson now steps into the same fate: remembered not for quantum complexity but for giving moral cover to child killing, land theft, and forced displacement.

This is why “Deep Zionism” matters. It’s not just one essay. It’s the culmination of a decade-long pattern: absolution of foreseeable child killings, grievance elevated into dogma, and now, intellectual authority harnessed to justify atrocity.

And now Woit has banned ScottAa from his blog:

One reason people are not discussing the WWII analogy here is that, as I explained, I delete attempts to argue one way or another about justifying the mass murder of children through things like bad analogies. It’s the kind of thing you seem to really enjoy a lot, but makes me sick to my stomach. […] Actually, that’s enough. If you want to carry on your arguments for killing children, and engage in lunatic rants about everyone being an antisemite, you have your own blog, can do so there.

Browsing that thread on old!SneerClub, I learned that a few months ago, ScottAa made a jokey post about being in some random “top 50” list of quantum-computing blogs, and the comment thread of that post escalated until he was saying this:

Aleksy #163: Please don’t take this the wrong way, but—I feel like the world would be a better place if you were not part of it.

My reasoning is as follows: when you single out a single UN member state, among all ~200 of them, as being illegitimate and having no right to exist—when, moreover, that state is literally the only thing standing between half the world’s Jews and their violent deaths in a second Holocaust—when it’s obvious to any fairminded person that, if you applied 10% of the same level of legal scrutiny to the founding events of other countries, the UN General Assembly would need to be swept nearly bare—when, finally, you needle a productive scientist over and over, commenting and emailing to ask why he hasn’t replied to you yet, taunting him that if he doesn’t then he’s effectively conceded the argument, etc. etc.—it’s clear that you’re making a negative contribution to the world.

I feel like, if you understood this, you’d see that the right and honorable thing to do would be to kill yourself as quickly as possible.

I hasten to add, however, that I’m not saying this out of any personal animus whatsoever towards you. It’s purely disinterested reason that’s led me to these conclusions. If you respond to me emotionally rather than rationally, that will show me that (alas) you weren’t ready for a logical, evidence-based discussion of these matters.

Never has a man had a more normal one

Woit is a math guy at Columbia who is mostly known for calling string theory a crock of non-science. I don’t think he’s sneerable. Sometimes his opinions align with a remark by, e.g., Hossenfelder, but he’s not … brain-cooked by engagement algorithms like she is. I check in on Woit’s blog occasionally to see if there’s news in the world of math that I missed, and the sense I get is that he made the criticisms he wanted to make and would rather talk about things he finds more interesting, whereas Hossenfelder is desperate for those physics is a corrupt cabal clicks.

MediaWiki does not seem like the right tool for this job, if one were starting from scratch. It’s… a lot of infrastructure for a small number of pages that will be changed very sporadically by a small number of people.

Hey, it looks like our very own corbin started the “complexity class” page at the nLab! Maybe we should flesh that out. (I started their page for the number 24 but am not very active at all.)

I copied this over to the recommendations thread for actual-science versions of things that the Sequences gesture incompetently at.

Here is a comment by corbin with relevant recommendations:

Gödel makes everyone weep. For tears of joy, my top pick is still Doug Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is suitable for undergraduates. Another strong classic is Raymond Smullyan’s To Mock a Mockingbird. Both of these dead-trees are worth it; I personally find myself cracking them open regularly for citations, quotes, and insights. For tears of frustration, the best way to fully understand the numerical machinery is Peter Smith’s An Introduction to Gödel’s Theorems, freely available online. These books are still receiving new editions, but any edition should suffice. If the goal is merely to ensure that the student can diagonalize, then the student can directly read Bill Lawvere’s 1968 paper Diagonal arguments & Cartesian closed categories with undergraduate category theory, but in any case they should also read Noson Yanofsky’s 2003 expository paper A universal approach to self-referential paradoxes, incompleteness & fixed points. The easiest options are at the beginning of the paragraph and the hardest ones are at the end; nonetheless any option will cover Cantor, Russell, Gödel, Turing, Tarski, and the essentials of diagonalization.

And picking that as a username is… “I know I’m a grown man, but inside I am 12 years old, and when I grow up nerds will be cool, you’ll see!”.

Dang, I am missing a lot due to eating junk food instead of fast food.

Well, not all of the comments there are horrible. Though there is a guy calling himself “richardfeynman” saying some pretty silly stuff. His prior comment history is full of promptfondling.

There could be other “into the locker now” signals that are as strong as calling yourself “richardfeynman” on Hacker News, but I cannot think of a stronger one.

Variations on this theme have probably come up repeatedly in promptfondler circles.

Ah, gotcha.

No, that’s not what superdeterminism is. You are importing a whole lot of baggage about what it means to understand things “as quantum mechanical systems”. You are also making the same mistake that Tim Maudlin does about the implications of Bell inequality violations. He thinks that the EPR criterion of reality is “analytically” true, and he’s wrong. Since you have recommended Maudlin elsewhere on Lemmy (as well as promulgating the myth that a singular “Copenhagen interpretation” exists), I’m going to do something else than try conversing with you further.

Something is missing here:

damages their users’ critical thinking and mental acuity whilst , all

The very unscientific sampling I did just now suggests that those complexity classes which Wikipedia covers, it covers better than the Zoo does anything. Of course, the Zoo has room for #P/lowpoly and LOGWANK and all the other classes that are attested in one paper apiece.

And we don’t want to introduce all the complexities of solving disagreements on Wikipedia.

wait for it

There should also be some kind of support for multiple AIs disagreeing with each other.

“The Torment Nexus definitely has positive uses. I personally use it frequently for looking up song lyrics and tracking my children’s medication doses. I find it helpful.”

From the comments:

I wonder if you could do something similar with all peer-reviewed scientific publications, summarizing all findings into an encyclopedia of all scientific knowledge.

True believers are fucked in the head.