Blog posts by Michael Nielen
https://michaelnielsen.org/blog/
Michael Nielsen
2017-04-09T00:00:00Z

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	<p>On Twitter, I’ve been chatting with my friend <a href="https://juliagalef.com/">Julia Galef</a> about tensions between thinking creatively and thinking in a way that reduces error.</p>
<p>Of course, all other things being equal, I’m in favour of reducing error in our thinking!</p>
<p>However, all other things are not always equal.</p>
<p>In particular, I <a href="https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/849871072178561024">believe</a> “there’s a tension, too, between behaviours which maximize accuracy &amp; which maximize creativity… A lot of important truths come from v. irrational ppl.”</p>
<p>Julia has summarized some of her thinking in a <a href="https://juliagalef.com/2017/04/07/does-irrationality-fuel-innovation/">blog post</a>, where she disagrees, writing: “I totally agree that we need more experimentation with â€œcrazy ideasâ€! Iâ€™m just skeptical that rationality is, on the margin, in tension with that goal.”</p>
<p>Before getting to Julia’s arguments, I want to flesh out the idea of a tension between maximizing creativity and maximizing accuracy.</p>
<p>Consider the following statement of Feynman’s, on the need to fool himself into believing that he had a creative edge in his work. He’s talking about his early ideas on how to develop a theory of electrons and light (which became, after many years, quantum electrodynamics). The statement is a little jarring to modern sensibilities, but please look past that to the idea he’s trying to convey:</p>
<blockquote><p> I told myself [of his competitors]: “They’re on the wrong track: I’ve got the track!” Now, in the end, I had to give up those ideas and go over to their ideas of retarded action and so on – my original idea of electrons not acting on themselves disappeared, but because I had been working so hard I found something. So, as long as I can drive myself one way or the other, it’s okay. Even if it’s an illusion, it still makes me go, and this is the kind of thing that keeps me going through the depths.</p>
<p>It’s like the African savages who are going into battle – first they have to gather around and beat drums and jump up and down to build up their energy to fight. I feel the same way, building up my energy by talking to myself and telling myself, “They are trying to do it this way, I’m going to do it that way” and then I get excited and I can go back to work again.
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<p>Many of the most creative scientists I know are extremely determined people, willing to explore unusual positions for years. Sometimes, those positions are well grounded. And sometimes, even well after the fact, it’s obvious they were fooling themselves, but somehow their early errors helped them find their way to the truth. They were, to use the mathematician Goro Shimura’s phrase “gifted with the special capability of making many mistakes, mostly in the right direction”.</p>
<p>An extreme example is the physicist Joseph Weber, who pioneered gravitational wave astronomy. The verdict of both his contemporaries and of history is that he was fooling himself: his systems simply didn’t work the way he thought. On the other hand, even though he fooled himself for decades, the principals on the (successful!) LIGO project have repeatedly acknowledged that his work was a major stimulus for them to work on finding gravitational waves. In retrospect, it’s difficult to be anything other than glad that Weber clung so tenaciously to his erroneous beliefs.</p>
<p>For me, what matters here is that: (a) much of Weber’s work was based on an unreasonable belief; and (b) on net, it helped speed up important discoveries.</p>
<p>Weber demonstrates my point in an extreme form. He was <em>outright</em> wrong, and remained so, and yet his erroneous example still served a useful purpose, helping inspire others to pursue ideas that eventually worked. In some sense, this is a collective (rather than individual) version of my point. More common is the case – like Feynman – of a person who may cling to mistaken beliefs for a long period, but ultimately uses that as a bridge to new discovery.</p>
<p>Turning to Julia’s post, she responds to my argument with: “In general, I think overconfidence stifles experimentation”, and argues that the great majority of people in society reject “crazy” ideas – say, seasteading – because they’re overconfident in conventional wisdom.</p>
<p>I agree that people often mistakenly reject unusual ideas because they’re overconfident in the conventional wisdom.</p>
<p>However, I don’t think it’s relevant to my argument. Being overconfident in beliefs that most people hold is not at all the same as being overconfident in beliefs that few people hold.</p>
<p>You may wonder if the underlying cognitive mechanisms are the same, and perhaps there’s some kind of broad disposition to overconfidence?</p>
<p>But if that was the case then you’d expect that someone overconfident in their own unusual ideas would, in other areas, also be overconfident in the conventional wisdom.</p>
<p>However, my anecdotal experience is that a colleague willing to pursue unusual ideas of their own is often particularly sympathetic to unusual ideas from other people in other areas. This suggests that being overconfident in your own crazy ideas isn’t likely to stifle other experimentation.</p>
<p>Julia also suggests several variants on the “strategy of temporarily suspending your disbelief and throwing yourself headlong into something for a while, allowing your emotional state to be <em>as<br/>
if</em> you were 100% confident.”</p>
<p>In a sense, Feynman and Weber were practicing an extreme version of this strategy. I don’t know Weber’s work well, but it’s notable that in the details of Feynman’s work he was good at ferreting out error, and not fooling himself. He wasn’t always rigorous – mathematicians have, for instance, spent decades trying to make the path integral rigorous – but there was usually a strong core argument. Indeed, Feynman delivered a very stimulating <a href="http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm">speech</a> on the value of careful thought in scientific work.</p>
<p>How can this careful approach to the details of argument be reconciled with his remarks about the need to fool yourself in creative work?</p>
<p>I never met Feynman, and can’t say how he reconciled the two points of view. But my own approach in creative work, and I believe many others also take this approach, is to carve out a sort of creative cocoon around nascent ideas.</p>
<p>Consider Apple designer Jony Ive’s remarks at a memorial after Steve Jobs’ death:</p>
<blockquote><p> Steve used to say to me — and he used to say this a lot — “Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea.”</p>
<p>And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet simple ones, which in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound. And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.
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<p>To be creative, you need to recognize those barely formed thoughts, thoughts which are usually wrong and poorly formed in many ways, but which have some kernel of originality and importance and<br/>
truth. And if they seem important enough to be worth pursuing, you construct a creative cocoon around them, a set of stories you tell yourself to protect the idea not just from others, but from your own self doubts. The purpose of those stories isn’t to be an air tight defence. It’s to give you the confidence to nurture the idea, possibly for years, to find out if there’s something really there. </p>
<p>And so, even someone who has extremely high standards for the final details of their work, may have an important component to their thinking which relies on rather woolly arguments. And they may well need to cling to that cocoon. Perhaps other approaches are possible. But my own experience is that this is often the case.</p>
<h2>Postscript</h2>
<p>Julia finishes her post with:</p>
<blockquote><p> One last point: Even if it turned out to be true that irrationality is necessary for innovators, thatâ€™s only a weak defense of your original claim, which was that Iâ€™m significantly overrating the value of rationality in general. Remember, â€œcoming up with brilliant new ideasâ€ is just one domain in which we could evaluate the potential value-add of increased rationality. There are lots of other domains to consider, such as designing policy, allocating philanthropic funds, military strategy, etc. We could certainly talk about those separately; for now, Iâ€™m just noting that you made this original claim about the dubious value of rationality in general, but then your argument focused on this one particular domain, innovation.
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<p>To clarify, I didn’t intend my claim to be in general: the tension I see is between creativity and accuracy.</p>
<p>That said, this tension does leak into other areas. </p>
<p>If you’re a funder, say, trying to determine what to fund in AI research, you go and talk to AI experts. And many of those people are likely to have cultivated their own creative cocoons, which will inform their remarks. How a funder should deal with that is a separate essay. My point here is simply that this process of creative cocooning isn’t easily untangled from things like evaluation of work.</p>
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	<p>Stefan Janusz from the Royal Society asked me to comment briefly on where I’d look for new ideas about the future of scientific publishing. Here’s my response, crossposted to the <a href="http://blogs.royalsociety.org/publishing/fssc-interface-design-and-collective-intelligence/">Royal Society’s blog about scientific publishing</a>.</p>
<p>It’s tempting to assume the key ideas will come from leading scientists, journal publishers, librarians, policy makers, and so on. </p>
<p>While these are all important groups, I don’t think they’re going to invent the key ideas behind the future of scientific publishing. That will be done primarily by two groups of outsiders: exceptionally creative user interface designers, and people who design group experiences.</p>
<p>Let me unpack both those statements.</p>
<p>The first important group is user interface designers. Ultimately, scientific journals are a user interface to humanity’s scientific knowledge, and people such as Henry Oldenburg, Johannes Gutenberg, and Aldus Manutius were all interface designers.</p>
<p>Now, many people working in science don’t understand the importance or difficulty of user interface design. It’s tempting to think it’s either about “making things pretty” or about “making things easy to use”. And, in fact, much work on interface design doesn’t go much deeper than those tasks. But the designers I’m talking about are doing something much deeper. They’re attempting to invent powerful new representations for knowledge, representations that will let us manipulate and comprehend knowledge in new ways.</p>
<p>Think, for example, of how the invention of user interface ideas such as the hyperlink and the search box have transformed how we relate to knowledge. Or take a look at some of <a href="http://worrydream.com">Bret Victor’s</a> <a href="http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/">beautiful designs</a> for changing how we think about systems and mathematics. In a more playful vein, look at Marco ten Bosch’s gorgeous game <a href="http://miegakure.com">Miegakure</a>, which challenges people to learn to think in four spatial dimensions. Or consider the way programming languages such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq">Coq</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerful-Ideas/dp/0465046746">Logo</a> change the way people interface to mathematical knowledge.</p>
<p>The second group I named is people who design group experiences. In addition to being user interfaces to scientific knowledge, journals are also a medium for collective intelligence. The design of media for collective intelligence isn’t yet a widely recognized field. But there are many people doing amazing things in this area. Just as a random sample, not necessarily related to science, take a look at <a href="http://www.starchamber.com/about">Ned Gulley’s</a> work on <a href="http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/contest/">the Mathworks programming competition</a>. Or economist <a href="http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/">Robin Hanson</a> on <a href="http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/ideafutures.html">idea futures</a>. Or even people such as the musician Bobby McFerrin, who understands <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk">crowd</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14LcvpXmb74">behaviour</a> as well as anyone. Or <a href="https://twitter.com/avantgame">Jane McGonigal</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/elanlee">Elan Lee’s</a> <a href="http://www.avantgame.com/McGonigal_WhyILoveBees_Feb2007.pdf">work</a> on creating games based on “puzzles and challenges that no single person could solve on their own”. This broad vein of work is a key direction from which important new fundamental ideas will ultimately come.</p>
<p>Let me finish by identifying a questionable assumption implicit in the question “Where will the future of scientific publishing come from?” The assumption is that there will be a single future for scientific publishing, a kind of jazzed-up version of the scientific article, and it’s simply up to enterprising publishers to figure out what it is.</p>
<p>I believe that, if things go well, there will instead be a proliferation of media types. Some will be informal, cognitive media for people to think and carry out experiments with. Look, for example, at some of <a href="http://norvig.com/ipython/">Peter Norvig’s ipython notebooks</a>. Others will be collaborative environments for building up knowledge – look at Tim Gowers’s and Terry Tao’s use of blogs and wikis to <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7266/full/461879a.html">solve mathematical problems collaboratively</a>. And some will be recognizable descendants of the “paper of record” model common in journals today. So what I hope we’ll see is a much richer and more varied ecosystem, and one that continues to change and improve rapidly over many decades</p>
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	<p><a href="http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap2.html">Chapter 2</a> of my free online book about <a href="http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com">“Neural Networks and Deep Learning”</a> is now available. The chapter is an in-depth explanation of the backpropagation algorithm. Backpropagation is the workhorse of learning in neural networks, and a key component in modern deep learning systems.ï»¿ Enjoy!</p>
	
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	<p>My new essay on the use of digital media to explain scientific ideas is <a href="http://michaelnielsen.org/reinventing_explanation/index.html">here</a>.</p>
	
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	<p>I am delighted to announce that the first chapter of my book “Neural Networks and Deep Learning” is now freely available online <a href="http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap1.html">here</a>.</p>
<p>The chapter explains the basic ideas behind neural networks, including how they learn. I show how powerful these ideas are by writing a short program which uses neural networks to solve a hard problem — recognizing handwritten digits. The chapter also takes a brief look at how deep learning works.</p>
<p>The book’s <a href="http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/">landing page</a> gives a broader view on the book. And I’ve written a more <a href="http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/about.html">in-depth discussion</a> of the philosophy behind the book.</p>
<p>Finally, if you’ve read this far I hope you’ll consider supporting my <a href="http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/neural-networks-and-deep-learning-book-project/">Indiegogo campaign</a> for the book, which will give you access to perks like early drafts of later chapters.</p>
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	<p>In September of 2012, a team of scientists released a photograph showing the most distant parts of the Universe ever seen by any human being. They obtained the photograph by pointing the Hubble Space Telescope at a single tiny patch of sky, gradually building up an image over a total of 23 days of observation. It’s an otherwise undistinguished patch of sky, within the little-known constellation Fornax. It’s less than one hundredth the size of the full moon, and appears totally empty to the naked eye. Here’s what’s seen with the Hubble Telescope:</p>
<p>This image is known as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Extreme_Deep_Field">Hubble Extreme Deep Field</a>. It contains 5,500 galaxies, each of which, in turn, contains billions of stars. This region of sky ordinarily looks empty because these galaxies are far too dim to be seen with the naked eye. Some of the galaxies are more than 13 billion light years away. We are seeing them as they were just a few hundred million years after the big bang, near the dawn of time. If you have the eyes to see, this is what deep space and the early history of the universe looks like.</p>
<p>One of the many striking things about the Hubble Extreme Deep Field is that it’s <em>beautiful</em>. Another work revealing beauty in nature is a 1999 art piece by a Dutch-Canadian artist named <a href="http://www.juangeuer.com/index.html">Juan Geuer</a>. In a darkened room, Geuer shone orange laser light through a single droplet of water, projecting the light onto a wall. The resulting play of light is spectacular. We see the changing internal structure of the droplet, and the interplay of surface tension and gravity, a marvellous mix of refraction, reflection, and diffraction. Here’s a recording of Geuer’s art piece, known as <a href="http://www.juangeuer.com/work/wis.html"><em>Water in Suspense</em></a>. (Some browsers don’t start the video at the right moment — move to 13:33 in the recording if that’s the case).</p>
<p>It’s not a typical action-packed online video. It moves slowly, slowly,… and then WHOOSH, a sudden, rapid change. I suggest watching it for at least a minute or two. During that time you’ll start to learn <em>how</em> to watch the droplet. Indeed, getting a feel for the multiple timescales at which the droplet changes is part of what we learn from the work.</p>
<p><em>Water in Suspense</em> reveals a hidden world. We discover a rich structure immanent in the water droplet, a structure not ordinarily accessible to our senses. In this way it’s similar to the Hubble Extreme Deep Field, which also reveals a hidden world. Both are examples of what I call Super-realist art, art which doesn’t just capture what we can see directly with our eyes or hear with our ears, but which uses new sensors and methods of visualization to reveal a world that we cannot directly perceive. It’s art being used to reveal science.</p>
<p>Although I’m not an artist or an art critic, I find Super-realist art fascinating. Works like the Hubble Extreme Deep Field and <em>Water in Suspense</em> give us concrete, vivid representations of deep space and the interior structure of a water droplet. For most of us, these are usually little more than dry abstractions, remote from our understanding. By creating vivid representations, Super-realist art provides us with a new way of thinking about such phenomena. And so in this essay I explore Super-realist art: what it is, how it relates to other modes of art, and why it is flourishing today.</p>
<p>I’m a technologist and scientist, a person whose main interests are in areas such as machine learning, data science, and, especially, the development of cognitive tools (i.e., tools to extend human thought). It may seem strange that I’m writing an essay about art. But thinking about technology from this viewpoint gives a perspective that’s radically different to the usual take. It’s a flip side, an artistic perspective that sees technology and, in particular, Super-realism, as a means to discover new aesthetics and new representations of reality. That means Super-realism is not just of interest to artists, but can also inform technologists and scientists, giving them a new way of thinking about how we can develop tools that extend human thought.</p>
<p>In discussing Super-realism I will ignore many of the usual labels we use to understand art. Instead, I’ll develop a caricature which divides much of Western art into just three categories: Realism, Post-realism, and Super-realism. I believe this way of thinking illuminates Super-realism, and ask the indulgence of any experts on art history who happen to be reading.</p>
<p>Until the latter part of the 19th century Realism was one of the main aspirations of much Western art [1]. Realist art aimed at capturing the reality accessible to our senses. My favourite Realist artist is Rembrandt:</p>
<p>Such paintings seem so true-to-life that it is as though the artist has captured an element of objective reality. Suppose aliens visited Earth after a cataclysm wiped out all traces of humanity, except for a few Rembrandt self-portraits that somehow survived. I believe the aliens could understand much about both Rembrandt and humanity from those portraits, including perhaps even something of Rembrandt’s personality, his habits, his likes, and his dislikes.</p>
<p>But even the most talented Realist artists capture only a tiny slice of reality. Rembrandt’s self-portraits, as real as they appear, omit nearly all the biological and mental processes going on in Rembrandt’s body and mind. Suppose, for example, we could zoom in on his face, seeing it at 10 times magnification, then 100, then 1,000, and so on. At each level of magnification a new world would be revealed, of pores and cells and microbes. And there is so much structure to understand in each of these worlds, from the incredibly complex ecology of microbes on the skin, to the inner workings of cells. Consider this video simulating the inside of a cell:</p>
<p>This is not to criticise Rembrandt and the other Realists. On their own terms, they succeeded. But what Super-realism shows is that we can see far deeper into the world, and find great beauty in so doing.</p>
<p>In the 20th century Western art moved away from Realism, and Post-realist art became increasingly influential. To describe how Super-realism relates to Post-realism I’ll use the work of Monet. Monet was an early Post-realist painter, one working at the boundary between Realism and Post-realism. Here’s one of Monet’s great works, the &#34;Water Lillies&#34; tryptych, housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York:</p>
<p> <a href="http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A4058&amp;page_number=4&amp;template_id=1&amp;sort_order=1">(credit)</a></p>
<p>Unfortunately, when viewed on a computer screen or as a small print, this tryptych looks washed out and insipid, a poor imitation of the Realists. But when you see the original — 6 and a half feet high, and 42 feet long — the effect is jaw-dropping. Monet’s genius, and what made his painting so overwhelming, was a deep understanding of <em>how</em> humans see. He was a master illusionist who understood how to trick the viewer’s brain into seeing something much, much better than a realistic rendition. This only works at scale. When &#34;Water Lillies&#34; is shrunk to print size, the psychology of perception changes, and the illusion vanishes. I don’t understand why this is. I’ve read something of the theory of Monet and his fellow Impressionists, and don’t find those explanations convincing. What I do know is that Monet’s shimmering pond loses its glory. It looks fake, less than a literal rendition, merely a washed out print. But somehow, in the original, Monet was able to use his understanding of human perception to <em>evoke</em> water lillies in a fashion more spectacular than a Realist painting could ever have achieved.</p>
<p>In Post-realism, art isn’t about directly representing an objective, independent reality. Instead, it’s about creating new types of relationship between the art piece and the human mind. Monet and his fellow Impressionists were on the boundary between Realism and Post-Realism, since their works still aimed to evoke an objective, independent reality, albeit not by a direct representation. But Post-realism was pushed much further by later artists, such as Picasso, M. C. Escher, and Kandinsky:</p>
<p>These works gradually shift away from representing reality, and toward exploring the relationship between art piece and viewer. Escher, for example, used quirks in the human visual system to evoke impossible realities. Abstract artists such as Kandinsky take this idea still further, and it is developed to an extreme in the work of abstract minimalists such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McLaughlin_artist">John McLaughlin</a>, a pioneer in what is known as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard-edge_painting">Hard-edge painting</a>:</p>
<p>At first glance this (and much of McLaughlin’s other work) looks ludicrous. But it makes more sense when you understand that McLaughlin was exploring how people respond to art. His earlier works were more complex. But he gradually simplified his work as he realized that people can have novel responses even to simple stimuli.</p>
<p>Abstract minimalism annoys many people. The approach can and has led to fakery and foolishness on the part of some artists. But my point here is neither to criticise nor to praise. Instead, it’s to understand what artists such as McLaughlin were up to. Whereas the Realist artists believed that virtuosity came from depicting part of reality with high fidelity, in Post-realism virtuosity may come from creating a novel relationship between art piece and viewer.</p>
<p>Super-realism changes art again. Virtuosity becomes about revealing hidden worlds and discovering new aesthetics. Take a look at the following video, which shows — in extreme slow motion! — a packet of light passing through a bottle. Ordinarily that passage takes less than a nanosecond, but the video slows the passage down by a factor of 10 billion, so we can see it:</p>
<p>In a way, Super-realism is a return to the aims of Realism, back to representing reality. But what’s new about Super-realism is the challenge (and opportunity!) to find ways of representing previously unseen parts of the world.</p>
<p>Most of my examples of Super-realist art have come from people who regard themselves mainly as scientists, not as artists. However, there are many artists doing Super-realist art. I’ve drawn my examples mostly from scientists merely because I’ve found that artists’ work is often more exploratory, and thus requires more background explanation, making it less suited for an essay such as this.</p>
<p>Although Super-realism’s flourishing is recent, its origins go back centuries. In 1610, Galileo published a short book entitled <em>Starry Messenger</em> (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereus_Nuncius">Sidereus Nuncius</a>), which contained several images showing the moon in unprecedented detail, as observed by Galileo through one of his new telescopes:</p>
<p>In a similar vein, in 1665 Robert Hooke published a bestselling book entitled <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micrographia">Micrographia</a>, which used the newly-invented microscope to reveal the world of the very small. Hooke’s book included the first ever drawings of biological cells, as well as drawings showing animals such as fleas in unprecedented detail:</p>
<p>While Super-realism isn’t new, that doesn’t mean it’s yet in the artistic mainstream. Many people don’t consider works such as the Hubble Extreme Deep Field or the light-in-a-bottle video to be art. (I would not be surprised if this includes the creators of those works.) Even works more explicitly artistic in intent, such as <em>Water in Suspense</em>, are viewed as borderline. But I believe that each of these works reveals a new aesthetic, an aesthetic generated by the scientific principles underlying the phenomenon being represented. And insofar as they reveal a new aesthetic, I believe these works are art.</p>
<p>Although Super-realism isn’t yet in the artistic mainstream, it has influenced parts of that mainstream. For example, in the 1980s the film diector and cinematographer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Fricke">Ron Fricke</a> used time-lapse photography to reveal new aspects of the everyday world, in documentary films such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronos_film"><em>Chronos</em></a> [2]:</p>
<p>Fricke was not, of course, the first to use time-lapse photography in this way. However, his films have won wide acclaim, and inspired many other artists to develop time-lapse photography further as an artistic medium.</p>
<p>Super-realism has grown rapidly in the past twenty to thirty years. Three forces are driving that growth.</p>
<p>First, far more people can access and learn to use scientific instruments. Recall Juan Geuer and his virtuoso home-made laser light show. There are people building everything from <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZZBughftos">home-made</a> <a href="http://makeprojects.com/Project/Cloud+Chamber/2182/1#.UP6WsCc0V8E">bubble chambers</a> to <a href="http://www.brooklynspaceprogram.org/BSP/Space_Balloon.html">balloons exploring the upper atmosphere</a>. These are not isolated curiosities, but rather part of a rapidly expanding social phenomenon that has been called by many names: the DIY movement, citizen science, the Maker movement. Whatever it is, it’s growing, fed by the expansion of online and mail-order suppliers that serve niche markets, and by the growth of online (and, increasingly, offline) communities of people who work with these instruments and teach one another.</p>
<p>Second, the data being taken by many of these instruments is being shared openly, online. In the 1980s if a scientist used a telescope to take a photograph, likely no more than a few dozen people would ever touch the photographic plate. Now more than a billion people can <a href="http://archive.stsci.edu/hst/">download data</a> from the Hubble Telescope, and find new ways to visualize it. Some of the most <a href="http://vimeo.com/45878034">extraordinary</a> <a href="http://vimeo.com/42909676">visualizations</a> of the Earth are made using data released openly by NASA. Any scientific project which releases data enables others to find new ways of making meaning from that data.</p>
<p>Third, we’re collectively building a powerful suite of tools to reveal these new worlds. For example, as I write there are more than <a href="https://github.com/search?q=visualization">25,000 open source visualization projects</a> available on the code repository GitHub. Most of those projects are, of coure, experiments that will be abandoned. But there are also many powerful tools that give people incredible abilities to make and reveal beauty. It’s no wonder Super-realism is flowering.</p>
<p>Story-tellers say that reality is often stranger and more interesting than fiction. I believe this is true for all art. The reason is that nature is more imaginative than we, and as we probe deeper into nature, we will continue to discover new aesthetics and new forms of beauty. I believe these new aesthetics will stimulate art for decades or centuries to come.</p>
<p><em>If you enjoyed this essay, you may wish to <a href="http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/feed/">subscribe to my blog</a>, or <a href="https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen">follow me on Twitter</a>.</em></p>
<p><strong>Footnotes</strong></p>
<p>[1] I am referring to Realist art broadly, not the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_arts">19th century artistic movement known as Realism</a>. I’m also certainly not claiming that all Western art was Realist until the late 19th century, merely that the idea of representing objective reality was often deeply influential.</p>
<p>[2] The YouTube video shows images from <em>Chronos</em>, but the music is from another source. Unfortunately, I could not find a good unabridged excerpt from <em>Chronos</em> online.</p>
<p><strong>Acknowledgements:</strong> This essay arose out of many conversations with <a href="http://jendodd.com/">Jen Dodd</a>, especially about her work with the <a href="http://subtletechnologies.com/">Subtle Technologies</a> Festival of Art and Science. Thanks also to <a href="http://www.cs.utah.edu/~miriah/">Miriah Meyer</a> and <a href="http://www.leesmolin.com/">Lee Smolin</a> for conversations that helped stimulate this essay.</p>
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	<p>As many of you no doubt know, the <a href="http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/hoap/Notes_on_the_Federal_Research_Public_Access_Act">FederalÂ Research Public Access Act</a>; (FRPAA, pronounced fur-pa) was introducedÂ into the US Congress a few days past. Â It’s a terrific bill, which, if itÂ passes, will have the effect of making all US Government-funded scientificÂ research accessible to the public within 6 months of publication.</p>
<p>Open access legislation like FRPAA doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. Â TheÂ <a href="http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/">Alliance for Taxpayer Access</a>Â (ATA) is a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group that works to promote openÂ access policies within the US Government. Â The ATA worked with CongressÂ (and many other organizations) to help pass the <a href="http://publicaccess.nih.gov/">NIH public access policy</a> in 2008,Â and have been working for the past several years with members of CongressÂ on FRPAA.</p>
<p>In this post, I interview <a href="http://www.arl.org/sparc/about/staff/joseph.shtml">Heather Joseph</a>, the Executive Director of the <a href="http://www.arl.org/sparc/">Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)</a>, which convenes the ATA, andÂ ask her about the bill, about next steps, and about how people can help.</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> <em>Heather, thanks for agreeing to be interviewed! What is FRPAA, and what’s it trying to accomplish?</em></p>
<p>Thank you, Michael – I’m happy to talk about this bill!</p>
<p>In a nutshell, FRPAA is designed to make sure that the results of scientific research paid for by the public can be accessed by the public.Â Most people are surprised to learn that this isn’t automatically the case;Â they assume that if their tax dollars pay for a research study, theyÂ should be entitled to read the results. Â But the reality is quiteÂ different. Â Right now, if you want to access articles that report onÂ publicly funded science, you have pay to do so, either through a subscription to a scientific journal (which can cost thousands of dollarsÂ a year), or though pay-per-view, which can easily cost upwards of $30 perÂ article. This presents an often-unsurmountable obstacle for exactly thoseÂ people who most want (or need) access – scientists, students, teachers,Â physicians, entrepreneurs – who too often find themselves unable to affordÂ such fees, and end up locked out of the game.</p>
<p>Out of eleven federal agencies that fund science here in the UnitedÂ States, only one – the National Institutes of Health – actually has aÂ policy that ensures that the public can freely access the results of theirÂ funded research online. FRPAA is designed to tackle this issue head on,Â and to make sure that the science stemming from all U.S. agencies is madeÂ freely available to anyone who wants to use. it.</p>
<p>FRPAA is a very straightforward bill – it simply says that if you receiveÂ money from a U.S. Agency to do scientific research, you agree (upfront) toÂ make any articles reporting on the results available to the public in aÂ freely accessible online database, no later than six months afterÂ publication in a peer-reviewed journal.</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> <em>What is the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA)?Â What role did the ATA play in advocating for FRPAA?</em></p>
<p>The ATA is a coalition of groups who are working together to try and craftÂ a positive solution to this problem. Â In 2004, the library community (led by my home organization, SPARC) decided that there must be other groupsÂ who shared our frustration over the current access situation. We reachedÂ out to research organizations, patient advocacy groups, consumer organizations, publishers, student groups – anyone we could think of whoÂ shared the goal of unlocking access to taxpayer funded research. Â WeÂ quickly attracted more than 80 organizations, representing millions ofÂ individuals. This created a whole new opportunity to advocate for nationalÂ access policies from a much stronger position… there really <em>is</em>Â strength in numbers!</p>
<p>The ATA has evolved into the leading advocacy organization for taxpayerÂ access to the results of taxpayer funded research. We knock on Congressional doors, talking with policymakers about Â the current barriers Â to access, and about new opportunities for scientific progress once those barriers are brought down.Â We are all about leveragingÂ the public’s investment in science by making sure that anyone who isÂ interested can easily access and build on this research. That’s howÂ science advances, after all.</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> <em>In 2008, the Congress passed the NIH public accessÂ policy. Â Can you tell us about that, and the ATA’s role?</em></p>
<p>Absolutely! Â As I mentioned, the NIH is currently the only U.S. agencyÂ that has a policy guaranteeing the public access to the results of itsÂ funded research. The idea for the policy surfaced in 2003, when CongressÂ expressed concern that results of the public’s nearly $30 billion annualÂ investment in NIH research were not being made as widely accessible asÂ they should be. Â They asked the NIH Director to create a policy to addressÂ the problem, setting in motion what would become 4 long years of intenseÂ debate in the scientific community.Â </p>
<p>Not surprisingly, some journal publishers expressed immediate concern thatÂ any policy that provided access to research results through any otherÂ channels other than subscription-based journals would irreparably damageÂ their businesses. Because journal publishing is big business (nearly $9Â billion in annual revenues) publishers were able to use theirÂ long-established trade associations to aggressively lobby the NIH andÂ Congress against the establishment of such a policy.</p>
<p>The scientists, librarians, patients, and others who favored the policyÂ found themselves at a disadvantage, advocating as individual organizationsÂ without a coordinated voice. This was the main reason the ATA wasÂ established, and we quickly found ourselves at the center of the debate,Â helping to ensure that all stakeholders who favored the establishment of aÂ public access policy had a way to present a united message toÂ policymakers. Ultimately, Congress passed a landmark policy fullyÂ supported by the ATA that was enacted in 2008.Â </p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> <em>Who works at the ATA?</em></p>
<p>The ATA is essentially a virtual coalition. While we’ve grown to representÂ over 100 organizations, the organization’s advocacy is carried out by aÂ pretty small core group of staff (all of whom have other full time jobs!) Â Besides myself, the wonderful <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/nshockey">Nick Shockey</a> and AndreaÂ Higginbotham are responsible for the coalition’s online presence – keepingÂ our <a href="http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/">website</a> up to date,Â maintaining our <a href="http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/FRPAA2012.shtml">Congressional Action Center</a>, and keeping our members looped in on various emailÂ lists. Â We also rely on our incredibly active members to help usÂ continually refine our messages, and look for opportunities to spread theÂ word about our work. Â People like <a href="http://www.geneticalliance.org/bio.terry">Sharon Terry</a> at the <a href="http://www.geneticalliance.org">Genetic Alliance</a>, <a href="http://www.arl.org/arl/staff/adler.shtml">Prue Adler</a> at the <a href="http://www.arl.org">Association of Research Libraries</a>, and <a href="http://community.parentprojectmd.org/profile/PatFurlong">PatÂ Furlong</a> at <a href="http://www.parentprojectmd.org/site/PageServer?pagename=nws_index">ParentÂ Project Muscular Dystrophy</a> are prime examples of some of the peopleÂ who keep the ATA active on the front lines. Also: there is no cost to join the ATA (SPARC picks up the relatively lowÂ tab to keep it humming!); and the door is open for any organization to <a href="http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/membership/join/index.shtml">sign on as a member through our website</a>. If you’re interested, please let usÂ know!</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> <em>What happens next, with FRPAA? Â How does itÂ (hopefully) become law? What could derail it?</em></p>
<p>The next steps for FRPAA will be for us (and our advocates) to encourageÂ other members of Congress to sign onto the bill as co-sponsors. GeneratingÂ a nice, robust list of supporting members of Congress is key in helping toÂ keep the profile of the bill high. Â Procedurally, the bill will beÂ referred to Committee for further consideration; in the Senate, it will goÂ to the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, and in theÂ House, the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will receive theÂ bill. Â As with any legislation, FRPAA faces an uphill battle in anÂ election year, but given the growing attention this issue has received inÂ the past year (from the White House Office of Science and TechnologyÂ Policy, to the America COMPETES Act, to the recent Research Works Act),Â we’re hopeful that the bill can continue to advance.</p>
<p>I think the biggest threat is inaction, so vocal support from stakeholdersÂ will be crucial!</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> <em>What can people do to help FRPAA become law?</em></p>
<p>The most important thing that people – especially active scientists – canÂ do help advance this bill is to speak out in support of this bill. Â And weÂ need folks to speak out in two ways:</p>
<p>First, speak out to your members of Congress. The ATA has an <a href="http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/action_frpaa/FRPAA2012.shtml">ActionÂ Center</a> set up so that you can simply log on, pick your Senators andÂ Representatives, and automatically generate a letter asking them toÂ support FRPAA. Â The Action Center has all kinds of information about theÂ bill, including Talking Points, FAQ’a and even template letters, to helpÂ make the process as easy as possible. <a href="http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/action_frpaa/FRPAA2012.shtml">CheckÂ it out!</a></p>
<p>Second, speak out to your colleagues and your community. Â Blog about theÂ bill, or spread the word on Twitter. Â Consider writing an OpEd for yourÂ local newspaper, or writing an article for your organization’s newsletter.Â The more people become aware of this issue, the more they support it.Â Help us spread the word!</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> <em>Finally, how can people follow what the ATA is doing, andÂ keep up with your calls for action?</em></p>
<p>You can sign onto the Alliance for Taxpayer Access by going to <a href="http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/membership/join/index.shtml">ourÂ website</a>. There’s no charge.</p>
<p>If you simply want to be added to our email list for alerts and updates,Â contact either or myself (heather@arl.org) Â or Andrea HigginbothamÂ (andrea@arl.org), or follow us on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/sparc_na">@SPARC_NA</a>.</p>
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	<p>Elsevier is the world’s largest and most profitable scientific publisher, making a <a href="http://www.reed-elsevier.com/mediacentre/pressreleases/Documents/2010/Reed%20Elsevier%202009%20Results%20Announcement%2017%20February%202010%20FINAL.pdf">profit of 1.1 billion dollars on revenue of 3.2 billion dollars in 2009</a>. Elsevier have also been involved in many dubious practices, including the <a href="http://classic.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55679/">publishing of fake medical journals sponsored by pharmaceutical companies</a>, and the publication of what are most kindly described as <a href="http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/?s=el+naschie">extraordinarily shoddy</a> journals. Until 2009, parent company Reed Elsevier helped facilitate the international <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/may/30/armstrade.weaponstechnology">arms trade</a>. (This is just a tiny sample: for more, see Gowers’s blog post, or look at some of the links on <a href="http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Journal_publishing_reform">this page</a>.) For this, executives at Reed Elsevier are paid multi-million dollar salaries (see, e.g., <a href="http://people.forbes.com/profile/erik-engstrom/67513">1</a> and <a href="http://people.forbes.com/profile/ian-smith/127655">2</a>, and links therein).</p>
<p>All this is pretty widely known in the scientific community. However, Tim Gowers recently started a large-scale discussion of Elsevier by scientists, by <a href="http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/">blogging </a> to explain that he will no longer be submitting papers to Elsevier journals, refereeing for Elsevier, or otherwise supporting the company in any way. The post now has more than 120 comments, with many mathematicians and scientists voicing similar concerns.</p>
<p>Following up from the discussion on Gowers’s post, <a href="http://www.math.nyu.edu/~neylon/">Tyler Neylon</a> has created a website called <a href="http://thecostofknowledge.com/">The Cost of Knowledge</a> (see also <a href="http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/httpthecostofknowledge-com/">Gowers’s followup</a>) where researchers can declare their unwillingness to “support any Elsevier journal unless they radically change how they operate”. If you’re a mathematician or scientist who is unhappy with Elsevier’s practices, then consider signing the declaration. And while you’re at it, consider making your scientific papers open access, either by depositing them into open repositories such as the <a href="http://arxiv.org">arXiv</a>, or by submitting them to open access journals such as the <a href="http://plos.org">Public Library of Science</a>. Or do both.</p>
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	<p>That’s the question I address (very partially) in a <a href="http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/if-correlation-doesnt-imply-causation-then-what-does/">new post</a> on my <a href="http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/">data-driven intelligence blog</a>. The post reviews some of the recent work on causal inference done by people such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judea_Pearl">Judea Pearl</a>. In particular the post describes the elements of a causal calculus developed by Pearl, and explains how the calculus can be applied to infer causation, even when a randomized, controlled experiment is not possible.</p>
	
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	<p>Click through for event details. I’ve included a few private events at organizations where it’s possible some readers work.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.thetech.org/bayarea_science/#nielsen">The Tech Museum</a> (Bay Area) November 1
</li><li><a href="http://www.harvard.com/event/michael_nielsen/">Harvard Book Store / Cambridge Forum</a> (Boston) November 9
</li><li><a href="http://www.google.com/talks/authors/index.html">Authors@Google</a> (Bay Area) November 15.
</li><li><a href="http://www.sfpl.org/index.php?pg=1007006401">San Francisco Public Library</a> (San Francisco) November 15
</li><li>Microsoft Colloquium (Seattle) November 16
</li><li><a href="http://townhallseattle.org/science-michael-nielsen-a-new-era-of-networked-science/">Town Hall Seattle</a> (Seattle) November 16
</li><li><a href="http://www.powells.com/events">Powell’s Books</a> (Portland) November 17
</li><li><a href="http://www.livewireradio.org/">LiveWire</a> (Portland) November 18
</li><li>Howard Hughes Medical Institute (Washington DC) November 29
</li><li><a href="http://tedxsalonopensourcing-eorg.eventbrite.com/">TEDxPrincetonLibrary</a> (New Jersey) November 30
</li><li>Carnegie Council (New York) December 1
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On Twitter, I’ve been chatting with my friend Julia Galef about tensions between thinking creatively and thinking in a way that reduces error.
Of course, all other things being equal, I’m in favour of reducing error in our thinking!
However, all other things are not always equal.
In particular, I believe “there’s a tension, too, between behaviours which maximize accuracy &amp; which maximize creativity… A lot of important truths come from v. irrational ppl.”
Julia has summarized some of her thinking in a blog post, where she disagrees, writing: “I totally agree that we need more experimentation with â€œcrazy ideasâ€! Iâ€™m just skeptical that rationality is, on the margin, in tension with that goal.”
Before getting to Julia’s arguments, I want to flesh out the idea of a tension between maximizing creativity and maximizing accuracy.
Consider the following statement of Feynman’s, on the need to fool himself into believing that he had a creative edge in his work. He’s talking about his early ideas on how to develop a theory of electrons and light (which became, after many years, quantum electrodynamics). The statement is a little jarring to modern sensibilities, but please look past that to the idea he’s trying to convey:
  I told myself [of his competitors]: “They’re on the wrong track: I’ve got the track!” Now, in the end, I had to give up those ideas and go over to their ideas of retarded action and so on – my original idea of electrons not acting on themselves disappeared, but because I had been working so hard I found something. So, as long as I can drive myself one way or the other, it’s okay. Even if it’s an illusion, it still makes me go, and this is the kind of thing that keeps me going through the depths.
It’s like the African savages who are going into battle – first they have to gather around and beat drums and jump up and down to build up their energy to fight. I feel the same way, building up my energy by talking to myself and telling myself, “They are trying to do it this way, I’m going to do it that way” and then I get excited and I can go back to work again.
 
Many of the most creative scientists I know are extremely determined people, willing to explore unusual positions for years. Sometimes, those positions are well grounded. And sometimes, even well after the fact, it’s obvious they were fooling themselves, but somehow their early errors helped them find their way to the truth. They were, to use the mathematician Goro Shimura’s phrase “gifted with the special capability of making many mistakes, mostly in the right direction”.
An extreme example is the physicist Joseph Weber, who pioneered gravitational wave astronomy. The verdict of both his contemporaries and of history is that he was fooling himself: his systems simply didn’t work the way he thought. On the other hand, even though he fooled himself for decades, the principals on the (successful!) LIGO project have repeatedly acknowledged that his work was a major stimulus for them to work on finding gravitational waves. In retrospect, it’s difficult to be anything other than glad that Weber clung so tenaciously to his erroneous beliefs.
For me, what matters here is that: (a) much of Weber’s work was based on an unreasonable belief; and (b) on net, it helped speed up important discoveries.
Weber demonstrates my point in an extreme form. He was outright wrong, and remained so, and yet his erroneous example still served a useful purpose, helping inspire others to pursue ideas that eventually worked. In some sense, this is a collective (rather than individual) version of my point. More common is the case – like Feynman – of a person who may cling to mistaken beliefs for a long period, but ultimately uses that as a bridge to new discovery.
Turning to Julia’s post, she responds to my argument with: “In general, I think overconfidence stifles experimentation”, and argues that the great majority of people in society reject “crazy” ideas – say, seasteading – because they’re overconfident in conventional wisdom.
I agree that people often mistakenly reject unusual ideas because they’re overconfident in the conventional wisdom.
However, I don’t think it’s relevant to my argument. Being overconfident in beliefs that most people hold is not at all the same as being overconfident in beliefs that few people hold.
You may wonder if the underlying cognitive mechanisms are the same, and perhaps there’s some kind of broad disposition to overconfidence?
But if that was the case then you’d expect that someone overconfident in their own unusual ideas would, in other areas, also be overconfident in the conventional wisdom.
However, my anecdotal experience is that a colleague willing to pursue unusual ideas of their own is often particularly sympathetic to unusual ideas from other people in other areas. This suggests that being overconfident in your own crazy ideas isn’t likely to stifle other experimentation.
Julia also suggests several variants on the “strategy of temporarily suspending your disbelief and throwing yourself headlong into something for a while, allowing your emotional state to be as
if you were 100% confident.”
In a sense, Feynman and Weber were practicing an extreme version of this strategy. I don’t know Weber’s work well, but it’s notable that in the details of Feynman’s work he was good at ferreting out error, and not fooling himself. He wasn’t always rigorous – mathematicians have, for instance, spent decades trying to make the path integral rigorous – but there was usually a strong core argument. Indeed, Feynman delivered a very stimulating speech on the value of careful thought in scientific work.
How can this careful approach to the details of argument be reconciled with his remarks about the need to fool yourself in creative work?
I never met Feynman, and can’t say how he reconciled the two points of view. But my own approach in creative work, and I believe many others also take this approach, is to carve out a sort of creative cocoon around nascent ideas.
Consider Apple designer Jony Ive’s remarks at a memorial after Steve Jobs’ death:
  Steve used to say to me — and he used to say this a lot — “Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea.”
And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet simple ones, which in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound. And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.
 
To be creative, you need to recognize those barely formed thoughts, thoughts which are usually wrong and poorly formed in many ways, but which have some kernel of originality and importance and
truth. And if they seem important enough to be worth pursuing, you construct a creative cocoon around them, a set of stories you tell yourself to protect the idea not just from others, but from your own self doubts. The purpose of those stories isn’t to be an air tight defence. It’s to give you the confidence to nurture the idea, possibly for years, to find out if there’s something really there. 
And so, even someone who has extremely high standards for the final details of their work, may have an important component to their thinking which relies on rather woolly arguments. And they may well need to cling to that cocoon. Perhaps other approaches are possible. But my own experience is that this is often the case.
Postscript
Julia finishes her post with:
  One last point: Even if it turned out to be true that irrationality is necessary for innovators, thatâ€™s only a weak defense of your original claim, which was that Iâ€™m significantly overrating the value of rationality in general. Remember, â€œcoming up with brilliant new ideasâ€ is just one domain in which we could evaluate the potential value-add of increased rationality. There are lots of other domains to consider, such as designing policy, allocating philanthropic funds, military strategy, etc. We could certainly talk about those separately; for now, Iâ€™m just noting that you made this original claim about the dubious value of rationality in general, but then your argument focused on this one particular domain, innovation.
 
To clarify, I didn’t intend my claim to be in general: the tension I see is between creativity and accuracy.
That said, this tension does leak into other areas. 
If you’re a funder, say, trying to determine what to fund in AI research, you go and talk to AI experts. And many of those people are likely to have cultivated their own creative cocoons, which will inform their remarks. How a funder should deal with that is a separate essay. My point here is simply that this process of creative cocooning isn’t easily untangled from things like evaluation of work.
	
	
	
	Stefan Janusz from the Royal Society asked me to comment briefly on where I’d look for new ideas about the future of scientific publishing. Here’s my response, crossposted to the Royal Society’s blog about scientific publishing.
It’s tempting to assume the key ideas will come from leading scientists, journal publishers, librarians, policy makers, and so on. 
While these are all important groups, I don’t think they’re going to invent the key ideas behind the future of scientific publishing. That will be done primarily by two groups of outsiders: exceptionally creative user interface designers, and people who design group experiences.
Let me unpack both those statements.
The first important group is user interface designers. Ultimately, scientific journals are a user interface to humanity’s scientific knowledge, and people such as Henry Oldenburg, Johannes Gutenberg, and Aldus Manutius were all interface designers.
Now, many people working in science don’t understand the importance or difficulty of user interface design. It’s tempting to think it’s either about “making things pretty” or about “making things easy to use”. And, in fact, much work on interface design doesn’t go much deeper than those tasks. But the designers I’m talking about are doing something much deeper. They’re attempting to invent powerful new representations for knowledge, representations that will let us manipulate and comprehend knowledge in new ways.
Think, for example, of how the invention of user interface ideas such as the hyperlink and the search box have transformed how we relate to knowledge. Or take a look at some of Bret Victor’s beautiful designs for changing how we think about systems and mathematics. In a more playful vein, look at Marco ten Bosch’s gorgeous game Miegakure, which challenges people to learn to think in four spatial dimensions. Or consider the way programming languages such as Coq and Logo change the way people interface to mathematical knowledge.
The second group I named is people who design group experiences. In addition to being user interfaces to scientific knowledge, journals are also a medium for collective intelligence. The design of media for collective intelligence isn’t yet a widely recognized field. But there are many people doing amazing things in this area. Just as a random sample, not necessarily related to science, take a look at Ned Gulley’s work on the Mathworks programming competition. Or economist Robin Hanson on idea futures. Or even people such as the musician Bobby McFerrin, who understands crowd behaviour as well as anyone. Or Jane McGonigal and Elan Lee’s work on creating games based on “puzzles and challenges that no single person could solve on their own”. This broad vein of work is a key direction from which important new fundamental ideas will ultimately come.
Let me finish by identifying a questionable assumption implicit in the question “Where will the future of scientific publishing come from?” The assumption is that there will be a single future for scientific publishing, a kind of jazzed-up version of the scientific article, and it’s simply up to enterprising publishers to figure out what it is.
I believe that, if things go well, there will instead be a proliferation of media types. Some will be informal, cognitive media for people to think and carry out experiments with. Look, for example, at some of Peter Norvig’s ipython notebooks. Others will be collaborative environments for building up knowledge – look at Tim Gowers’s and Terry Tao’s use of blogs and wikis to solve mathematical problems collaboratively. And some will be recognizable descendants of the “paper of record” model common in journals today. So what I hope we’ll see is a much richer and more varied ecosystem, and one that continues to change and improve rapidly over many decades
	
	
	 Chapter 2 of my free online book about “Neural Networks and Deep Learning” is now available. The chapter is an in-depth explanation of the backpropagation algorithm. Backpropagation is the workhorse of learning in neural networks, and a key component in modern deep learning systems.ï»¿ Enjoy!
	
	My new essay on the use of digital media to explain scientific ideas is here.
	
	
	I am delighted to announce that the first chapter of my book “Neural Networks and Deep Learning” is now freely available online here.
The chapter explains the basic ideas behind neural networks, including how they learn. I show how powerful these ideas are by writing a short program which uses neural networks to solve a hard problem — recognizing handwritten digits. The chapter also takes a brief look at how deep learning works.
The book’s landing page gives a broader view on the book. And I’ve written a more in-depth discussion of the philosophy behind the book.
Finally, if you’ve read this far I hope you’ll consider supporting my Indiegogo campaign for the book, which will give you access to perks like early drafts of later chapters.
	
	
	
	In September of 2012, a team of scientists released a photograph showing the most distant parts of the Universe ever seen by any human being. They obtained the photograph by pointing the Hubble Space Telescope at a single tiny patch of sky, gradually building up an image over a total of 23 days of observation. It’s an otherwise undistinguished patch of sky, within the little-known constellation Fornax. It’s less than one hundredth the size of the full moon, and appears totally empty to the naked eye. Here’s what’s seen with the Hubble Telescope:
This image is known as the Hubble Extreme Deep Field. It contains 5,500 galaxies, each of which, in turn, contains billions of stars. This region of sky ordinarily looks empty because these galaxies are far too dim to be seen with the naked eye. Some of the galaxies are more than 13 billion light years away. We are seeing them as they were just a few hundred million years after the big bang, near the dawn of time. If you have the eyes to see, this is what deep space and the early history of the universe looks like.
One of the many striking things about the Hubble Extreme Deep Field is that it’s beautiful. Another work revealing beauty in nature is a 1999 art piece by a Dutch-Canadian artist named Juan Geuer. In a darkened room, Geuer shone orange laser light through a single droplet of water, projecting the light onto a wall. The resulting play of light is spectacular. We see the changing internal structure of the droplet, and the interplay of surface tension and gravity, a marvellous mix of refraction, reflection, and diffraction. Here’s a recording of Geuer’s art piece, known as  Water in Suspense . (Some browsers don’t start the video at the right moment — move to 13:33 in the recording if that’s the case).
It’s not a typical action-packed online video. It moves slowly, slowly,… and then WHOOSH, a sudden, rapid change. I suggest watching it for at least a minute or two. During that time you’ll start to learn how to watch the droplet. Indeed, getting a feel for the multiple timescales at which the droplet changes is part of what we learn from the work.
 Water in Suspense reveals a hidden world. We discover a rich structure immanent in the water droplet, a structure not ordinarily accessible to our senses. In this way it’s similar to the Hubble Extreme Deep Field, which also reveals a hidden world. Both are examples of what I call Super-realist art, art which doesn’t just capture what we can see directly with our eyes or hear with our ears, but which uses new sensors and methods of visualization to reveal a world that we cannot directly perceive. It’s art being used to reveal science.
Although I’m not an artist or an art critic, I find Super-realist art fascinating. Works like the Hubble Extreme Deep Field and Water in Suspense give us concrete, vivid representations of deep space and the interior structure of a water droplet. For most of us, these are usually little more than dry abstractions, remote from our understanding. By creating vivid representations, Super-realist art provides us with a new way of thinking about such phenomena. And so in this essay I explore Super-realist art: what it is, how it relates to other modes of art, and why it is flourishing today.
I’m a technologist and scientist, a person whose main interests are in areas such as machine learning, data science, and, especially, the development of cognitive tools (i.e., tools to extend human thought). It may seem strange that I’m writing an essay about art. But thinking about technology from this viewpoint gives a perspective that’s radically different to the usual take. It’s a flip side, an artistic perspective that sees technology and, in particular, Super-realism, as a means to discover new aesthetics and new representations of reality. That means Super-realism is not just of interest to artists, but can also inform technologists and scientists, giving them a new way of thinking about how we can develop tools that extend human thought.
In discussing Super-realism I will ignore many of the usual labels we use to understand art. Instead, I’ll develop a caricature which divides much of Western art into just three categories: Realism, Post-realism, and Super-realism. I believe this way of thinking illuminates Super-realism, and ask the indulgence of any experts on art history who happen to be reading.
Until the latter part of the 19th century Realism was one of the main aspirations of much Western art [1]. Realist art aimed at capturing the reality accessible to our senses. My favourite Realist artist is Rembrandt:
Such paintings seem so true-to-life that it is as though the artist has captured an element of objective reality. Suppose aliens visited Earth after a cataclysm wiped out all traces of humanity, except for a few Rembrandt self-portraits that somehow survived. I believe the aliens could understand much about both Rembrandt and humanity from those portraits, including perhaps even something of Rembrandt’s personality, his habits, his likes, and his dislikes.
But even the most talented Realist artists capture only a tiny slice of reality. Rembrandt’s self-portraits, as real as they appear, omit nearly all the biological and mental processes going on in Rembrandt’s body and mind. Suppose, for example, we could zoom in on his face, seeing it at 10 times magnification, then 100, then 1,000, and so on. At each level of magnification a new world would be revealed, of pores and cells and microbes. And there is so much structure to understand in each of these worlds, from the incredibly complex ecology of microbes on the skin, to the inner workings of cells. Consider this video simulating the inside of a cell:
This is not to criticise Rembrandt and the other Realists. On their own terms, they succeeded. But what Super-realism shows is that we can see far deeper into the world, and find great beauty in so doing.
In the 20th century Western art moved away from Realism, and Post-realist art became increasingly influential. To describe how Super-realism relates to Post-realism I’ll use the work of Monet. Monet was an early Post-realist painter, one working at the boundary between Realism and Post-realism. Here’s one of Monet’s great works, the &#34;Water Lillies&#34; tryptych, housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York:
 (credit) 
Unfortunately, when viewed on a computer screen or as a small print, this tryptych looks washed out and insipid, a poor imitation of the Realists. But when you see the original — 6 and a half feet high, and 42 feet long — the effect is jaw-dropping. Monet’s genius, and what made his painting so overwhelming, was a deep understanding of how humans see. He was a master illusionist who understood how to trick the viewer’s brain into seeing something much, much better than a realistic rendition. This only works at scale. When &#34;Water Lillies&#34; is shrunk to print size, the psychology of perception changes, and the illusion vanishes. I don’t understand why this is. I’ve read something of the theory of Monet and his fellow Impressionists, and don’t find those explanations convincing. What I do know is that Monet’s shimmering pond loses its glory. It looks fake, less than a literal rendition, merely a washed out print. But somehow, in the original, Monet was able to use his understanding of human perception to evoke water lillies in a fashion more spectacular than a Realist painting could ever have achieved.
In Post-realism, art isn’t about directly representing an objective, independent reality. Instead, it’s about creating new types of relationship between the art piece and the human mind. Monet and his fellow Impressionists were on the boundary between Realism and Post-Realism, since their works still aimed to evoke an objective, independent reality, albeit not by a direct representation. But Post-realism was pushed much further by later artists, such as Picasso, M. C. Escher, and Kandinsky:
These works gradually shift away from representing reality, and toward exploring the relationship between art piece and viewer. Escher, for example, used quirks in the human visual system to evoke impossible realities. Abstract artists such as Kandinsky take this idea still further, and it is developed to an extreme in the work of abstract minimalists such as John McLaughlin, a pioneer in what is known as Hard-edge painting:
At first glance this (and much of McLaughlin’s other work) looks ludicrous. But it makes more sense when you understand that McLaughlin was exploring how people respond to art. His earlier works were more complex. But he gradually simplified his work as he realized that people can have novel responses even to simple stimuli.
Abstract minimalism annoys many people. The approach can and has led to fakery and foolishness on the part of some artists. But my point here is neither to criticise nor to praise. Instead, it’s to understand what artists such as McLaughlin were up to. Whereas the Realist artists believed that virtuosity came from depicting part of reality with high fidelity, in Post-realism virtuosity may come from creating a novel relationship between art piece and viewer.
Super-realism changes art again. Virtuosity becomes about revealing hidden worlds and discovering new aesthetics. Take a look at the following video, which shows — in extreme slow motion! — a packet of light passing through a bottle. Ordinarily that passage takes less than a nanosecond, but the video slows the passage down by a factor of 10 billion, so we can see it:
In a way, Super-realism is a return to the aims of Realism, back to representing reality. But what’s new about Super-realism is the challenge (and opportunity!) to find ways of representing previously unseen parts of the world.
Most of my examples of Super-realist art have come from people who regard themselves mainly as scientists, not as artists. However, there are many artists doing Super-realist art. I’ve drawn my examples mostly from scientists merely because I’ve found that artists’ work is often more exploratory, and thus requires more background explanation, making it less suited for an essay such as this.
Although Super-realism’s flourishing is recent, its origins go back centuries. In 1610, Galileo published a short book entitled Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius), which contained several images showing the moon in unprecedented detail, as observed by Galileo through one of his new telescopes:
In a similar vein, in 1665 Robert Hooke published a bestselling book entitled Micrographia, which used the newly-invented microscope to reveal the world of the very small. Hooke’s book included the first ever drawings of biological cells, as well as drawings showing animals such as fleas in unprecedented detail:
While Super-realism isn’t new, that doesn’t mean it’s yet in the artistic mainstream. Many people don’t consider works such as the Hubble Extreme Deep Field or the light-in-a-bottle video to be art. (I would not be surprised if this includes the creators of those works.) Even works more explicitly artistic in intent, such as Water in Suspense, are viewed as borderline. But I believe that each of these works reveals a new aesthetic, an aesthetic generated by the scientific principles underlying the phenomenon being represented. And insofar as they reveal a new aesthetic, I believe these works are art.
Although Super-realism isn’t yet in the artistic mainstream, it has influenced parts of that mainstream. For example, in the 1980s the film diector and cinematographer Ron Fricke used time-lapse photography to reveal new aspects of the everyday world, in documentary films such as  Chronos  [2]:
Fricke was not, of course, the first to use time-lapse photography in this way. However, his films have won wide acclaim, and inspired many other artists to develop time-lapse photography further as an artistic medium.
Super-realism has grown rapidly in the past twenty to thirty years. Three forces are driving that growth.
First, far more people can access and learn to use scientific instruments. Recall Juan Geuer and his virtuoso home-made laser light show. There are people building everything from home-made bubble chambers to balloons exploring the upper atmosphere. These are not isolated curiosities, but rather part of a rapidly expanding social phenomenon that has been called by many names: the DIY movement, citizen science, the Maker movement. Whatever it is, it’s growing, fed by the expansion of online and mail-order suppliers that serve niche markets, and by the growth of online (and, increasingly, offline) communities of people who work with these instruments and teach one another.
Second, the data being taken by many of these instruments is being shared openly, online. In the 1980s if a scientist used a telescope to take a photograph, likely no more than a few dozen people would ever touch the photographic plate. Now more than a billion people can download data from the Hubble Telescope, and find new ways to visualize it. Some of the most extraordinary visualizations of the Earth are made using data released openly by NASA. Any scientific project which releases data enables others to find new ways of making meaning from that data.
Third, we’re collectively building a powerful suite of tools to reveal these new worlds. For example, as I write there are more than 25,000 open source visualization projects available on the code repository GitHub. Most of those projects are, of coure, experiments that will be abandoned. But there are also many powerful tools that give people incredible abilities to make and reveal beauty. It’s no wonder Super-realism is flowering.
Story-tellers say that reality is often stranger and more interesting than fiction. I believe this is true for all art. The reason is that nature is more imaginative than we, and as we probe deeper into nature, we will continue to discover new aesthetics and new forms of beauty. I believe these new aesthetics will stimulate art for decades or centuries to come.
 If you enjoyed this essay, you may wish to subscribe to my blog, or follow me on Twitter. 
 Footnotes 
[1] I am referring to Realist art broadly, not the 19th century artistic movement known as Realism. I’m also certainly not claiming that all Western art was Realist until the late 19th century, merely that the idea of representing objective reality was often deeply influential.
[2] The YouTube video shows images from Chronos, but the music is from another source. Unfortunately, I could not find a good unabridged excerpt from Chronos online.
 Acknowledgements: This essay arose out of many conversations with Jen Dodd, especially about her work with the Subtle Technologies Festival of Art and Science. Thanks also to Miriah Meyer and Lee Smolin for conversations that helped stimulate this essay.
	
	
	
	As many of you no doubt know, the FederalÂ Research Public Access Act; (FRPAA, pronounced fur-pa) was introducedÂ into the US Congress a few days past. Â It’s a terrific bill, which, if itÂ passes, will have the effect of making all US Government-funded scientificÂ research accessible to the public within 6 months of publication.
Open access legislation like FRPAA doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. Â TheÂ Alliance for Taxpayer AccessÂ (ATA) is a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group that works to promote openÂ access policies within the US Government. Â The ATA worked with CongressÂ (and many other organizations) to help pass the NIH public access policy in 2008,Â and have been working for the past several years with members of CongressÂ on FRPAA.
In this post, I interview Heather Joseph, the Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), which convenes the ATA, andÂ ask her about the bill, about next steps, and about how people can help.
 Q: Heather, thanks for agreeing to be interviewed! What is FRPAA, and what’s it trying to accomplish? 
Thank you, Michael – I’m happy to talk about this bill!
In a nutshell, FRPAA is designed to make sure that the results of scientific research paid for by the public can be accessed by the public.Â Most people are surprised to learn that this isn’t automatically the case;Â they assume that if their tax dollars pay for a research study, theyÂ should be entitled to read the results. Â But the reality is quiteÂ different. Â Right now, if you want to access articles that report onÂ publicly funded science, you have pay to do so, either through a subscription to a scientific journal (which can cost thousands of dollarsÂ a year), or though pay-per-view, which can easily cost upwards of $30 perÂ article. This presents an often-unsurmountable obstacle for exactly thoseÂ people who most want (or need) access – scientists, students, teachers,Â physicians, entrepreneurs – who too often find themselves unable to affordÂ such fees, and end up locked out of the game.
Out of eleven federal agencies that fund science here in the UnitedÂ States, only one – the National Institutes of Health – actually has aÂ policy that ensures that the public can freely access the results of theirÂ funded research online. FRPAA is designed to tackle this issue head on,Â and to make sure that the science stemming from all U.S. agencies is madeÂ freely available to anyone who wants to use. it.
FRPAA is a very straightforward bill – it simply says that if you receiveÂ money from a U.S. Agency to do scientific research, you agree (upfront) toÂ make any articles reporting on the results available to the public in aÂ freely accessible online database, no later than six months afterÂ publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
 Q: What is the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA)?Â What role did the ATA play in advocating for FRPAA? 
The ATA is a coalition of groups who are working together to try and craftÂ a positive solution to this problem. Â In 2004, the library community (led by my home organization, SPARC) decided that there must be other groupsÂ who shared our frustration over the current access situation. We reachedÂ out to research organizations, patient advocacy groups, consumer organizations, publishers, student groups – anyone we could think of whoÂ shared the goal of unlocking access to taxpayer funded research. Â WeÂ quickly attracted more than 80 organizations, representing millions ofÂ individuals. This created a whole new opportunity to advocate for nationalÂ access policies from a much stronger position… there really isÂ strength in numbers!
The ATA has evolved into the leading advocacy organization for taxpayerÂ access to the results of taxpayer funded research. We knock on Congressional doors, talking with policymakers about Â the current barriers Â to access, and about new opportunities for scientific progress once those barriers are brought down.Â We are all about leveragingÂ the public’s investment in science by making sure that anyone who isÂ interested can easily access and build on this research. That’s howÂ science advances, after all.
 Q: In 2008, the Congress passed the NIH public accessÂ policy. Â Can you tell us about that, and the ATA’s role? 
Absolutely! Â As I mentioned, the NIH is currently the only U.S. agencyÂ that has a policy guaranteeing the public access to the results of itsÂ funded research. The idea for the policy surfaced in 2003, when CongressÂ expressed concern that results of the public’s nearly $30 billion annualÂ investment in NIH research were not being made as widely accessible asÂ they should be. Â They asked the NIH Director to create a policy to addressÂ the problem, setting in motion what would become 4 long years of intenseÂ debate in the scientific community.Â 
Not surprisingly, some journal publishers expressed immediate concern thatÂ any policy that provided access to research results through any otherÂ channels other than subscription-based journals would irreparably damageÂ their businesses. Because journal publishing is big business (nearly $9Â billion in annual revenues) publishers were able to use theirÂ long-established trade associations to aggressively lobby the NIH andÂ Congress against the establishment of such a policy.
The scientists, librarians, patients, and others who favored the policyÂ found themselves at a disadvantage, advocating as individual organizationsÂ without a coordinated voice. This was the main reason the ATA wasÂ established, and we quickly found ourselves at the center of the debate,Â helping to ensure that all stakeholders who favored the establishment of aÂ public access policy had a way to present a united message toÂ policymakers. Ultimately, Congress passed a landmark policy fullyÂ supported by the ATA that was enacted in 2008.Â 
 Q: Who works at the ATA? 
The ATA is essentially a virtual coalition. While we’ve grown to representÂ over 100 organizations, the organization’s advocacy is carried out by aÂ pretty small core group of staff (all of whom have other full time jobs!) Â Besides myself, the wonderful Nick Shockey and AndreaÂ Higginbotham are responsible for the coalition’s online presence – keepingÂ our website up to date,Â maintaining our Congressional Action Center, and keeping our members looped in on various emailÂ lists. Â We also rely on our incredibly active members to help usÂ continually refine our messages, and look for opportunities to spread theÂ word about our work. Â People like Sharon Terry at the Genetic Alliance, Prue Adler at the Association of Research Libraries, and PatÂ Furlong at ParentÂ Project Muscular Dystrophy are prime examples of some of the peopleÂ who keep the ATA active on the front lines. Also: there is no cost to join the ATA (SPARC picks up the relatively lowÂ tab to keep it humming!); and the door is open for any organization to sign on as a member through our website. If you’re interested, please let usÂ know!
 Q: What happens next, with FRPAA? Â How does itÂ (hopefully) become law? What could derail it? 
The next steps for FRPAA will be for us (and our advocates) to encourageÂ other members of Congress to sign onto the bill as co-sponsors. GeneratingÂ a nice, robust list of supporting members of Congress is key in helping toÂ keep the profile of the bill high. Â Procedurally, the bill will beÂ referred to Committee for further consideration; in the Senate, it will goÂ to the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, and in theÂ House, the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will receive theÂ bill. Â As with any legislation, FRPAA faces an uphill battle in anÂ election year, but given the growing attention this issue has received inÂ the past year (from the White House Office of Science and TechnologyÂ Policy, to the America COMPETES Act, to the recent Research Works Act),Â we’re hopeful that the bill can continue to advance.
I think the biggest threat is inaction, so vocal support from stakeholdersÂ will be crucial!
 Q: What can people do to help FRPAA become law? 
The most important thing that people – especially active scientists – canÂ do help advance this bill is to speak out in support of this bill. Â And weÂ need folks to speak out in two ways:
First, speak out to your members of Congress. The ATA has an ActionÂ Center set up so that you can simply log on, pick your Senators andÂ Representatives, and automatically generate a letter asking them toÂ support FRPAA. Â The Action Center has all kinds of information about theÂ bill, including Talking Points, FAQ’a and even template letters, to helpÂ make the process as easy as possible. CheckÂ it out! 
Second, speak out to your colleagues and your community. Â Blog about theÂ bill, or spread the word on Twitter. Â Consider writing an OpEd for yourÂ local newspaper, or writing an article for your organization’s newsletter.Â The more people become aware of this issue, the more they support it.Â Help us spread the word!
 Q: Finally, how can people follow what the ATA is doing, andÂ keep up with your calls for action? 
You can sign onto the Alliance for Taxpayer Access by going to ourÂ website. There’s no charge.
If you simply want to be added to our email list for alerts and updates,Â contact either or myself (heather@arl.org) Â or Andrea HigginbothamÂ (andrea@arl.org), or follow us on Twitter at @SPARC_NA.
	
	
	
	Elsevier is the world’s largest and most profitable scientific publisher, making a profit of 1.1 billion dollars on revenue of 3.2 billion dollars in 2009. Elsevier have also been involved in many dubious practices, including the publishing of fake medical journals sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, and the publication of what are most kindly described as extraordinarily shoddy journals. Until 2009, parent company Reed Elsevier helped facilitate the international arms trade. (This is just a tiny sample: for more, see Gowers’s blog post, or look at some of the links on this page.) For this, executives at Reed Elsevier are paid multi-million dollar salaries (see, e.g., 1 and 2, and links therein).
All this is pretty widely known in the scientific community. However, Tim Gowers recently started a large-scale discussion of Elsevier by scientists, by blogging  to explain that he will no longer be submitting papers to Elsevier journals, refereeing for Elsevier, or otherwise supporting the company in any way. The post now has more than 120 comments, with many mathematicians and scientists voicing similar concerns.
Following up from the discussion on Gowers’s post, Tyler Neylon has created a website called The Cost of Knowledge (see also Gowers’s followup) where researchers can declare their unwillingness to “support any Elsevier journal unless they radically change how they operate”. If you’re a mathematician or scientist who is unhappy with Elsevier’s practices, then consider signing the declaration. And while you’re at it, consider making your scientific papers open access, either by depositing them into open repositories such as the arXiv, or by submitting them to open access journals such as the Public Library of Science. Or do both.
	
	
	That’s the question I address (very partially) in a new post on my data-driven intelligence blog. The post reviews some of the recent work on causal inference done by people such as Judea Pearl. In particular the post describes the elements of a causal calculus developed by Pearl, and explains how the calculus can be applied to infer causation, even when a randomized, controlled experiment is not possible.
	
	
	Click through for event details. I’ve included a few private events at organizations where it’s possible some readers work.
 The Tech Museum (Bay Area) November 1
  Harvard Book Store / Cambridge Forum (Boston) November 9
  Authors@Google (Bay Area) November 15.
  San Francisco Public Library (San Francisco) November 15
 Microsoft Colloquium (Seattle) November 16
  Town Hall Seattle (Seattle) November 16
  Powell’s Books (Portland) November 17
  LiveWire (Portland) November 18
 Howard Hughes Medical Institute (Washington DC) November 29
  TEDxPrincetonLibrary (New Jersey) November 30
 Carnegie Council (New York) December 1
Michael Nielsen
https://michaelnielsen.org/blog/
https://michaelnielsen.org/blog/quantum-computing-for-the-determined/
Quantum computing for the determined
2011-06-10
Siva
<div><div>
	<p>I’ve posted to YouTube a series of 22 short videos giving an introduction to quantum computing. Here’s the first video:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Below I list the remaining 21 videos, which cover subjects including the basic model of quantum computing, entanglement, superdense coding, and quantum teleportation.</p>
<p>To work through the videos you need to be comfortable with basic linear algebra, and with assimilating new mathematical terminology. If you’re not, working through the videos will be arduous at best! Apart from that background, the main prerequisite is determination, and the willingness to work more than once over material you don’t fully understand.</p>
<p>In particular, you don’t need a background in quantum mechanics to follow the videos. </p>
<p>The videos are short, from 5-15 minutes, and each video focuses on explaining one main concept from quantum mechanics or quantum computing. In taking this approach I was inspired by the excellent <a href="http://www.khanacademy.org/">Khan Academy</a>.</p>
<p>The course is not complete — I originally planned about 8 more videos. The extra videos would complete my summary of basic quantum mechanics (+2 videos), and cover reversible computing (+2 videos), and Grover’s quantum search algorithm (+4 videos). Unfortunately, work responsibilities that couldn’t be put aside meant I had to put the remaining videos on hold. If lots of people work through the existing videos and are keen for more, then I’ll find time to finish them off. As it is, I hope the incomplete series is still useful.</p>
<p>One minor gotcha: originally, I was hoping to integrate the videos with a set of exercises. Again, time prevented me from doing this: there are no exercises. But as a remnant of this plan, in at least one video (video 7, the video on unitary matrices preserving length, and possibly elsewhere) I leave something “to the exercises”. Hopefully it’s pretty clear what needs to be filled in at this point, and viewers can supply the missing details.</p>
<p>Let me finish with two comments on approach. First, the videos treat quantum bits — qubits — as abstract mathematical entities, in a way similar to how we can think of conventional (classical) bits as 0 or 1, not as voltages in a circuit, or magnetic domains on a hard disk. I <em>don’t</em> get into the details of physical implementation at all. This approach bugs some people a lot, and others not at all. If you think it’ll bug you, these videos aren’t for you.</p>
<p>Second, the videos focus on the nuts-and-bolts of how things work. If you want a high-level overview of quantum computing, why it’s interesting, and what quantum computers may be capable of, there are many available online, a Google search away. Here’s a <a href="http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/The_Limits_of_Quantum_Computers.pdf">nice one</a>, from Scott Aaronson. You may also enjoy David Deutsch’s <a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.41.2382&amp;rep=rep1&amp;type=pdf">original paper</a> about quantum computing. It’s a bit harder to read than an article in Wired or Scientific American, but it’s worth the effort, for the paper gives a lot of insight into some of the fundamental reasons for thinking about quantum computing in the first place. Such higher-level articles may be helpful to read in conjunction with the videos.</p>
<p>Here’s the full list of videos, including the first one above. Note that because this really does get into the nuts and bolts of how things work, it also builds cumulatively. You can’t just skip straight to the quantum teleportation video and hope to understand it, you’ll need to work through the earlier videos, unless you already understand their content.</p>
<h3>The basics</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2q1PuI2RFI">The qubit</a>
</li><li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo-RZ27o3Uw">Tips for working with qubits</a>
</li><li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDDSjsQLv80">Our first quantum gate: the quantum NOT gate</a>
</li><li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6gOp_o7Bi8">The Hadamard gate</a>
</li><li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMbh0GgCN7I">Measuring a qubit</a>
</li><li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWKuH9emuag">General single-qubit gates</a>
</li><li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foNuXVzOtW0">Why unitaries are the only matrices which preserve length</a>
</li><li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYfVRyBHnCA">Examples of single-qubit quantum gates</a>
</li><li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLF-oHaXLtE">The controlled-NOT gate</a>
</li><li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2okky5vD8k">Universal quantum computation</a>
</li></ul>
<h3>Superdense coding</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5rCn593Dig">Superdense coding: how to send two bits using one qubit</a>
</li><li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2pYwsLMXo4">Preparing the Bell state</a>
</li><li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRglXdLI7KY">What’s so special about entangled states anyway?</a>
</li><li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT0xj5lSFkY">Distinguishing quantum states</a>
</li><li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC7J5JbiJaE">Superdense coding redux: putting it all together</a>
</li></ul>
<h3>Quantum teleportation</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG_9JWsrKtM">Partial measurements</a>
</li><li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU6M8EA2JRs">Partial measurements in an arbitrary basis</a>
</li><li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wZ35c3oYUE">Quantum teleportation</a>
</li><li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yfk7J1kBegw">Quantum teleportation: discussion</a>
</li></ul>
<h3>The postulates of quantum mechanics (TBC)</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf_CyFwKbPQ">The postulates of quantum mechanics I: states and state space</a>
</li><li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZqRUH1uSlE">The postulates of quantum mechanics II: dynamics</a>
</li><li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Amk46VKgaeg">The postulates of quantum mechanics III: measurement</a>
</li></ul>
<p><em>Thanks to <a href="http://jendodd.com/">Jen Dodd</a>, <a href="http://www.igvita.com/">Ilya Grigorik</a> and <a href="http://www.hassanmasum.com/">Hassan Masum</a> for feedback on the videos, and for many enjoyable discussions about open education.</em></p>
<p><em>If you enjoyed these videos, you may be interested in my forthcoming book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Discovery-New-Networked-Science/dp/product-description/0691148902">Reinventing Discovery</a>, where I describe how online tools and open science are transforming the way scientific discoveries are made.</em></p>
	</div>||||I|||| Skip to content
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 Michael Nielsen
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 Quantum computing for the determined

 by Michael Nielsen on June 10, 2011

 I’ve posted to YouTube a series of 22 short videos giving an introduction to quantum computing. Here’s the first video:

 Below I list the remaining 21 videos, which cover subjects including the basic model of quantum computing, entanglement, superdense coding, and quantum teleportation.

 To work through the videos you need to be comfortable with basic linear algebra, and with assimilating new mathematical terminology. If you’re not, working through the videos will be arduous at best! Apart from that background, the main prerequisite is determination, and the willingness to work more than once over material you don’t fully understand.

 In particular, you don’t need a background in quantum mechanics to follow the videos.

 The videos are short, from 5-15 minutes, and each video focuses on explaining one main concept from quantum mechanics or quantum computing. In taking this approach I was inspired by the excellent Khan Academy.

 The course is not complete — I originally planned about 8 more videos. The extra videos would complete my summary of basic quantum mechanics (+2 videos), and cover reversible computing (+2 videos), and Grover’s quantum search algorithm (+4 videos). Unfortunately, work responsibilities that couldn’t be put aside meant I had to put the remaining videos on hold. If lots of people work through the existing videos and are keen for more, then I’ll find time to finish them off. As it is, I hope the incomplete series is still useful.

 One minor gotcha: originally, I was hoping to integrate the videos with a set of exercises. Again, time prevented me from doing this: there are no exercises. But as a remnant of this plan, in at least one video (video 7, the video on unitary matrices preserving length, and possibly elsewhere) I leave something “to the exercises”. Hopefully it’s pretty clear what needs to be filled in at this point, and viewers can supply the missing details.

 Let me finish with two comments on approach. First, the videos treat quantum bits — qubits — as abstract mathematical entities, in a way similar to how we can think of conventional (classical) bits as 0 or 1, not as voltages in a circuit, or magnetic domains on a hard disk. I don’t get into the details of physical implementation at all. This approach bugs some people a lot, and others not at all. If you think it’ll bug you, these videos aren’t for you.

 Second, the videos focus on the nuts-and-bolts of how things work. If you want a high-level overview of quantum computing, why it’s interesting, and what quantum computers may be capable of, there are many available online, a Google search away. Here’s a nice one, from Scott Aaronson. You may also enjoy David Deutsch’s original paper about quantum computing. It’s a bit harder to read than an article in Wired or Scientific American, but it’s worth the effort, for the paper gives a lot of insight into some of the fundamental reasons for thinking about quantum computing in the first place. Such higher-level articles may be helpful to read in conjunction with the videos.

 Here’s the full list of videos, including the first one above. Note that because this really does get into the nuts and bolts of how things work, it also builds cumulatively. You can’t just skip straight to the quantum teleportation video and hope to understand it, you’ll need to work through the earlier videos, unless you already understand their content.

 The basics

 * The qubit
 * Tips for working with qubits
 * Our first quantum gate: the quantum NOT gate
 * The Hadamard gate
 * Measuring a qubit
 * General single-qubit gates
 * Why unitaries are the only matrices which preserve length
 * Examples of single-qubit quantum gates
 * The controlled-NOT gate
 * Universal quantum computation

 Superdense coding

 * Superdense coding: how to send two bits using one qubit
 * Preparing the Bell state
 * What’s so special about entangled states anyway?
 * Distinguishing quantum states
 * Superdense coding redux: putting it all together

 Quantum teleportation

 * Partial measurements
 * Partial measurements in an arbitrary basis
 * Quantum teleportation
 * Quantum teleportation: discussion

 The postulates of quantum mechanics (TBC)

 * The postulates of quantum mechanics I: states and state space
 * The postulates of quantum mechanics II: dynamics
 * The postulates of quantum mechanics III: measurement

 Thanks to Jen Dodd, Ilya Grigorik and Hassan Masum for feedback on the videos, and for many enjoyable discussions about open education.

 If you enjoyed these videos, you may be interested in my forthcoming book, Reinventing Discovery, where I describe how online tools and open science are transforming the way scientific discoveries are made.

 From → Uncategorized

 93 Comments
 1. Johan S permalink

 This is really amazing and great, I hope you finish the remaining videos so we can have a complete course. It really is appreciated a lot.

 2. Michael permalink

 I’ve not used linear algebra in depth (I’m a software developer) in over 16 years. I definitely would like to see the last 8 videos made, if you have the time!

 You bring up the Khan Academy in the course and blog – have you considered working with him to make this one of his courses?

 3. Henning permalink

 Want to join into the chorus and express my hope that you will find time to continue the video course. This is just a delightful introduction to QC. It is very instructive to see QM treated as abstracted mathematical framework for computational purposes. Inspired way to approach the subject.

 I feel strongly this work should get about the same exposure as the better open courseware lectures on offer by MIT (i.e. viewership in the thousands rather than hundreds). To this end I took the liberty to submit a story to slashdot.org in order to promote this course.

 Hopefully, this will gin up some viewership and maybe enough intellectually curious people will be sufficiently determined to make it through all videos.

 4. Michael permalink

 @Henning – And Slashdot is exactly how I came across this. Thanks!

 5. K Akella permalink

 Thanks Michael! It’s been a decade since I did my senior level Quantum Mechanics course. Not sure if will be able to follow the lectures without brushing up the material, but I am hopeful. back in the days I used to follow the developments in Quantum Computing with great interest. With MIT’s 5 qbit quantum computer in Dec 2001(?) that did Shor’s algorithm and then the 7 qbit one. There was speculation that Quantum Computing was following Moore’s law. Then some how I lost track of it all (Job is a big killer). I heard of the Adiabatic one from D-Wave (or was it Q-Wave?). But feels like Q Computing has lost the momentum. Did it? Or is it just a lull before its going to come back in a big way?

 Thanks for the lectures! And thanks to slashdot for bringing me here.

 [MN: Thanks!]

 6. Michael Nielsen permalink *

 Thankyou all, for the nice words about my videos!

 @Michael – I haven’t spoken with Khan. He’d certainly be welcome to integrate these into his Academy!

 @Henning – Thanks for putting it on Slashdot!

 7. James permalink

 I watched the first video and I can’t wait to watch the rest. I saw this story on slashdot. I hope you take these videos to the end. Quantum computing is an insane topic. Great job!

 8. Asger Grunnet permalink

 Great work! Here is another vote for you to finish the course!

 9. Joshua Z permalink

 Excellent series! Please complete the course when time allows.

 10. Edwin permalink

 Thanks for putting up these videos! It’s pretty interesting stuff. Initially thing were pretty simple, but I had a little trouble with the notation of at the superdense coding. So I tried to recreate it in matrix form to better understand what was happening. It turns out that my problem was two fold. First I hadn’t quite thought the consequences of the cNOT gate through, which has sunk in after reviewing the vids. But there’s still one result I can’t reproduce. In the video you give the result of the XZ operation as 10-11, but when I calculate it in matrix form I get (0 -1 1 0)/sqrt(2), or 10-01. Naturally I’d doubt myself first, but the latter makes much more ‘systematical’ sense. Could you verify if there is a mistake in the video of whether I should slap myself and start over again.

 11. Michael Nielsen permalink *

 @Edwin: Thanks! As regards superdense coding, I simply made an error. See the comments on that video for more – someone else noticed the same thing, and commented there – but I’m pretty sure you got it right. (The fact you got it right strongly suggests you’re really understanding this well!)

 12. Edwin permalink

 Thanks! Rather silly to have missed that comment. But at least the road is clear to continue.

 13. Bradley Gibby permalink

 Many many thanks for these videos. I feel that there is so much more information conveyed through them than to simply read the information by itself.

 I would love to see the course completed!

 Excellent work!

 14. Dan permalink

 A few years ago, I made it a goal to actually understand QM before I die. (Rather than just oogle its mysteries from afar.) I’m an engineer, not a scientist, so am perfectly happy wallowing in linear algebra, probability, and complex numbers – and so I’m frustrated by popular articles on QM which cower away from that essential math, thereby explaining nothing, and leaving the theory looking like magic. Conversely, since I never had any advanced physics classes, I’m baffled by advanced scientific books presuming readers are already fluent with all the basic notation and elementary concepts of QM.
 A few rare resources, such as your videos, are aimed at exactly the right level: using the necessary math to construct the right mental models to create understanding. Thank you very much for building these bridges for me, and do please complete the rest of the set you had in mind!

 15. Henning permalink

 @K Akella – Can’t pass up the opportunity to plug my own blog here. It’s purpose is to keep an eye on the evolving quantum computing industry and I just had an entry about how it’s prospects are undersold in the media: http://wavewatching.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/45/

 16. Don V Black, PhD permalink

 Yet another vote to complete the video series, or at least “The postulates of quantum mechanics IV”

 I just completed watching the video series (15 minutes is perfect for watching while on an exercise machine). Perhaps link to the script for the final chapter?

 Thanks for a good job.

 17. Jon permalink

 I am all for you completing this! Please do!!

 18. John Kerr permalink

 Your great videos inspired me to try to explain come quantum phenomena to some math phobic colleagues in this series: http://mycodehere.blogspot.com/2011/11/quantum-computing-5-quantum.html (no ads) – but they boiled it down even further by making me remove most of the matrices, vectors and greek letters! I do hope that you complete this set, and also do something on algorithms?

 19. Deepit Purkayastha permalink

 Sir,

 Its been great to study these lectures along with following your book. It would be great if you cud take some time off from your busy schedule and complete the series.

 20. Yu permalink

 Please continue the course! I just started learning about quantum computation and this is a really good foundation. 🙂 I come from the wish to go deeper into quantum cryptography. I’m a cryptography student.

 21. Martin permalink

 One more vote for more. I watched the 22 videos, and im curious how any algortihm might take advantage of the possiblities offered by the information in the state space.

 22. Danupon permalink

 I’ve just finished your videos and found them very helpful. So, I’d like to add another vote for finishing the course. (Looking forward to it!)

 23. Mauri permalink

 Thank you, gracias, shukran merci, toda.
 Great job, and thank you for making it available.
 Mauri.

 24. Adrian Jackson permalink

 Thanks very much. Superbly clear presentation. Another vote for the complete series.

 25. Jigar Thakkar permalink

 Hello Sir, It was a pleasure watching this videos , hope you complete them . i am going for project on quantum computing for my masters in india , could you suggest some topics to simulate on standard computer for my project.
 Also can you suggest some GUI based software in which we can simulate the simple quantum gates with single or multiple qbits so we can raise the complexity of the circuits , vary the inputs and observe the output of the gates . It would be real fun to build our custom circuits and do the calculations on paper and verify them on the simulator.

 26. Jon permalink

 Sat down to watch the first video this morning, and now it’s gone 8 in the evening and I’ve finished them. I could easily have watched a few more. What a way to spend most of a Saturday! I loved the easy bite-sized chunks, and apart from a couple that were mostly proofs I enjoyed them all (sorry, I’m just not all that into proofs).

 Great job.

 Really looking forward to the next set when you get around to it!

 27. Phil permalink

 Hi Michael,

 You sound like you’re from Oz? I did a BSc in mathematical physics in Bert Green and Angus Hurst’s famous old dept in Adelaide many years ago (probably before your time) and have never entirely lost my interest, so I’ve seen the Hilbert space formulation before and solving the hydrogen atom, quantum scattering etc etc. Knew next to nothing about quantum computing.

 I’ve seldom seen QM-related material explained so simply and clearly. Loved the lectures, any chance you will do more? Lec 22 just stops! And – if you don’t have time to write exercises, maybe a grad student might volunteer to write them?

 Thanks,

 Phil

 28. Phil permalink

 PS: I like the way you basically put your notes, as you engage with a subject, on your blog. This pulls out the key points while laying out your reasoning or distillation process. It’s a good idea.

 29. Lars Sandberg permalink

 Definitely the best introduction i have seen. I thank people like Michael for lowering the bar for students of complicated “stuff” like this, thereby increasing the number of people that take us even further in our quest to understand the inner workings of nature. Go finish the videos when you have time Michael. Its greatly appriciated!

 30. Luiz SÃ¡ permalink

 Shor’s algorithm, PLEASE, PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 31. a permalink

 I would also like for you to finish the course.

 32. Baswanth Oruganti permalink

 Thank you very much for the great work you put in to make quantum computing understandable for every one through these video lectures.Looking forward for more such videos.

 33. Simon Bourne permalink

 Thanks for the videos so far. +1 from me to complete them when you get some time. This was the only place I found the right level of detail for me. There was one thing that took me ages to understand. Assuming I now understand correctly! That was the fact that, for an N qubit system, you’d need 2 to the power N numbers to represent it’s internal state, and not 2 * N. Once I’d realised that, it all started to fall into place.

 34. Ritajit Majumdar permalink

 Sir, your videos are excellent. I regularly follow your book on Quantum Computation for my project works. It will be of immense help if you can manage some time and finish the course.

 35. axel permalink

 Hi, thanks for the videos, they’re really interesting ! Any chance on having some exercices to practice ?

 36. SU225 permalink

 Sir,

 I am currently a first year undergraduate student of Electrical and Electronics engineering in India.

 I don’t have an opportunity here to take courses on Quantum Mechanics, Information Theory, Algorithms, Complexity theory etc. I am interested in Quantum Computation and I want to do masters and Ph.D in this field. IS IT POSSIBLE? [Since I have no formal background of Physics, Math or Computer Science]

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I’ve posted to YouTube a series of 22 short videos giving an introduction to quantum computing. Here’s the first video:
 
Below I list the remaining 21 videos, which cover subjects including the basic model of quantum computing, entanglement, superdense coding, and quantum teleportation.
To work through the videos you need to be comfortable with basic linear algebra, and with assimilating new mathematical terminology. If you’re not, working through the videos will be arduous at best! Apart from that background, the main prerequisite is determination, and the willingness to work more than once over material you don’t fully understand.
In particular, you don’t need a background in quantum mechanics to follow the videos. 
The videos are short, from 5-15 minutes, and each video focuses on explaining one main concept from quantum mechanics or quantum computing. In taking this approach I was inspired by the excellent Khan Academy.
The course is not complete — I originally planned about 8 more videos. The extra videos would complete my summary of basic quantum mechanics (+2 videos), and cover reversible computing (+2 videos), and Grover’s quantum search algorithm (+4 videos). Unfortunately, work responsibilities that couldn’t be put aside meant I had to put the remaining videos on hold. If lots of people work through the existing videos and are keen for more, then I’ll find time to finish them off. As it is, I hope the incomplete series is still useful.
One minor gotcha: originally, I was hoping to integrate the videos with a set of exercises. Again, time prevented me from doing this: there are no exercises. But as a remnant of this plan, in at least one video (video 7, the video on unitary matrices preserving length, and possibly elsewhere) I leave something “to the exercises”. Hopefully it’s pretty clear what needs to be filled in at this point, and viewers can supply the missing details.
Let me finish with two comments on approach. First, the videos treat quantum bits — qubits — as abstract mathematical entities, in a way similar to how we can think of conventional (classical) bits as 0 or 1, not as voltages in a circuit, or magnetic domains on a hard disk. I don’t get into the details of physical implementation at all. This approach bugs some people a lot, and others not at all. If you think it’ll bug you, these videos aren’t for you.
Second, the videos focus on the nuts-and-bolts of how things work. If you want a high-level overview of quantum computing, why it’s interesting, and what quantum computers may be capable of, there are many available online, a Google search away. Here’s a nice one, from Scott Aaronson. You may also enjoy David Deutsch’s original paper about quantum computing. It’s a bit harder to read than an article in Wired or Scientific American, but it’s worth the effort, for the paper gives a lot of insight into some of the fundamental reasons for thinking about quantum computing in the first place. Such higher-level articles may be helpful to read in conjunction with the videos.
Here’s the full list of videos, including the first one above. Note that because this really does get into the nuts and bolts of how things work, it also builds cumulatively. You can’t just skip straight to the quantum teleportation video and hope to understand it, you’ll need to work through the earlier videos, unless you already understand their content.
The basics
 The qubit
  Tips for working with qubits
  Our first quantum gate: the quantum NOT gate
  The Hadamard gate
  Measuring a qubit
  General single-qubit gates
  Why unitaries are the only matrices which preserve length
  Examples of single-qubit quantum gates
  The controlled-NOT gate
  Universal quantum computation
 
Superdense coding
 Superdense coding: how to send two bits using one qubit
  Preparing the Bell state
  What’s so special about entangled states anyway?
  Distinguishing quantum states
  Superdense coding redux: putting it all together
 
Quantum teleportation
 Partial measurements
  Partial measurements in an arbitrary basis
  Quantum teleportation
  Quantum teleportation: discussion
 
The postulates of quantum mechanics (TBC)
 The postulates of quantum mechanics I: states and state space
  The postulates of quantum mechanics II: dynamics
  The postulates of quantum mechanics III: measurement
 
 Thanks to Jen Dodd, Ilya Grigorik and Hassan Masum for feedback on the videos, and for many enjoyable discussions about open education. 
 If you enjoyed these videos, you may be interested in my forthcoming book, Reinventing Discovery, where I describe how online tools and open science are transforming the way scientific discoveries are made.
Quantum computing for the determined
https://michaelnielsen.org/blog/quantum-computing-for-the-determined/
https://michaelnielsen.org/blog/the-artist-and-the-machine/
The artist and the machine
2013-02-06
Siva
<div><div>
	<p>In September of 2012, a team of scientists released a photograph showing the most distant parts of the Universe ever seen by any human being. They obtained the photograph by pointing the Hubble Space Telescope at a single tiny patch of sky, gradually building up an image over a total of 23 days of observation. It’s an otherwise undistinguished patch of sky, within the little-known constellation Fornax. It’s less than one hundredth the size of the full moon, and appears totally empty to the naked eye. Here’s what’s seen with the Hubble Telescope:</p>
<br />
<br />
<p>This image is known as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Extreme_Deep_Field">Hubble Extreme Deep Field</a>. It contains 5,500 galaxies, each of which, in turn, contains billions of stars. This region of sky ordinarily looks empty because these galaxies are far too dim to be seen with the naked eye. Some of the galaxies are more than 13 billion light years away. We are seeing them as they were just a few hundred million years after the big bang, near the dawn of time. If you have the eyes to see, this is what deep space and the early history of the universe looks like.</p>
<p>One of the many striking things about the Hubble Extreme Deep Field is that it’s <em>beautiful</em>. Another work revealing beauty in nature is a 1999 art piece by a Dutch-Canadian artist named <a href="http://www.juangeuer.com/index.html">Juan Geuer</a>. In a darkened room, Geuer shone orange laser light through a single droplet of water, projecting the light onto a wall. The resulting play of light is spectacular. We see the changing internal structure of the droplet, and the interplay of surface tension and gravity, a marvellous mix of refraction, reflection, and diffraction. Here’s a recording of Geuer’s art piece, known as <a href="http://www.juangeuer.com/work/wis.html"><em>Water in Suspense</em></a>. (Some browsers don’t start the video at the right moment — move to 13:33 in the recording if that’s the case).</p>
<br />
<br />
<p>It’s not a typical action-packed online video. It moves slowly, slowly,… and then WHOOSH, a sudden, rapid change. I suggest watching it for at least a minute or two. During that time you’ll start to learn <em>how</em> to watch the droplet. Indeed, getting a feel for the multiple timescales at which the droplet changes is part of what we learn from the work.</p>
<p><em>Water in Suspense</em> reveals a hidden world. We discover a rich structure immanent in the water droplet, a structure not ordinarily accessible to our senses. In this way it’s similar to the Hubble Extreme Deep Field, which also reveals a hidden world. Both are examples of what I call Super-realist art, art which doesn’t just capture what we can see directly with our eyes or hear with our ears, but which uses new sensors and methods of visualization to reveal a world that we cannot directly perceive. It’s art being used to reveal science.</p>
<p>Although I’m not an artist or an art critic, I find Super-realist art fascinating. Works like the Hubble Extreme Deep Field and <em>Water in Suspense</em> give us concrete, vivid representations of deep space and the interior structure of a water droplet. For most of us, these are usually little more than dry abstractions, remote from our understanding. By creating vivid representations, Super-realist art provides us with a new way of thinking about such phenomena. And so in this essay I explore Super-realist art: what it is, how it relates to other modes of art, and why it is flourishing today.</p>
<p>I’m a technologist and scientist, a person whose main interests are in areas such as machine learning, data science, and, especially, the development of cognitive tools (i.e., tools to extend human thought). It may seem strange that I’m writing an essay about art. But thinking about technology from this viewpoint gives a perspective that’s radically different to the usual take. It’s a flip side, an artistic perspective that sees technology and, in particular, Super-realism, as a means to discover new aesthetics and new representations of reality. That means Super-realism is not just of interest to artists, but can also inform technologists and scientists, giving them a new way of thinking about how we can develop tools that extend human thought.</p>
<p>In discussing Super-realism I will ignore many of the usual labels we use to understand art. Instead, I’ll develop a caricature which divides much of Western art into just three categories: Realism, Post-realism, and Super-realism. I believe this way of thinking illuminates Super-realism, and ask the indulgence of any experts on art history who happen to be reading.</p>
<p>Until the latter part of the 19th century Realism was one of the main aspirations of much Western art [1]. Realist art aimed at capturing the reality accessible to our senses. My favourite Realist artist is Rembrandt:</p>
<br />
 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rembrandt_-_Zelfportret_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg">(credit)</a><br />
<p>Such paintings seem so true-to-life that it is as though the artist has captured an element of objective reality. Suppose aliens visited Earth after a cataclysm wiped out all traces of humanity, except for a few Rembrandt self-portraits that somehow survived. I believe the aliens could understand much about both Rembrandt and humanity from those portraits, including perhaps even something of Rembrandt’s personality, his habits, his likes, and his dislikes.</p>
<p>But even the most talented Realist artists capture only a tiny slice of reality. Rembrandt’s self-portraits, as real as they appear, omit nearly all the biological and mental processes going on in Rembrandt’s body and mind. Suppose, for example, we could zoom in on his face, seeing it at 10 times magnification, then 100, then 1,000, and so on. At each level of magnification a new world would be revealed, of pores and cells and microbes. And there is so much structure to understand in each of these worlds, from the incredibly complex ecology of microbes on the skin, to the inner workings of cells. Consider this video simulating the inside of a cell:</p>
<br />
<br />
<p>This is not to criticise Rembrandt and the other Realists. On their own terms, they succeeded. But what Super-realism shows is that we can see far deeper into the world, and find great beauty in so doing.</p>
<p>In the 20th century Western art moved away from Realism, and Post-realist art became increasingly influential. To describe how Super-realism relates to Post-realism I’ll use the work of Monet. Monet was an early Post-realist painter, one working at the boundary between Realism and Post-realism. Here’s one of Monet’s great works, the "Water Lillies" tryptych, housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York:</p>
<p> <a href="http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A4058&amp;page_number=4&amp;template_id=1&amp;sort_order=1">(credit)</a></p>
<p>Unfortunately, when viewed on a computer screen or as a small print, this tryptych looks washed out and insipid, a poor imitation of the Realists. But when you see the original — 6 and a half feet high, and 42 feet long — the effect is jaw-dropping. Monet’s genius, and what made his painting so overwhelming, was a deep understanding of <em>how</em> humans see. He was a master illusionist who understood how to trick the viewer’s brain into seeing something much, much better than a realistic rendition. This only works at scale. When "Water Lillies" is shrunk to print size, the psychology of perception changes, and the illusion vanishes. I don’t understand why this is. I’ve read something of the theory of Monet and his fellow Impressionists, and don’t find those explanations convincing. What I do know is that Monet’s shimmering pond loses its glory. It looks fake, less than a literal rendition, merely a washed out print. But somehow, in the original, Monet was able to use his understanding of human perception to <em>evoke</em> water lillies in a fashion more spectacular than a Realist painting could ever have achieved.</p>
<p>In Post-realism, art isn’t about directly representing an objective, independent reality. Instead, it’s about creating new types of relationship between the art piece and the human mind. Monet and his fellow Impressionists were on the boundary between Realism and Post-Realism, since their works still aimed to evoke an objective, independent reality, albeit not by a direct representation. But Post-realism was pushed much further by later artists, such as Picasso, M. C. Escher, and Kandinsky:</p>
<br />
 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Picasso_three_musicians_moma_2006.jpg">(credit)</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ascending_and_Descending.jpg">(credit)</a> <br /> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kandinsky_-_Composition_VI_1913.jpg">(credit)</a><br />
<p>These works gradually shift away from representing reality, and toward exploring the relationship between art piece and viewer. Escher, for example, used quirks in the human visual system to evoke impossible realities. Abstract artists such as Kandinsky take this idea still further, and it is developed to an extreme in the work of abstract minimalists such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McLaughlin_artist">John McLaughlin</a>, a pioneer in what is known as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard-edge_painting">Hard-edge painting</a>:</p>
<br />
 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_McLaughlin_-_Number_17,_1966.jpg">(credit)</a><br />
<p>At first glance this (and much of McLaughlin’s other work) looks ludicrous. But it makes more sense when you understand that McLaughlin was exploring how people respond to art. His earlier works were more complex. But he gradually simplified his work as he realized that people can have novel responses even to simple stimuli.</p>
<p>Abstract minimalism annoys many people. The approach can and has led to fakery and foolishness on the part of some artists. But my point here is neither to criticise nor to praise. Instead, it’s to understand what artists such as McLaughlin were up to. Whereas the Realist artists believed that virtuosity came from depicting part of reality with high fidelity, in Post-realism virtuosity may come from creating a novel relationship between art piece and viewer.</p>
<p>Super-realism changes art again. Virtuosity becomes about revealing hidden worlds and discovering new aesthetics. Take a look at the following video, which shows — in extreme slow motion! — a packet of light passing through a bottle. Ordinarily that passage takes less than a nanosecond, but the video slows the passage down by a factor of 10 billion, so we can see it:</p>
<br />
<br />
<p>In a way, Super-realism is a return to the aims of Realism, back to representing reality. But what’s new about Super-realism is the challenge (and opportunity!) to find ways of representing previously unseen parts of the world.</p>
<p>Most of my examples of Super-realist art have come from people who regard themselves mainly as scientists, not as artists. However, there are many artists doing Super-realist art. I’ve drawn my examples mostly from scientists merely because I’ve found that artists’ work is often more exploratory, and thus requires more background explanation, making it less suited for an essay such as this.</p>
<p>Although Super-realism’s flourishing is recent, its origins go back centuries. In 1610, Galileo published a short book entitled <em>Starry Messenger</em> (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereus_Nuncius">Sidereus Nuncius</a>), which contained several images showing the moon in unprecedented detail, as observed by Galileo through one of his new telescopes:</p>
<br />
 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Galileo%27s_sketches_of_the_moon.png">(credit)</a><br />
<p>In a similar vein, in 1665 Robert Hooke published a bestselling book entitled <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micrographia">Micrographia</a>, which used the newly-invented microscope to reveal the world of the very small. Hooke’s book included the first ever drawings of biological cells, as well as drawings showing animals such as fleas in unprecedented detail:</p>
<br />
<br />
<p>While Super-realism isn’t new, that doesn’t mean it’s yet in the artistic mainstream. Many people don’t consider works such as the Hubble Extreme Deep Field or the light-in-a-bottle video to be art. (I would not be surprised if this includes the creators of those works.) Even works more explicitly artistic in intent, such as <em>Water in Suspense</em>, are viewed as borderline. But I believe that each of these works reveals a new aesthetic, an aesthetic generated by the scientific principles underlying the phenomenon being represented. And insofar as they reveal a new aesthetic, I believe these works are art.</p>
<p>Although Super-realism isn’t yet in the artistic mainstream, it has influenced parts of that mainstream. For example, in the 1980s the film diector and cinematographer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Fricke">Ron Fricke</a> used time-lapse photography to reveal new aspects of the everyday world, in documentary films such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronos_film"><em>Chronos</em></a> [2]:</p>
<br />
<br />
<p>Fricke was not, of course, the first to use time-lapse photography in this way. However, his films have won wide acclaim, and inspired many other artists to develop time-lapse photography further as an artistic medium.</p>
<p>Super-realism has grown rapidly in the past twenty to thirty years. Three forces are driving that growth.</p>
<p>First, far more people can access and learn to use scientific instruments. Recall Juan Geuer and his virtuoso home-made laser light show. There are people building everything from <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZZBughftos">home-made</a> <a href="http://makeprojects.com/Project/Cloud+Chamber/2182/1#.UP6WsCc0V8E">bubble chambers</a> to <a href="http://www.brooklynspaceprogram.org/BSP/Space_Balloon.html">balloons exploring the upper atmosphere</a>. These are not isolated curiosities, but rather part of a rapidly expanding social phenomenon that has been called by many names: the DIY movement, citizen science, the Maker movement. Whatever it is, it’s growing, fed by the expansion of online and mail-order suppliers that serve niche markets, and by the growth of online (and, increasingly, offline) communities of people who work with these instruments and teach one another.</p>
<p>Second, the data being taken by many of these instruments is being shared openly, online. In the 1980s if a scientist used a telescope to take a photograph, likely no more than a few dozen people would ever touch the photographic plate. Now more than a billion people can <a href="http://archive.stsci.edu/hst/">download data</a> from the Hubble Telescope, and find new ways to visualize it. Some of the most <a href="http://vimeo.com/45878034">extraordinary</a> <a href="http://vimeo.com/42909676">visualizations</a> of the Earth are made using data released openly by NASA. Any scientific project which releases data enables others to find new ways of making meaning from that data.</p>
<p>Third, we’re collectively building a powerful suite of tools to reveal these new worlds. For example, as I write there are more than <a href="https://github.com/search?q=visualization">25,000 open source visualization projects</a> available on the code repository GitHub. Most of those projects are, of coure, experiments that will be abandoned. But there are also many powerful tools that give people incredible abilities to make and reveal beauty. It’s no wonder Super-realism is flowering.</p>
<p>Story-tellers say that reality is often stranger and more interesting than fiction. I believe this is true for all art. The reason is that nature is more imaginative than we, and as we probe deeper into nature, we will continue to discover new aesthetics and new forms of beauty. I believe these new aesthetics will stimulate art for decades or centuries to come.</p>
<p><em>If you enjoyed this essay, you may wish to <a href="http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/feed/">subscribe to my blog</a>, or <a href="https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen">follow me on Twitter</a>.</em></p>
<p><strong>Footnotes</strong></p>
<p>[1] I am referring to Realist art broadly, not the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_arts">19th century artistic movement known as Realism</a>. I’m also certainly not claiming that all Western art was Realist until the late 19th century, merely that the idea of representing objective reality was often deeply influential.</p>
<p>[2] The YouTube video shows images from <em>Chronos</em>, but the music is from another source. Unfortunately, I could not find a good unabridged excerpt from <em>Chronos</em> online.</p>
<p><strong>Acknowledgements:</strong> This essay arose out of many conversations with <a href="http://jendodd.com/">Jen Dodd</a>, especially about her work with the <a href="http://subtletechnologies.com/">Subtle Technologies</a> Festival of Art and Science. Thanks also to <a href="http://www.cs.utah.edu/~miriah/">Miriah Meyer</a> and <a href="http://www.leesmolin.com/">Lee Smolin</a> for conversations that helped stimulate this essay.</p>
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 The artist and the machine

 by Michael Nielsen on February 6, 2013

 In September of 2012, a team of scientists released a photograph showing the most distant parts of the Universe ever seen by any human being. They obtained the photograph by pointing the Hubble Space Telescope at a single tiny patch of sky, gradually building up an image over a total of 23 days of observation. It’s an otherwise undistinguished patch of sky, within the little-known constellation Fornax. It’s less than one hundredth the size of the full moon, and appears totally empty to the naked eye. Here’s what’s seen with the Hubble Telescope:



 This image is known as the Hubble Extreme Deep Field. It contains 5,500 galaxies, each of which, in turn, contains billions of stars. This region of sky ordinarily looks empty because these galaxies are far too dim to be seen with the naked eye. Some of the galaxies are more than 13 billion light years away. We are seeing them as they were just a few hundred million years after the big bang, near the dawn of time. If you have the eyes to see, this is what deep space and the early history of the universe looks like.

 One of the many striking things about the Hubble Extreme Deep Field is that it’s beautiful. Another work revealing beauty in nature is a 1999 art piece by a Dutch-Canadian artist named Juan Geuer. In a darkened room, Geuer shone orange laser light through a single droplet of water, projecting the light onto a wall. The resulting play of light is spectacular. We see the changing internal structure of the droplet, and the interplay of surface tension and gravity, a marvellous mix of refraction, reflection, and diffraction. Here’s a recording of Geuer’s art piece, known as Water in Suspense. (Some browsers don’t start the video at the right moment — move to 13:33 in the recording if that’s the case).



 It’s not a typical action-packed online video. It moves slowly, slowly,… and then WHOOSH, a sudden, rapid change. I suggest watching it for at least a minute or two. During that time you’ll start to learn how to watch the droplet. Indeed, getting a feel for the multiple timescales at which the droplet changes is part of what we learn from the work.

 Water in Suspense reveals a hidden world. We discover a rich structure immanent in the water droplet, a structure not ordinarily accessible to our senses. In this way it’s similar to the Hubble Extreme Deep Field, which also reveals a hidden world. Both are examples of what I call Super-realist art, art which doesn’t just capture what we can see directly with our eyes or hear with our ears, but which uses new sensors and methods of visualization to reveal a world that we cannot directly perceive. It’s art being used to reveal science.

 Although I’m not an artist or an art critic, I find Super-realist art fascinating. Works like the Hubble Extreme Deep Field and Water in Suspense give us concrete, vivid representations of deep space and the interior structure of a water droplet. For most of us, these are usually little more than dry abstractions, remote from our understanding. By creating vivid representations, Super-realist art provides us with a new way of thinking about such phenomena. And so in this essay I explore Super-realist art: what it is, how it relates to other modes of art, and why it is flourishing today.

 I’m a technologist and scientist, a person whose main interests are in areas such as machine learning, data science, and, especially, the development of cognitive tools (i.e., tools to extend human thought). It may seem strange that I’m writing an essay about art. But thinking about technology from this viewpoint gives a perspective that’s radically different to the usual take. It’s a flip side, an artistic perspective that sees technology and, in particular, Super-realism, as a means to discover new aesthetics and new representations of reality. That means Super-realism is not just of interest to artists, but can also inform technologists and scientists, giving them a new way of thinking about how we can develop tools that extend human thought.

 In discussing Super-realism I will ignore many of the usual labels we use to understand art. Instead, I’ll develop a caricature which divides much of Western art into just three categories: Realism, Post-realism, and Super-realism. I believe this way of thinking illuminates Super-realism, and ask the indulgence of any experts on art history who happen to be reading.

 Until the latter part of the 19th century Realism was one of the main aspirations of much Western art [1]. Realist art aimed at capturing the reality accessible to our senses. My favourite Realist artist is Rembrandt:


 (credit)

 Such paintings seem so true-to-life that it is as though the artist has captured an element of objective reality. Suppose aliens visited Earth after a cataclysm wiped out all traces of humanity, except for a few Rembrandt self-portraits that somehow survived. I believe the aliens could understand much about both Rembrandt and humanity from those portraits, including perhaps even something of Rembrandt’s personality, his habits, his likes, and his dislikes.

 But even the most talented Realist artists capture only a tiny slice of reality. Rembrandt’s self-portraits, as real as they appear, omit nearly all the biological and mental processes going on in Rembrandt’s body and mind. Suppose, for example, we could zoom in on his face, seeing it at 10 times magnification, then 100, then 1,000, and so on. At each level of magnification a new world would be revealed, of pores and cells and microbes. And there is so much structure to understand in each of these worlds, from the incredibly complex ecology of microbes on the skin, to the inner workings of cells. Consider this video simulating the inside of a cell:



 This is not to criticise Rembrandt and the other Realists. On their own terms, they succeeded. But what Super-realism shows is that we can see far deeper into the world, and find great beauty in so doing.

 In the 20th century Western art moved away from Realism, and Post-realist art became increasingly influential. To describe how Super-realism relates to Post-realism I’ll use the work of Monet. Monet was an early Post-realist painter, one working at the boundary between Realism and Post-realism. Here’s one of Monet’s great works, the "Water Lillies" tryptych, housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York:

 (credit)

 Unfortunately, when viewed on a computer screen or as a small print, this tryptych looks washed out and insipid, a poor imitation of the Realists. But when you see the original — 6 and a half feet high, and 42 feet long — the effect is jaw-dropping. Monet’s genius, and what made his painting so overwhelming, was a deep understanding of how humans see. He was a master illusionist who understood how to trick the viewer’s brain into seeing something much, much better than a realistic rendition. This only works at scale. When "Water Lillies" is shrunk to print size, the psychology of perception changes, and the illusion vanishes. I don’t understand why this is. I’ve read something of the theory of Monet and his fellow Impressionists, and don’t find those explanations convincing. What I do know is that Monet’s shimmering pond loses its glory. It looks fake, less than a literal rendition, merely a washed out print. But somehow, in the original, Monet was able to use his understanding of human perception to evoke water lillies in a fashion more spectacular than a Realist painting could ever have achieved.

 In Post-realism, art isn’t about directly representing an objective, independent reality. Instead, it’s about creating new types of relationship between the art piece and the human mind. Monet and his fellow Impressionists were on the boundary between Realism and Post-Realism, since their works still aimed to evoke an objective, independent reality, albeit not by a direct representation. But Post-realism was pushed much further by later artists, such as Picasso, M. C. Escher, and Kandinsky:


 (credit) (credit)
 (credit)

 These works gradually shift away from representing reality, and toward exploring the relationship between art piece and viewer. Escher, for example, used quirks in the human visual system to evoke impossible realities. Abstract artists such as Kandinsky take this idea still further, and it is developed to an extreme in the work of abstract minimalists such as John McLaughlin, a pioneer in what is known as Hard-edge painting:


 (credit)

 At first glance this (and much of McLaughlin’s other work) looks ludicrous. But it makes more sense when you understand that McLaughlin was exploring how people respond to art. His earlier works were more complex. But he gradually simplified his work as he realized that people can have novel responses even to simple stimuli.

 Abstract minimalism annoys many people. The approach can and has led to fakery and foolishness on the part of some artists. But my point here is neither to criticise nor to praise. Instead, it’s to understand what artists such as McLaughlin were up to. Whereas the Realist artists believed that virtuosity came from depicting part of reality with high fidelity, in Post-realism virtuosity may come from creating a novel relationship between art piece and viewer.

 Super-realism changes art again. Virtuosity becomes about revealing hidden worlds and discovering new aesthetics. Take a look at the following video, which shows — in extreme slow motion! — a packet of light passing through a bottle. Ordinarily that passage takes less than a nanosecond, but the video slows the passage down by a factor of 10 billion, so we can see it:



 In a way, Super-realism is a return to the aims of Realism, back to representing reality. But what’s new about Super-realism is the challenge (and opportunity!) to find ways of representing previously unseen parts of the world.

 Most of my examples of Super-realist art have come from people who regard themselves mainly as scientists, not as artists. However, there are many artists doing Super-realist art. I’ve drawn my examples mostly from scientists merely because I’ve found that artists’ work is often more exploratory, and thus requires more background explanation, making it less suited for an essay such as this.

 Although Super-realism’s flourishing is recent, its origins go back centuries. In 1610, Galileo published a short book entitled Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius), which contained several images showing the moon in unprecedented detail, as observed by Galileo through one of his new telescopes:


 (credit)

 In a similar vein, in 1665 Robert Hooke published a bestselling book entitled Micrographia, which used the newly-invented microscope to reveal the world of the very small. Hooke’s book included the first ever drawings of biological cells, as well as drawings showing animals such as fleas in unprecedented detail:



 While Super-realism isn’t new, that doesn’t mean it’s yet in the artistic mainstream. Many people don’t consider works such as the Hubble Extreme Deep Field or the light-in-a-bottle video to be art. (I would not be surprised if this includes the creators of those works.) Even works more explicitly artistic in intent, such as Water in Suspense, are viewed as borderline. But I believe that each of these works reveals a new aesthetic, an aesthetic generated by the scientific principles underlying the phenomenon being represented. And insofar as they reveal a new aesthetic, I believe these works are art.

 Although Super-realism isn’t yet in the artistic mainstream, it has influenced parts of that mainstream. For example, in the 1980s the film diector and cinematographer Ron Fricke used time-lapse photography to reveal new aspects of the everyday world, in documentary films such as Chronos [2]:



 Fricke was not, of course, the first to use time-lapse photography in this way. However, his films have won wide acclaim, and inspired many other artists to develop time-lapse photography further as an artistic medium.

 Super-realism has grown rapidly in the past twenty to thirty years. Three forces are driving that growth.

 First, far more people can access and learn to use scientific instruments. Recall Juan Geuer and his virtuoso home-made laser light show. There are people building everything from home-made bubble chambers to balloons exploring the upper atmosphere. These are not isolated curiosities, but rather part of a rapidly expanding social phenomenon that has been called by many names: the DIY movement, citizen science, the Maker movement. Whatever it is, it’s growing, fed by the expansion of online and mail-order suppliers that serve niche markets, and by the growth of online (and, increasingly, offline) communities of people who work with these instruments and teach one another.

 Second, the data being taken by many of these instruments is being shared openly, online. In the 1980s if a scientist used a telescope to take a photograph, likely no more than a few dozen people would ever touch the photographic plate. Now more than a billion people can download data from the Hubble Telescope, and find new ways to visualize it. Some of the most extraordinary visualizations of the Earth are made using data released openly by NASA. Any scientific project which releases data enables others to find new ways of making meaning from that data.

 Third, we’re collectively building a powerful suite of tools to reveal these new worlds. For example, as I write there are more than 25,000 open source visualization projects available on the code repository GitHub. Most of those projects are, of coure, experiments that will be abandoned. But there are also many powerful tools that give people incredible abilities to make and reveal beauty. It’s no wonder Super-realism is flowering.

 Story-tellers say that reality is often stranger and more interesting than fiction. I believe this is true for all art. The reason is that nature is more imaginative than we, and as we probe deeper into nature, we will continue to discover new aesthetics and new forms of beauty. I believe these new aesthetics will stimulate art for decades or centuries to come.

 If you enjoyed this essay, you may wish to subscribe to my blog, or follow me on Twitter.

 Footnotes

 [1] I am referring to Realist art broadly, not the 19th century artistic movement known as Realism. I’m also certainly not claiming that all Western art was Realist until the late 19th century, merely that the idea of representing objective reality was often deeply influential.

 [2] The YouTube video shows images from Chronos, but the music is from another source. Unfortunately, I could not find a good unabridged excerpt from Chronos online.

 Acknowledgements: This essay arose out of many conversations with Jen Dodd, especially about her work with the Subtle Technologies Festival of Art and Science. Thanks also to Miriah Meyer and Lee Smolin for conversations that helped stimulate this essay.

 From → Uncategorized

 10 Comments
 1. Frank Hecker permalink

 Great post, which provokes a number of thoughts (my apologies for the length):

 Regarding the question “what is art?”, I like Cynthia Freeland’s book “But Is It Art?”, which has a good discussion of the various ways in which people have conceived of art in different cultures and times. Freeland quotes two definitions of art, formulated by anthropologist Richard Anderson and environment artist Robert Irwin respectively. Per Irwin, art is “a continuous examination of our perceptual awareness and a continuous expansion of our awareness of the world around us”. This definition is very congenial to your concept of Super-realism, particularly the second part, but also I think the first: It’s not just the fact that science has enabled us to expand our perception, it’s that that expansion of perception has changed the way in which we perceive ourselves: The person who can conceive of light as something that flows slowly through a bottle or that has traveled 13 billion years to reach us is a different person than the person who can conceive of light only in traditional terms (e.g., brightness vs. darkness, as in chiaroscuro).

 That in turn leads into Anderson’s definition of art: “culturally significant meaning, skillfully encoded in an affecting, sensuous medium”. The “culturally significant” part of this definition points to what I think is a fourth factor to add to your three: We have lived long enough with various aspects of science and technology that they have become part of our common culture, and thus part of the common store of items, concepts, etc., from which we construct meaning and interpret it for one another.

 This process of cultural absorption can take (and has taken) a while. As an earlier example, it took on the order of a century from the beginnings of the industrial revolution in the late 18th and early 19th century to the point in the early 20th century at which there arose an artistic movement (Futurism) that wholeheartedly adopted industrialism as its central theme. The first half of the twentieth century saw an ensuing scientific and science-based technological revolutions–from the theory of special relativity to the elucidation of the structure of DNA, with quantum mechanics, information theory, and computability and actual computers along the way. Thus if Super-realism does indeed evolve into a significant artistic movement then it’s arriving right on schedule, and we can expect to see major works in the next 10-20 years.

 How will we recognize them as major works? First, because they speak deeply to us in our current state of existence, and second, because we will develop the critical vocabulary to discuss exactly why and how they affect us. (As always, the art will come first, the criticism later.) That critical vocabulary will be informed both by science and technology and by the ways in which they affect us, and of course will depend on critics’ familiarity with both.

 A few years ago I had a temporary (re)infatuation with contemporary art, and wrote some blog post on the works “g” and “Spinning Beach Ball of Death” by Jack Strange. Leaving aside their value as criticism (which I myself can’t judge), what I found noteworthy was how much my own emotional reaction to the works depended on my scientific and technical background. (For example, none of the other discussions of the work I read speculated as to why “g” is called “g” and not something else, while I think this a major key to the work–no pun intended.) As an ex-physics student I’m admittedly a special case, but I think scientific literacy is widespread enough now that an artist can conciously (or unconciously) incorporate scientific concepts into a work to effective ends.

 2. Michael Nielsen permalink *

 Thanks for the terrific comment, Frank.

 Your speculation on major works is interesting. I’m curious as where exactly they’d come from. Movie artists? Lone artists? Alex Roman’s “The Third and the Seventh” seems to be on the boundary between Super-realism and Realism to me, and perhaps his development process is what will be used:

 http://vimeo.com/7809605

 On Irwin and definitions: That’s a really striking definition! I hadn’t read it before, but some similar statements from him influenced my thinking about Post-realism. The first half of his definition seems Post-realist, the second half Super-realist. So maybe he’s a boundary figure.

 3. Frank Hecker permalink

 I saw “The Third and the Seventh” when it came out, and was quite struck by it. I agree with your comment about the development process for that film being potentially a fruitful one for other artists to emulate. Another place I’d look to for potential major artworks is the community of people working on visualizations for large data sets, (especially?) including those resulting from sensor input. There enough folks working in this area, enough powerful tools, and enough new and interesting datasets (as you point out), that there will be motive, means, and opportunity to hijack the tools and data in the service of art, just as Alex Roman did with high-end architectural design software and 3D building models. (For one example see the airFIELD sculpture, http://vimeo.com/44517807)

 Re Irwin’s definition, I wouldn’t be so quick to discount the first part as irrelevant to Super-realism. If we restrict ourselves solely to the “continuous expansion of our awareness of the world around us” then how would we distinguish art from science?

 4. Frank Hecker permalink

 One more comment: If you’re not familiar with them, you should check out the artworks of Jim Sanborn (see http://jimsanborn.net and Wikipedia).

 5. Michael Nielsen permalink *

 @Frank — Jim Sanborn was new to me (although I had seen Kryptos). Thanks for the pointer, it’s very interesting stuff! I note that on his Wikipedia page it says that “making the invisible visible” has been a theme in his art, which is obviously similar to my explanation of Super-realism.

 I agree that the data visualization community is a potential source of major artworks. Some of their works are already iconic, such as the famous “maps of the internet”:

 http://www.opte.org/maps/

 6. Keith Seifert permalink

 Thanks for mentioning the work of Juan Geuer. I met Juan twice before he passed away a few years ago, in his early nineties. I had the privilege of receiving a personal tour of his last public exhibition, held in his home town of Almonte, Ontario. It was an afternoon that changed the way I thought about science, its relationship with art, and my own place in the world. Juan’s pre-artistic career was as a draftsman for the Geological Surfey of Canada and this connection remained in his work. At his final exhibition, there was an installation with lights triggered by real-time tectonic events in the earth’s crust, and another where you walked through a model of a geological fault, with the sounds of the tectonic forces magnified a million times. He told me what I later learned to be one of his favorite stories, about ants eating the pages of a book of philosophy that he opened when he lived in Ecuador, where he lived after fleeing Holland in the Second World War. If you want to know this story, you’ll have to track it down. I can’t do it justice.

 Juan’s collection was donated by his family to the Arts Court in Ottawa. It is worth a visit, to experience the imagination of this inspiring man. I’ve been lucky, in my career as a biologist, to collaborate with one of his protÃ©gÃ©s, Annie Thibault. They taught me that science and art are two sides of the same face, the exploration of the unknown, the quest for originality, the challenge to be the first in an intellectual space. C.P. Snow’s two solitudes of the humanities and the sciences may be the context in which we have been indoctrinated, but it is also a lie. More scientists, more artists, need to know this.

 7. Keith Seifert permalink

 When I left Juan’s exhibition that afternoon, it was with his insistent message, “We have to do something about this!” He envisioned a conference, giving rise to a movement that would unite the arts and the sciences on a course to improve the lot of humanity. He sent me out into the winter making me feel it was my duty to help this happen. I never saw him again.

 8. haig permalink

 This is the continuing paradigm shift away from virtual reality towards augmented reality. I’m reminded of Jaron Lanier’s ideas of ‘post-symbolic language’, though he is interested in VR while I think the thrust of this type of work will be implemented through augmented reality or intelligence amplification, to use some more techno-verbiage.

 A lot of our intuition comes from the Kahneman type 1 cognitive processes, and in order for us to really amplify our individual and collective intelligences, visualization and ‘super-realism’ will be necessary to bridge the gap between our faster type 1 systems and our slower type 2 systems.

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In September of 2012, a team of scientists released a photograph showing the most distant parts of the Universe ever seen by any human being. They obtained the photograph by pointing the Hubble Space Telescope at a single tiny patch of sky, gradually building up an image over a total of 23 days of observation. It’s an otherwise undistinguished patch of sky, within the little-known constellation Fornax. It’s less than one hundredth the size of the full moon, and appears totally empty to the naked eye. Here’s what’s seen with the Hubble Telescope:
This image is known as the Hubble Extreme Deep Field. It contains 5,500 galaxies, each of which, in turn, contains billions of stars. This region of sky ordinarily looks empty because these galaxies are far too dim to be seen with the naked eye. Some of the galaxies are more than 13 billion light years away. We are seeing them as they were just a few hundred million years after the big bang, near the dawn of time. If you have the eyes to see, this is what deep space and the early history of the universe looks like.
One of the many striking things about the Hubble Extreme Deep Field is that it’s beautiful. Another work revealing beauty in nature is a 1999 art piece by a Dutch-Canadian artist named Juan Geuer. In a darkened room, Geuer shone orange laser light through a single droplet of water, projecting the light onto a wall. The resulting play of light is spectacular. We see the changing internal structure of the droplet, and the interplay of surface tension and gravity, a marvellous mix of refraction, reflection, and diffraction. Here’s a recording of Geuer’s art piece, known as  Water in Suspense . (Some browsers don’t start the video at the right moment — move to 13:33 in the recording if that’s the case).
It’s not a typical action-packed online video. It moves slowly, slowly,… and then WHOOSH, a sudden, rapid change. I suggest watching it for at least a minute or two. During that time you’ll start to learn how to watch the droplet. Indeed, getting a feel for the multiple timescales at which the droplet changes is part of what we learn from the work.
 Water in Suspense reveals a hidden world. We discover a rich structure immanent in the water droplet, a structure not ordinarily accessible to our senses. In this way it’s similar to the Hubble Extreme Deep Field, which also reveals a hidden world. Both are examples of what I call Super-realist art, art which doesn’t just capture what we can see directly with our eyes or hear with our ears, but which uses new sensors and methods of visualization to reveal a world that we cannot directly perceive. It’s art being used to reveal science.
Although I’m not an artist or an art critic, I find Super-realist art fascinating. Works like the Hubble Extreme Deep Field and Water in Suspense give us concrete, vivid representations of deep space and the interior structure of a water droplet. For most of us, these are usually little more than dry abstractions, remote from our understanding. By creating vivid representations, Super-realist art provides us with a new way of thinking about such phenomena. And so in this essay I explore Super-realist art: what it is, how it relates to other modes of art, and why it is flourishing today.
I’m a technologist and scientist, a person whose main interests are in areas such as machine learning, data science, and, especially, the development of cognitive tools (i.e., tools to extend human thought). It may seem strange that I’m writing an essay about art. But thinking about technology from this viewpoint gives a perspective that’s radically different to the usual take. It’s a flip side, an artistic perspective that sees technology and, in particular, Super-realism, as a means to discover new aesthetics and new representations of reality. That means Super-realism is not just of interest to artists, but can also inform technologists and scientists, giving them a new way of thinking about how we can develop tools that extend human thought.
In discussing Super-realism I will ignore many of the usual labels we use to understand art. Instead, I’ll develop a caricature which divides much of Western art into just three categories: Realism, Post-realism, and Super-realism. I believe this way of thinking illuminates Super-realism, and ask the indulgence of any experts on art history who happen to be reading.
Until the latter part of the 19th century Realism was one of the main aspirations of much Western art [1]. Realist art aimed at capturing the reality accessible to our senses. My favourite Realist artist is Rembrandt:
 (credit) 
Such paintings seem so true-to-life that it is as though the artist has captured an element of objective reality. Suppose aliens visited Earth after a cataclysm wiped out all traces of humanity, except for a few Rembrandt self-portraits that somehow survived. I believe the aliens could understand much about both Rembrandt and humanity from those portraits, including perhaps even something of Rembrandt’s personality, his habits, his likes, and his dislikes.
But even the most talented Realist artists capture only a tiny slice of reality. Rembrandt’s self-portraits, as real as they appear, omit nearly all the biological and mental processes going on in Rembrandt’s body and mind. Suppose, for example, we could zoom in on his face, seeing it at 10 times magnification, then 100, then 1,000, and so on. At each level of magnification a new world would be revealed, of pores and cells and microbes. And there is so much structure to understand in each of these worlds, from the incredibly complex ecology of microbes on the skin, to the inner workings of cells. Consider this video simulating the inside of a cell:
This is not to criticise Rembrandt and the other Realists. On their own terms, they succeeded. But what Super-realism shows is that we can see far deeper into the world, and find great beauty in so doing.
In the 20th century Western art moved away from Realism, and Post-realist art became increasingly influential. To describe how Super-realism relates to Post-realism I’ll use the work of Monet. Monet was an early Post-realist painter, one working at the boundary between Realism and Post-realism. Here’s one of Monet’s great works, the "Water Lillies" tryptych, housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York:
 (credit) 
Unfortunately, when viewed on a computer screen or as a small print, this tryptych looks washed out and insipid, a poor imitation of the Realists. But when you see the original — 6 and a half feet high, and 42 feet long — the effect is jaw-dropping. Monet’s genius, and what made his painting so overwhelming, was a deep understanding of how humans see. He was a master illusionist who understood how to trick the viewer’s brain into seeing something much, much better than a realistic rendition. This only works at scale. When "Water Lillies" is shrunk to print size, the psychology of perception changes, and the illusion vanishes. I don’t understand why this is. I’ve read something of the theory of Monet and his fellow Impressionists, and don’t find those explanations convincing. What I do know is that Monet’s shimmering pond loses its glory. It looks fake, less than a literal rendition, merely a washed out print. But somehow, in the original, Monet was able to use his understanding of human perception to evoke water lillies in a fashion more spectacular than a Realist painting could ever have achieved.
In Post-realism, art isn’t about directly representing an objective, independent reality. Instead, it’s about creating new types of relationship between the art piece and the human mind. Monet and his fellow Impressionists were on the boundary between Realism and Post-Realism, since their works still aimed to evoke an objective, independent reality, albeit not by a direct representation. But Post-realism was pushed much further by later artists, such as Picasso, M. C. Escher, and Kandinsky:
 (credit) (credit)  (credit) 
These works gradually shift away from representing reality, and toward exploring the relationship between art piece and viewer. Escher, for example, used quirks in the human visual system to evoke impossible realities. Abstract artists such as Kandinsky take this idea still further, and it is developed to an extreme in the work of abstract minimalists such as John McLaughlin, a pioneer in what is known as Hard-edge painting:
 (credit) 
At first glance this (and much of McLaughlin’s other work) looks ludicrous. But it makes more sense when you understand that McLaughlin was exploring how people respond to art. His earlier works were more complex. But he gradually simplified his work as he realized that people can have novel responses even to simple stimuli.
Abstract minimalism annoys many people. The approach can and has led to fakery and foolishness on the part of some artists. But my point here is neither to criticise nor to praise. Instead, it’s to understand what artists such as McLaughlin were up to. Whereas the Realist artists believed that virtuosity came from depicting part of reality with high fidelity, in Post-realism virtuosity may come from creating a novel relationship between art piece and viewer.
Super-realism changes art again. Virtuosity becomes about revealing hidden worlds and discovering new aesthetics. Take a look at the following video, which shows — in extreme slow motion! — a packet of light passing through a bottle. Ordinarily that passage takes less than a nanosecond, but the video slows the passage down by a factor of 10 billion, so we can see it:
In a way, Super-realism is a return to the aims of Realism, back to representing reality. But what’s new about Super-realism is the challenge (and opportunity!) to find ways of representing previously unseen parts of the world.
Most of my examples of Super-realist art have come from people who regard themselves mainly as scientists, not as artists. However, there are many artists doing Super-realist art. I’ve drawn my examples mostly from scientists merely because I’ve found that artists’ work is often more exploratory, and thus requires more background explanation, making it less suited for an essay such as this.
Although Super-realism’s flourishing is recent, its origins go back centuries. In 1610, Galileo published a short book entitled Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius), which contained several images showing the moon in unprecedented detail, as observed by Galileo through one of his new telescopes:
 (credit) 
In a similar vein, in 1665 Robert Hooke published a bestselling book entitled Micrographia, which used the newly-invented microscope to reveal the world of the very small. Hooke’s book included the first ever drawings of biological cells, as well as drawings showing animals such as fleas in unprecedented detail:
While Super-realism isn’t new, that doesn’t mean it’s yet in the artistic mainstream. Many people don’t consider works such as the Hubble Extreme Deep Field or the light-in-a-bottle video to be art. (I would not be surprised if this includes the creators of those works.) Even works more explicitly artistic in intent, such as Water in Suspense, are viewed as borderline. But I believe that each of these works reveals a new aesthetic, an aesthetic generated by the scientific principles underlying the phenomenon being represented. And insofar as they reveal a new aesthetic, I believe these works are art.
Although Super-realism isn’t yet in the artistic mainstream, it has influenced parts of that mainstream. For example, in the 1980s the film diector and cinematographer Ron Fricke used time-lapse photography to reveal new aspects of the everyday world, in documentary films such as  Chronos  [2]:
Fricke was not, of course, the first to use time-lapse photography in this way. However, his films have won wide acclaim, and inspired many other artists to develop time-lapse photography further as an artistic medium.
Super-realism has grown rapidly in the past twenty to thirty years. Three forces are driving that growth.
First, far more people can access and learn to use scientific instruments. Recall Juan Geuer and his virtuoso home-made laser light show. There are people building everything from home-made bubble chambers to balloons exploring the upper atmosphere. These are not isolated curiosities, but rather part of a rapidly expanding social phenomenon that has been called by many names: the DIY movement, citizen science, the Maker movement. Whatever it is, it’s growing, fed by the expansion of online and mail-order suppliers that serve niche markets, and by the growth of online (and, increasingly, offline) communities of people who work with these instruments and teach one another.
Second, the data being taken by many of these instruments is being shared openly, online. In the 1980s if a scientist used a telescope to take a photograph, likely no more than a few dozen people would ever touch the photographic plate. Now more than a billion people can download data from the Hubble Telescope, and find new ways to visualize it. Some of the most extraordinary visualizations of the Earth are made using data released openly by NASA. Any scientific project which releases data enables others to find new ways of making meaning from that data.
Third, we’re collectively building a powerful suite of tools to reveal these new worlds. For example, as I write there are more than 25,000 open source visualization projects available on the code repository GitHub. Most of those projects are, of coure, experiments that will be abandoned. But there are also many powerful tools that give people incredible abilities to make and reveal beauty. It’s no wonder Super-realism is flowering.
Story-tellers say that reality is often stranger and more interesting than fiction. I believe this is true for all art. The reason is that nature is more imaginative than we, and as we probe deeper into nature, we will continue to discover new aesthetics and new forms of beauty. I believe these new aesthetics will stimulate art for decades or centuries to come.
 If you enjoyed this essay, you may wish to subscribe to my blog, or follow me on Twitter. 
 Footnotes 
[1] I am referring to Realist art broadly, not the 19th century artistic movement known as Realism. I’m also certainly not claiming that all Western art was Realist until the late 19th century, merely that the idea of representing objective reality was often deeply influential.
[2] The YouTube video shows images from Chronos, but the music is from another source. Unfortunately, I could not find a good unabridged excerpt from Chronos online.
 Acknowledgements: This essay arose out of many conversations with Jen Dodd, especially about her work with the Subtle Technologies Festival of Art and Science. Thanks also to Miriah Meyer and Lee Smolin for conversations that helped stimulate this essay.
The artist and the machine
https://michaelnielsen.org/blog/the-artist-and-the-machine/
https://www.quantamagazine.org/authors/michael-nielsen
Author: Michael Nielsen | Quanta Magazine
2016-03-29
Michael Nielsen Contributing Columnist Twitter
<div><p>We care about your data, and we'd like to use cookies to give you a smooth browsing experience. Please agree and read more about our <a href="/privacy-policy">privacy policy</a>.</p><div><div><div><p><em>Contributing Columnist</em></p><div><a href="https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen"><div>Twitter</div></a></div></div></div><h2>Latest Articles</h2><div><div><div><a href="/is-alphago-really-such-a-big-deal-20160329/"></a></div><div><div><p><a href="/tag/quantized/">Quantized Columns</a></p></div><a href="/is-alphago-really-such-a-big-deal-20160329/"><h3>Is AlphaGo Really Such a Big Deal?</h3></a><div><div><p><em>By </em><a href="/authors/michael-nielsen/">Michael Nielsen</a></p></div><div><p>March 29, 2016</p></div><div><div><a href="/is-alphago-really-such-a-big-deal-20160329/#comments">Comment</a></div><div><p>Read Later</p></div></div></div><p>The Go-playing program teaches itself to replicate something very much like human intuition, an advance that promises far-reaching consequences.</p></div></div><div><div><a href="/the-physical-origin-of-universal-computing-20151027/"></a></div><div><div><p><a href="/tag/quantized/">Quantized Columns</a></p></div><a href="/the-physical-origin-of-universal-computing-20151027/"><h3>The Physical Origin of Universal Computing</h3></a><div><div><p><em>By </em><a href="/authors/michael-nielsen/">Michael Nielsen</a></p></div><div><p>October 27, 2015</p></div><div><div><a href="/the-physical-origin-of-universal-computing-20151027/#comments">Comment</a></div><div><p>Read Later</p></div></div></div><p>The physical nature of computers might reveal deep truths about their uniquely powerful abstract abilities.</p></div></div><div><div><a href="/the-rise-of-computer-aided-explanation-20150723/"></a></div><div><div><p><a href="/tag/quantized/">Quantized Columns</a></p></div><a href="/the-rise-of-computer-aided-explanation-20150723/"><h3>The Rise of Computer-Aided Explanation</h3></a><div><div><p><em>By </em><a href="/authors/michael-nielsen/">Michael Nielsen</a></p></div><div><p>July 23, 2015</p></div><div><div><a href="/the-rise-of-computer-aided-explanation-20150723/#comments">Comment</a></div><div><p>Read Later</p></div></div></div><p>Computers can translate French and prove mathematical theorems. But can they make deep conceptual insights into the way the world works?</p></div></div></div><div><p>The Quanta Newsletter</p><p><em>Get highlights of the most important news delivered to your email inbox</em></p><div><div><p>Email</p></div></div><div><p><a href="http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/home/?u=0d6ddf7dc1a0b7297c8e06618&amp;id=f0cb61321c">Recent newsletters</a></p></div></div></div>||||I|||| We care about your data, and we'd like to use cookies to give you a smooth browsing experience. Please agree and read more about our privacy policy.Agree
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 Michael Nielsen

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 Latest Articles

 Quantized Columns

 Is AlphaGo Really Such a Big Deal?

 By Michael Nielsen
 March 29, 2016
 Read Later

 The Go-playing program teaches itself to replicate something very much like human intuition, an advance that promises far-reaching consequences.

 Quantized Columns

 The Physical Origin of Universal Computing

 By Michael Nielsen
 October 27, 2015
 Read Later

 The physical nature of computers might reveal deep truths about their uniquely powerful abstract abilities.

 Quantized Columns

 The Rise of Computer-Aided Explanation

 By Michael Nielsen
 July 23, 2015
 Read Later

 Computers can translate French and prove mathematical theorems. But can they make deep conceptual insights into the way the world works?

 About the author

 Michael Nielsen is a computer scientist and research fellow at the Recurse Center in New York City. He has written books on quantum computing, open science, and deep learning. His current research interests are collective cognition and intelligence amplification.
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We care about your data, and we'd like to use cookies to give you a smooth browsing experience. Please agree and read more about our privacy policy.     Contributing Columnist    Twitter     Latest Articles          Quantized Columns    Is AlphaGo Really Such a Big Deal?     By  Michael Nielsen    March 29, 2016    Comment   Read Later    The Go-playing program teaches itself to replicate something very much like human intuition, an advance that promises far-reaching consequences.           Quantized Columns    The Physical Origin of Universal Computing     By  Michael Nielsen    October 27, 2015    Comment   Read Later    The physical nature of computers might reveal deep truths about their uniquely powerful abstract abilities.           Quantized Columns    The Rise of Computer-Aided Explanation     By  Michael Nielsen    July 23, 2015    Comment   Read Later    Computers can translate French and prove mathematical theorems. But can they make deep conceptual insights into the way the world works?     The Quanta Newsletter  Get highlights of the most important news delivered to your email inbox    Email     Recent newsletters
Author: Michael Nielsen | Quanta Magazine
https://www.quantamagazine.org/authors/michael-nielsen/
https://freelancingscience.com/tag/michael-nielsen/
Michael Nielsen – Freelancing science
2009-04-14
None
<div><div>
<p>This is a follow up to my <a href="https://freelancingscience.com/2009/01/27/science-art-what-language-do-you-use/">recent post in this theme</a>. I got encouraging (thank you!) and interesting responses to that post, some of which deserve a highlight. First quote comes from <a href="http://www.gregorylent.com/">Gregory Lent</a>, an artist:</p>
<blockquote><p>art is simply listening inwards and being aware of what you feel. true of both art appreciation, and art making …. the permission to do that is more an emotional allowing than any sort of training or “creativity” … it is merely conscious sensitivity …</p>
<p>scientists have this ability, of course, but are too wedded to the intellect to allow it to emerge, or to be part of the daily flow …</p></blockquote>
<p>The next one is from <a href="http://stevegrand.wordpress.com/">Steven Grand</a>, AI researcher:</p>
<blockquote><p>The thing is, all creative thinkers use some kind of analogy. At the artistic end of the scale these analogies tend to be loose, suggestive metaphors. At the scientific end of the scale we build mathematical models. But in between come many shades of analogy, some more concrete and some metaphorical; some symbolic and some more touchy-feely.</p>
<p>The trick, of course, is to be able to shift freely up and down the continuum as required. Not all artists or scientists can do this, sadly. Many artists are unable to anchor their thoughts in reality and many scientists are too scared to let go of certainty.</p></blockquote>
<p>And finally, a comment from <a href="http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?page_id=181">Michael Nielsen</a>, theoretical physicist (quantum information theorist to be precise), <a href="http://friendfeed.com/e/bc07f5d6-227b-ea1c-40f1-c92bc36fca59/Science-Art-what-language-do-you-use/">posted over at FriendFeed</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>(…) I don’t think particularly verbally when I’m doing research. Not visually either. Instead, it’s a mishmash of spatial, kinesthetic, visual and linguistic; very, very hard to describe. In any case, I don’t think I fit your description. I suspect a lot of theoretical physicists don’t.</p></blockquote>
<p>And actually I could end this post here, as these quotes nicely complement each other. However, there’s one more thing I wanted to add.</p>
<p>After noticing how limited my thinking patterns are, I suspect that there’s a lot of mental barriers for creative thinking in sciences, that are “inherited” during the training process (mainly the PhD studies). There’s quite a lot of “outside” barriers too (see <a href="http://usefulchem.blogspot.com/2009/04/is-human-ego-good-for-science.html">brilliant post by Jean-Claude  on ego-less science</a>), but my feeling is that great ideas don’t appear too often because we simply rarely fall off the track to find them. The times of <a href="http://www.anseladams.org">Ansel Adams</a> who took some of his most beatiful photographs from or in close proximity to his car are gone – science became a crowded tourists destination with thousands of eyes looking for a good picture from exactly the same spot.</p>
<p>I’m very happy where the topic has lead me. The whole theme of intersection between Science and Art becomes a quest for exploring limits in scientific creativity.</p>
<p><a href="http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/99561e9e-77a5-4913-9454-8452fbd29cb1/"></a></p>
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 Science and Art: limits in scientific creativity

 14 Apr

 This is a follow up to my recent post in this theme. I got encouraging (thank you!) and interesting responses to that post, some of which deserve a highlight. First quote comes from Gregory Lent, an artist:

 art is simply listening inwards and being aware of what you feel. true of both art appreciation, and art making …. the permission to do that is more an emotional allowing than any sort of training or “creativity” … it is merely conscious sensitivity …

 scientists have this ability, of course, but are too wedded to the intellect to allow it to emerge, or to be part of the daily flow …

 The next one is from Steven Grand, AI researcher:

 The thing is, all creative thinkers use some kind of analogy. At the artistic end of the scale these analogies tend to be loose, suggestive metaphors. At the scientific end of the scale we build mathematical models. But in between come many shades of analogy, some more concrete and some metaphorical; some symbolic and some more touchy-feely.

 The trick, of course, is to be able to shift freely up and down the continuum as required. Not all artists or scientists can do this, sadly. Many artists are unable to anchor their thoughts in reality and many scientists are too scared to let go of certainty.

 And finally, a comment from Michael Nielsen, theoretical physicist (quantum information theorist to be precise), posted over at FriendFeed:

 (…) I don’t think particularly verbally when I’m doing research. Not visually either. Instead, it’s a mishmash of spatial, kinesthetic, visual and linguistic; very, very hard to describe. In any case, I don’t think I fit your description. I suspect a lot of theoretical physicists don’t.

 And actually I could end this post here, as these quotes nicely complement each other. However, there’s one more thing I wanted to add.

 After noticing how limited my thinking patterns are, I suspect that there’s a lot of mental barriers for creative thinking in sciences, that are “inherited” during the training process (mainly the PhD studies). There’s quite a lot of “outside” barriers too (see brilliant post by Jean-Claude on ego-less science), but my feeling is that great ideas don’t appear too often because we simply rarely fall off the track to find them. The times of Ansel Adams who took some of his most beatiful photographs from or in close proximity to his car are gone – science became a crowded tourists destination with thousands of eyes looking for a good picture from exactly the same spot.

 I’m very happy where the topic has lead me. The whole theme of intersection between Science and Art becomes a quest for exploring limits in scientific creativity.

 5 Comments

 Posted by Pawel Szczesny on April 14, 2009 in Science and Art

 Tags: ART, Creativity, Michael Nielsen, Theoretical physics, Visual arts

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This is a follow up to my recent post in this theme. I got encouraging (thank you!) and interesting responses to that post, some of which deserve a highlight. First quote comes from Gregory Lent, an artist:
 art is simply listening inwards and being aware of what you feel. true of both art appreciation, and art making …. the permission to do that is more an emotional allowing than any sort of training or “creativity” … it is merely conscious sensitivity …
scientists have this ability, of course, but are too wedded to the intellect to allow it to emerge, or to be part of the daily flow … 
The next one is from Steven Grand, AI researcher:
 The thing is, all creative thinkers use some kind of analogy. At the artistic end of the scale these analogies tend to be loose, suggestive metaphors. At the scientific end of the scale we build mathematical models. But in between come many shades of analogy, some more concrete and some metaphorical; some symbolic and some more touchy-feely.
The trick, of course, is to be able to shift freely up and down the continuum as required. Not all artists or scientists can do this, sadly. Many artists are unable to anchor their thoughts in reality and many scientists are too scared to let go of certainty. 
And finally, a comment from Michael Nielsen, theoretical physicist (quantum information theorist to be precise), posted over at FriendFeed:
 (…) I don’t think particularly verbally when I’m doing research. Not visually either. Instead, it’s a mishmash of spatial, kinesthetic, visual and linguistic; very, very hard to describe. In any case, I don’t think I fit your description. I suspect a lot of theoretical physicists don’t. 
And actually I could end this post here, as these quotes nicely complement each other. However, there’s one more thing I wanted to add.
After noticing how limited my thinking patterns are, I suspect that there’s a lot of mental barriers for creative thinking in sciences, that are “inherited” during the training process (mainly the PhD studies). There’s quite a lot of “outside” barriers too (see brilliant post by Jean-Claude  on ego-less science), but my feeling is that great ideas don’t appear too often because we simply rarely fall off the track to find them. The times of Ansel Adams who took some of his most beatiful photographs from or in close proximity to his car are gone – science became a crowded tourists destination with thousands of eyes looking for a good picture from exactly the same spot.
I’m very happy where the topic has lead me. The whole theme of intersection between Science and Art becomes a quest for exploring limits in scientific creativity.
Michael Nielsen – Freelancing science
https://freelancingscience.com/tag/michael-nielsen/
https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computation-Information-10th-Anniversary/dp/1107002176
Quantum Computation and Quantum Information: 10th Anniversary Edition: Nielsen, Michael A., Chuang, Isaac L.: 9781107002173: Amazon.com: Books
2011-01-31
Michael A Nielsen
<div><div><p>The content of the book is great and well written, clear presentation of the concepts, I'd rate it with five stars. All the books that I bought through Amazon, published by Cambridge University Press, arrived in poor condition while the books published with other editorials are sent with protection to avoid this disappointing situation. The books best preserved are those sold by MIT Press.Actually, it's the first time I've written a review about an item bought through Amazon, however, considering it isn't the first time I received a CUP book in this lame condition (so far I've bought four CUP books through Amazon), I took my time to communicate this. Such a shame, taking into account that we're talking about expensive books (at least in my country).Henceforth, I'll buy books from other editorials such as MIT and Springer because I receive the former kind of books in great shape, and the latter ones in an (almost) acceptable state.</p></div></div>||||I|||| Skip to main content
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 Quantum Computation and Quantum Information: 10th Anniversary Edition Anniversary Edition

 by Michael A. Nielsen (Author), Isaac L. Chuang (Author)
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 One of the most cited books in physics of all time, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information remains the best textbook in this exciting field of science. This 10th anniversary edition includes an introduction from the authors setting the work in context. This comprehensive textbook describes such remarkable effects as fast quantum algorithms, quantum teleportation, quantum cryptography and quantum error-correction. Quantum mechanics and computer science are introduced before moving on to describe what a quantum computer is, how it can be used to solve problems faster than ‘classical' computers and its real-world implementation. It concludes with an in-depth treatment of quantum information. Containing a wealth of figures and exercises, this well-known textbook is ideal for courses on the subject, and will interest beginning graduate students and researchers in physics, computer science, mathematics, and electrical engineering.
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 9781107002173
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 978-1107002173
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 Cambridge University Press
 5. Publication date
 January 31, 2011
 6. Language
 English
 7. Dimensions
 7 x 1.6 x 9.8 inches
 8. Print length
 702 pages
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 "In conclusion, “Mike and Ike” is still the authoritative reference point for anybody studying or researching in the field of quantum computing."
 Alessandro Berni, Computing Reviews

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 This 10th anniversary edition includes an introduction from the authors setting the work in context.


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 Product details

 * ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1107002176
 * Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cambridge University Press; Anniversary edition (January 31, 2011)
 * Language ‏ : ‎ English
 * Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 702 pages
 * ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781107002173
 * ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1107002173
 * Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.44 pounds
 * Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 1.6 x 9.8 inches
 * Best Sellers Rank: #73,248 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )
 + #54 in Computer Science (Books)
 + #70 in Quantum Theory (Books)
 + #1,086 in Unknown
 * Customer Reviews:
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  2 Stars
  The book deserves five stars although I received the book in a bad condition
  The content of the book is great and well written, clear presentation of the concepts, I'd rate it with five stars. All the books that I bought through Amazon, published by Cambridge University Press, arrived in poor condition while the books published with other editorials are sent with protection to avoid this disappointing situation. The books best preserved are those sold by MIT Press.Actually, it's the first time I've written a review about an item bought through Amazon, however, considering it isn't the first time I received a CUP book in this lame condition (so far I've bought four CUP books through Amazon), I took my time to communicate this. Such a shame, taking into account that we're talking about expensive books (at least in my country).Henceforth, I'll buy books from other editorials such as MIT and Springer because I receive the former kind of books in great shape, and the latter ones in an (almost) acceptable state.
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  Amazon Customer
  5.0 out of 5 stars Approachable but Thorough
  Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2024
  Verified Purchase
  As an independent reader with a background in mathematics, this has been a difficult but entertaining read. I definitely recommend a strong background in linear algebra because if you come in blind, the 20 page recap is unlikely to be sufficient. However, the recap is a great review and introduction to the notation.

  I'm still relatively early in the book, but the writing is very clear and I would definitely recommend it to any independent readers who are interested in quantum computing!
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  Henry M.
  5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Text
  Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2024
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  Excellent text. Very accessible to all researchers and graduate students.
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  Mateo
  5.0 out of 5 stars The quantum computing must
  Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2023
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  Great book! I received it just as I asked.
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  Thomas M. Marshall
  5.0 out of 5 stars There's a very good reason why this book is considered the standard.
  Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2022
  Verified Purchase
  This book is required reading for anyone who wants to understand quantum computing -- with the emphasis on "understand".
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  9 people found this helpful
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  RKL
  5.0 out of 5 stars A great reference, but surprisingly, also a better intro than other titles
  Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2017
  Verified Purchase
  I bought several titles to get introduced to quantum computing... thinking that this one would be the text but adding some hopefully more accessible intros... turns out that this title is actually the best intro as well as the best reference! this title helps motivated the reader into looking at quantum from its own lens instead of trying to start from classic references or spending chapters on a review of linear algebra. I recommend new students to the subject start with this book.
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  30 people found this helpful
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  GC
  5.0 out of 5 stars Assumes very little prior knowledge, and is fun to read!
  Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2018
  Verified Purchase
  I'm going through this book very thoroughly, problem-by-problem. I found their appendices on probability and group theory, and their part in chapter 2 on linear algebra, to be extremely well-done. The authors manage to be concise without being dense. For that alone, I give 5 stars. The style is conversational but direct, and very enjoyable in my opinion.
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  18 people found this helpful
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  David
  4.0 out of 5 stars THE Quantum Computer text
  Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2014
  Verified Purchase
  Quantum Computation and Quantum Information: 10th Anniversary Edition
  This book is definitely THE source to turn to for an understanding of Quantum Computation and Information. One can only read through the first chapter and you are given the key feature of Quantum Computation and Information. The advantage of this approach is that Chapter 1 establishes a Quantum roadmap of what you need to know. You can stop there or you can dive deeper into the technology. Using the remaining chapters as a reference or continuation of course studies.

  But, it is the 10th Edition and I would have liked to see some new information associated with current trends in Quantum Computing. For examples:
  1) Adiabatic verses Gate Arrays,
  2) Quantum instructions examples, whether it is by circuit manipulation or by an Objective function,
  3) A review section on quantum Notations (logic, Bra-kets, linear algebra) to help readers get back into it again.

  This is THE book for those interested in finding out what is Quantum computers, but go slow with the first chapter and use the internet to clarify topics that are new to you, or to just refresh your memory. If you can skip through Chapter 1, you don't need the book.
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  30 people found this helpful
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  Alex P.
  5.0 out of 5 stars Good book
  Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2016
  Verified Purchase
  This is not an easy read. But I got started in QC and go the hard copy due to complaints about the digital version. In hindsight being able to put tabs on pages on a book this big is probably easier than managing it electronically.

  Lots of material in this book. Unfortunately the only QC I have access too doesn't have a lot of qbits.
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  7 people found this helpful
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  Prof. M.R. Soleymani
  5.0 out of 5 stars Good service
  Reviewed in Canada on January 2, 2024
  Verified Purchase
  I got what I expected on time.
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  Cliente de Amazon
  5.0 out of 5 stars La biblia de la computación cuántica.
  Reviewed in Mexico on February 20, 2023
  Verified Purchase
  Este libro es un obligado para introducir al lector en la computación cuántica. El nivel matemático del libro es sumamente accesible. El mejor libro que he visto hasta ahora del tema.
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  Ana
  5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing book
  Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 26, 2024
  Verified Purchase
  One of the best books out there for an introduction to quantum computing. Starts with the basics such than an undergraduate science student can get started with it easily, before diving into more complex topics.
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  Dave
  5.0 out of 5 stars La bibbia del quantum
  Reviewed in Italy on March 18, 2022
  Verified Purchase
  Ottimo referenza per il mondo del calcolo quantistico, o quantum computing. Forse non l'ideale per iniziare ma di sicuro da usare per quando si vuole approfondire la superficie
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  Martin Vesely
  5.0 out of 5 stars Must have for all quantum computing aficionados
  Reviewed in Germany on November 15, 2019
  Verified Purchase
  The book is very interesting and useful for everyone who means to deal with the quantum computing seriously. The book will provide you with necessary theoretical background to understand quantum computing and quantum algorithm.

  The first part is introduction to the quantum computing, quantum mechanics and theoretical computer science, the second part deals with basic of quantum circuits, quantum Fourier transformation and its application and Grover search algorithm. Last part is focused on theory of information, mainly the quantum one.

  The book is not light reading but it can serve as very useful guide in the world of quantum computing theory.
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  4 people found this helpful
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The content of the book is great and well written, clear presentation of the concepts, I'd rate it with five stars. All the books that I bought through Amazon, published by Cambridge University Press, arrived in poor condition while the books published with other editorials are sent with protection to avoid this disappointing situation. The books best preserved are those sold by MIT Press.Actually, it's the first time I've written a review about an item bought through Amazon, however, considering it isn't the first time I received a CUP book in this lame condition (so far I've bought four CUP books through Amazon), I took my time to communicate this. Such a shame, taking into account that we're talking about expensive books (at least in my country).Henceforth, I'll buy books from other editorials such as MIT and Springer because I receive the former kind of books in great shape, and the latter ones in an (almost) acceptable state.
Quantum Computation and Quantum Information: 10th Anniversary Edition: Nielsen, Michael A., Chuang, Isaac L.: 9781107002173: Amazon.com: Books
https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computation-Information-10th-Anniversary/dp/1107002176
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JBAPssaYMMRfNqYt7/michael-nielsen-s-notes-on-effective-altruism
Michael Nielsen's "Notes on effective altruism" - EA Forum
2022-06-03
Pablo
<div><div><p>Quantum physicist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Nielsen">Michael Nielsen</a> has published a powerful critical essay about EA. </p><p>Summary:</p><blockquote><p><i>Long and rough notes on Effective Altruism (EA). Written to help me get to the bottom of several questions: what do I like and think is important about EA? Why do I find the mindset so foreign? Why am I not an EA? And to start me thinking about: what do alternatives to EA look like? The notes are not aimed at effective altruists, though they may perhaps be of interest to EA-adjacent people. Thoughtful, informed comments and corrections welcome (especially detailed, specific corrections!) - see the comment area at the bottom.</i></p></blockquote><p>Some passages I highlighted:</p><blockquote><p>I have EA friends who donate a large fraction of their income to charitable causes. In some cases it's <i>all </i>their income above some fairly low (by rich developed world standards) threshold, say $30k. In some cases it seems plausible that their personal donations are responsible for saving dozens of lives, helping lift many people out of poverty, and preventing many debilitating diseases, often in some of the poorest and most underserved parts of the world. Some of those friends have directly helped save many lives. That's a simple sentence, but an extraordinary one, so I'll repeat it: they've directly helped save many lives.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>As extraordinary as my friend's generosity was, there is something further still going on here. Kravinsky's act is one of moral imagination, to even consider donating a kidney, and then of moral conviction, to follow through. This is an astonishing act of moral invention: someone (presumably Kravinsky) was the first to both imagine doing this, and then to actually do it. That moral invention then inspired others to do the same. It actually expanded the range of human moral experience, which others can learn from and then emulate. In this sense a person like Kravinsky can be thought of as a moral pioneer or moral psychonaut, inventing new forms of moral experience.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>Moral reasoning, if taken seriously and acted upon, is of the utmost concern, in part because there is a danger of terrible mistakes. The Nazi example is overly dramatic: for one thing, I find it hard to believe that the originators of Nazi ideas didn't realize that these were deeply evil acts. But a more everyday example, and one which should give any ideology pause, is overly self-righteous people, acting in what they "know" is a good cause, but in fact doing harm. I'm cautiously enthusiastic about EA's moral pioneering. But it is potentially a minefield, something to also be cautious about.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>when EA judo is practiced too much, it's worth looking for more fundamental problems. The basic form of EA judo is: "Look, disagreement over what is good does nothing directly to touch EA. Indeed, such disagreement is the engine driving improvement in our notion of what is good." This is perhaps true in some God's-eye, omniscient, in-principle philosopher's sense. But EA community and organizations are subject to fashion and power games and shortcomings and biases, just like every other community and organization. Good intentions alone aren't enough to ensure effective decisions about effectiveness. And the reason many people are bothered by EA is not that they think it's a bad idea to "do good better". But rather that they doubt the ability of EA institutions and community to live up to the aspirations.</p><p>These critiques can come from many directions. From people interested in identity politics I've heard: "Look, many of these EA organizations are being run by powerful white men, reproducing existing power structures, biased toward technocratic capitalism and the status quo, and ignoring many of the things which really matter." From libertarians I've heard: "Look, EA is just leftist collective utilitarianism. It centralizes decision-making too much, and ignores both price signals and the immense power that comes from having lots of people working in</p><p>their own self-interest, albeit inside a system designed so that self-interest (often) helps everyone collectively ." From startup people and inventors I've heard: "Aren't EAs just working on public goods? If you want to do the most good, why not work on a startup instead? We can just invent and scale new technology (or new ideas) to improve the world!" From people familiar with the pathologies of aging organizations and communities, I've heard: "Look, any movement which grows rapidly will also start to decay. It will become dominated by ambitious careerists and principal agent problems, and lose the sincerity and agility that characterized the pioneers and early adopters"</p><p>All these critiques have some truth; they also have significant issues. Without getting into those weeds, the immediate point is that they all look like "merely" practical problems, for which EA judo may be practiced: "If we're not doing that right, we shall improve, we simply need you to provide evidence and a better alternative". But the organizational patterns are so strong that these criticisms seem more in-principle to me. Again: if your social movement "works in principle" but practical implementation has too many problems, then it's not really working in principle, either. The quality "we are able to do this effectively in practice" is an important (implicit) in-principle quality.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>I've heard several EAs say they know multiple EAs who get very down or even depressed because they feel they're not having enough impact on the world. As a purely intellectual project it's fascinating to start from a principle like "use reason and evidence to figure out how do the most good in the world" and try to derive things like "care for children" or "enjoy eating ice cream" or "engage in or support the arts" as special cases of the overarching principle. But while that's intellectually interesting, as a direct guide to living it's a terrible mistake. The reason to care for children (<i>etc</i>) isn't because it helps you do the most good. It's because <i>we're absolutely supposed to care for our children</i>. The reason art and music and ice cream matter aren't because they help you do the most good. It's because we're human beings – not soulless automatons – who respond in ways we don't entirely understand to things whose impact on our <i>selves </i>we do not and cannot fully apprehend.</p><p>Now, the pattern that's been chosen by EA has been to insert escape clauses. Many talk about having a "warm fuzzies" budget for "ineffective" giving that simply makes them feel good. And they carve out <i>ad hoc </i>extension clauses like the one about having children or setting aside an ice cream budget or a dinner budget, and so on. It all seems to me like special pleading at a frequency which suggests something amiss. You've started from a single overarching principle that seems tremendously attractive. But now you've either got to accept all the consequences, and make yourself miserable. Or you have to start, as an individual, grafting on <i>ad hoc </i>extension clauses.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>EA is an inspiring meaning-giving life philosophy. It invites people to strongly connect with some notion of a greater good, to contribute to that greater good, and to make it central in their life. EA-in-practice has done a remarkable amount of direct good in the world, making people's lives better. It's excellent to have the conversational frame of "how to do the most good" readily available and presumptively of value. EA-in-practice also provides a strong community and sense of belonging and shared values for many people. As moral pioneers EA is providing a remarkable set of new public goods.</p><p>All this makes EA attractive as a life philosophy, providing orientation and meaning and a clear and powerful core, with supporting institutions. Unfortunately, strong-EA is a poor life philosophy, with poor boundaries that may cause great distress to people, and underserves core needs. EA-in-practice is too centralized, too focused on absolute advantage; the market often does a far better job of providing certain kinds of private (or privatizable) good. However, EA-in-practice likely does a better job of providing certain kinds of public good than do many existing institutions. EA relies overmuch on online charisma: flashy but insubstantial discussion of topics like the simulation argument and x-risk and AI safety have a tendency to dominate conversation, rather than more substantial work. (This does not mean there aren't good discussions of such topics.) EA-in-practice is too allied with existing systems of power, and does little to question or change them. Appropriating the term "effective" is clever marketing and movement-building, but intellectually disingenuous. EA views illegibility as a problem to be solved, not as a fundamental condition. Because of this it does poorly on certain kinds of creative and aesthetic work. Moral utilitarianism is a useful but limited practical tool, mistaking quantification that is useful for making tradeoffs with a fundamental fact about the world.</p><p>I've strongly criticized EA in these notes. But I haven't provided a clearly and forcefully articulated alternative. It amounts to saying that someone's diet of ice cream and chocolate bars isn't ideal, without providing better food; it may be correct, but isn't immediately actionable. Given the tremendous emotional need people have for a powerful meaning-giving system, I don't expect it to have much impact on those people. It's too easy to arm-wave the issues away, or ignore them as things which can be resolved by grafting some exception clauses on. But writing the notes both helped me better understand why I'm not EA, and also why I think the EA principle would, with very considerable modification, make a valuable part of some larger life philosophy. But I don't yet understand what that life philosophy is.</p></blockquote></div>||||I|||| This website requires javascript to properly function. Consider activating javascript to get access to all site functionality.

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 Michael Nielsen's "Notes on effective altruism"

 by Pablo 6 min read 3rd Jun 2022 48 comments

 211

 Criticism of effective altruism Criticism and Red Teaming Contest
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 This is a linkpost for https://michaelnotebook.com/eanotes/

 Quantum physicist Michael Nielsen has published a powerful critical essay about EA.

 Summary:

 Long and rough notes on Effective Altruism (EA). Written to help me get to the bottom of several questions: what do I like and think is important about EA? Why do I find the mindset so foreign? Why am I not an EA? And to start me thinking about: what do alternatives to EA look like? The notes are not aimed at effective altruists, though they may perhaps be of interest to EA-adjacent people. Thoughtful, informed comments and corrections welcome (especially detailed, specific corrections!) - see the comment area at the bottom.

 Some passages I highlighted:

 I have EA friends who donate a large fraction of their income to charitable causes. In some cases it's all their income above some fairly low (by rich developed world standards) threshold, say $30k. In some cases it seems plausible that their personal donations are responsible for saving dozens of lives, helping lift many people out of poverty, and preventing many debilitating diseases, often in some of the poorest and most underserved parts of the world. Some of those friends have directly helped save many lives. That's a simple sentence, but an extraordinary one, so I'll repeat it: they've directly helped save many lives.

 As extraordinary as my friend's generosity was, there is something further still going on here. Kravinsky's act is one of moral imagination, to even consider donating a kidney, and then of moral conviction, to follow through. This is an astonishing act of moral invention: someone (presumably Kravinsky) was the first to both imagine doing this, and then to actually do it. That moral invention then inspired others to do the same. It actually expanded the range of human moral experience, which others can learn from and then emulate. In this sense a person like Kravinsky can be thought of as a moral pioneer or moral psychonaut, inventing new forms of moral experience.

 Moral reasoning, if taken seriously and acted upon, is of the utmost concern, in part because there is a danger of terrible mistakes. The Nazi example is overly dramatic: for one thing, I find it hard to believe that the originators of Nazi ideas didn't realize that these were deeply evil acts. But a more everyday example, and one which should give any ideology pause, is overly self-righteous people, acting in what they "know" is a good cause, but in fact doing harm. I'm cautiously enthusiastic about EA's moral pioneering. But it is potentially a minefield, something to also be cautious about.

 when EA judo is practiced too much, it's worth looking for more fundamental problems. The basic form of EA judo is: "Look, disagreement over what is good does nothing directly to touch EA. Indeed, such disagreement is the engine driving improvement in our notion of what is good." This is perhaps true in some God's-eye, omniscient, in-principle philosopher's sense. But EA community and organizations are subject to fashion and power games and shortcomings and biases, just like every other community and organization. Good intentions alone aren't enough to ensure effective decisions about effectiveness. And the reason many people are bothered by EA is not that they think it's a bad idea to "do good better". But rather that they doubt the ability of EA institutions and community to live up to the aspirations.

 These critiques can come from many directions. From people interested in identity politics I've heard: "Look, many of these EA organizations are being run by powerful white men, reproducing existing power structures, biased toward technocratic capitalism and the status quo, and ignoring many of the things which really matter." From libertarians I've heard: "Look, EA is just leftist collective utilitarianism. It centralizes decision-making too much, and ignores both price signals and the immense power that comes from having lots of people working in

 their own self-interest, albeit inside a system designed so that self-interest (often) helps everyone collectively ." From startup people and inventors I've heard: "Aren't EAs just working on public goods? If you want to do the most good, why not work on a startup instead? We can just invent and scale new technology (or new ideas) to improve the world!" From people familiar with the pathologies of aging organizations and communities, I've heard: "Look, any movement which grows rapidly will also start to decay. It will become dominated by ambitious careerists and principal agent problems, and lose the sincerity and agility that characterized the pioneers and early adopters"

 All these critiques have some truth; they also have significant issues. Without getting into those weeds, the immediate point is that they all look like "merely" practical problems, for which EA judo may be practiced: "If we're not doing that right, we shall improve, we simply need you to provide evidence and a better alternative". But the organizational patterns are so strong that these criticisms seem more in-principle to me. Again: if your social movement "works in principle" but practical implementation has too many problems, then it's not really working in principle, either. The quality "we are able to do this effectively in practice" is an important (implicit) in-principle quality.

 I've heard several EAs say they know multiple EAs who get very down or even depressed because they feel they're not having enough impact on the world. As a purely intellectual project it's fascinating to start from a principle like "use reason and evidence to figure out how do the most good in the world" and try to derive things like "care for children" or "enjoy eating ice cream" or "engage in or support the arts" as special cases of the overarching principle. But while that's intellectually interesting, as a direct guide to living it's a terrible mistake. The reason to care for children (etc) isn't because it helps you do the most good. It's because we're absolutely supposed to care for our children. The reason art and music and ice cream matter aren't because they help you do the most good. It's because we're human beings – not soulless automatons – who respond in ways we don't entirely understand to things whose impact on our selves we do not and cannot fully apprehend.

 Now, the pattern that's been chosen by EA has been to insert escape clauses. Many talk about having a "warm fuzzies" budget for "ineffective" giving that simply makes them feel good. And they carve out ad hoc extension clauses like the one about having children or setting aside an ice cream budget or a dinner budget, and so on. It all seems to me like special pleading at a frequency which suggests something amiss. You've started from a single overarching principle that seems tremendously attractive. But now you've either got to accept all the consequences, and make yourself miserable. Or you have to start, as an individual, grafting on ad hoc extension clauses.

 EA is an inspiring meaning-giving life philosophy. It invites people to strongly connect with some notion of a greater good, to contribute to that greater good, and to make it central in their life. EA-in-practice has done a remarkable amount of direct good in the world, making people's lives better. It's excellent to have the conversational frame of "how to do the most good" readily available and presumptively of value. EA-in-practice also provides a strong community and sense of belonging and shared values for many people. As moral pioneers EA is providing a remarkable set of new public goods.

 All this makes EA attractive as a life philosophy, providing orientation and meaning and a clear and powerful core, with supporting institutions. Unfortunately, strong-EA is a poor life philosophy, with poor boundaries that may cause great distress to people, and underserves core needs. EA-in-practice is too centralized, too focused on absolute advantage; the market often does a far better job of providing certain kinds of private (or privatizable) good. However, EA-in-practice likely does a better job of providing certain kinds of public good than do many existing institutions. EA relies overmuch on online charisma: flashy but insubstantial discussion of topics like the simulation argument and x-risk and AI safety have a tendency to dominate conversation, rather than more substantial work. (This does not mean there aren't good discussions of such topics.) EA-in-practice is too allied with existing systems of power, and does little to question or change them. Appropriating the term "effective" is clever marketing and movement-building, but intellectually disingenuous. EA views illegibility as a problem to be solved, not as a fundamental condition. Because of this it does poorly on certain kinds of creative and aesthetic work. Moral utilitarianism is a useful but limited practical tool, mistaking quantification that is useful for making tradeoffs with a fundamental fact about the world.

 I've strongly criticized EA in these notes. But I haven't provided a clearly and forcefully articulated alternative. It amounts to saying that someone's diet of ice cream and chocolate bars isn't ideal, without providing better food; it may be correct, but isn't immediately actionable. Given the tremendous emotional need people have for a powerful meaning-giving system, I don't expect it to have much impact on those people. It's too easy to arm-wave the issues away, or ignore them as things which can be resolved by grafting some exception clauses on. But writing the notes both helped me better understand why I'm not EA, and also why I think the EA principle would, with very considerable modification, make a valuable part of some larger life philosophy. But I don't yet understand what that life philosophy is.

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 [ - ]Geoffrey Miller 8mo 98

 The Michael Neilsen critique seems thoughtful, constructive, and well-balanced on first read, but I have some serious reservations about the underlying ethos and its implications.

 Look, any compelling new world-view that is outside the mainstream cultures' Overton window can be pathologized as an information hazard that makes its believers feel unhappy, inadequate, and even mentally ill by mainstream standards. Nielsen seems to view 'strong EA' as that kind of information hazard, and critiques it as such.

 Trouble is, if you understand that most normies are delusional about some important issue, and you you develop some genuinely deeper insights into that issue, the psychologically predictable result is some degree of alienation and frustration. This is true for everyone who has a religious conversion experience. It's true for everyone who really takes onboard the implications of any intellectually compelling science -- whether cosmology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, signaling theory, game theory, behavior genetics, etc. It's true for everyone who learns about any branch of moral philosophy and takes it seriously as a guide to action.

 I've seen this over, and over, and over in my own field of evolutionary psychology. The usual 'character arc' of ev psych insight is that (1) you read Dawkins or Pinker or Buss, you get filled with curiosity about the origins of human nature, (2) you learn some more and you feel overwhelming intellectual awe and excitement about the grandeur of evolutionary theory, (3) you gradually come to understand that every human perception, preference, value, desire, emotion, and motivation has deep evolutionary roots beyond your control, and you start to feel uneasy, (4) you ruminate about how you're nothing but an evolved robot chasing reproductive success through adaptively self-deceived channels, and you feel some personal despair, (5) you look around at a society full of other self-deceived humans unaware of their biological programming, and you feel black-pilled civilizational despair, (6) you live with the Darwinian nihilism for a few years, adapt to the new normal, and gradually find some way to live with the new insights, climbing your way back into some semblance of normie-adjacent happiness. I've seen these six phases many times in my own colleagues, grad students, and collaborators.

 And that's just with a new descriptive world-view about how the human world works. EA's challenge can be even more profound, because it's not just descriptive, but normative, or at least prescriptive. So there's a painful gap between what we could be doing, and what we are doing. And so there should be, if you take the world in a morally serious way.

 I think the deeper problem is that given 20th century history, there's a general dubiousness about any group of people who do take the world in a morally serious way that deviates from the usual forms of mild political virtue signaling encouraged in our current system of credentialism, careerism, and consumerism.

 Reply
 [ - ]Elliot_Olds 8mo 23

 I think even on EA's own terms (apart from any effects from EA being fringe) there's a good reason for EAs to be OK with being more stressed and unhappy than people with other philosophies.

 On the scale of human history we're likely in an emergency situation when we have an opportunity to trade off the happiness of EAs for enormous gains in total well-being. Similar to how during a bear attack you'd accept that you won't feel relaxed and happy while you try to mitigate the attack, but this period of stress is worth it overall. This is especially true if you believe we're in the hinge of history.

 Reply
 [ - ]Guy Raveh 8mo 3

 In contrast to a bear attack, you don't expect to know that the "period of stress" has ended during your lifetime. Which raises a few questions, like "Is it worth it?" and "How sure can we be that this really is a stress period?". The thought that we especially are in a position to trade our happiness for enormous gains for society - while not impossible - is dangerous in that it's very appealing, regardless whether it's true or not.

 Reply
 [ - ]Linch 8mo 12

 The thought that we especially are in a position to trade our happiness for enormous gains for society [...] is dangerous in that it's very appealing,

 I'm not denying that what you say is true, but on the face of it, "the appeal of this ideology is that you have to sacrifice a lot for others' gain" is not an intuitively compelling message.

 Reply
 [ - ]kokotajlod 8mo 4

 In contrast to a bear attack, you don't expect to know that the "period of stress" has ended during your lifetime.

 I expect to know this. Either AI will go well and we'll get the glorious transhuman future, or it'll go poorly and we'll have a brief moment of realization before we are killed etc. (or more realistically, a longer moment of awareness where we realize all is truly and thoroughly lost, before eventually the nanobots orwhatever come for us).




 Reply
 [ - ]Kerkko Pelttari 8mo 4

 By many numbers AI risk being solved would only reduce total probability of X-risk by 1/3, 2/3, or maybe 9/10 if you are very heavy on AI-risk probability.

 Personally I think humanity's "period of stress" will take at least 1000s of years to be solved but I might be being quite pessimistic. Of course situations will get better but I think world will still be "burning" for quite some time.

 Reply
 [ - ]Linch 8mo 9

 Here's a common belief in these circles (which I share):

 If AI risk is solved through means other than "we collectively coordinate to not build TAI"(a solution which I think is unlikely both because that level of global coordination is very hard and because the opportunity costs are massive), then soon after, whether human civilization flourishes or not is mostly a question that's out of human hands.

 Reply
 [ - ]Locke 8mo 1

 Eh this logic can be used to justify a lot of extreme action in the name of progress. Communists and Marxists have had a lot of thoughts about the "hinge of history" and used that to unleash terrible destruction on the rest of humanity.

 Reply
 [ - ]Jonas Hallgren 8mo 8

 This is completely unrelated to the great point you made with the comment but I felt I had to share a classic? EA tip that worked well for me. (uncertain how much this counts as a classic.) I got to the nice nihilistic bottom of realising that my moral system is essentially based on evolution but I reversed that within a year by reading a bunch of Buddhist philosophy and by meditating. Now it's all nirvana over here! (try it out now...)

 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mf2MCkYgSZSJRz5nM/a-non-mystical-explanation-of-insight-meditation-and-the

 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WYmmC3W6ZNhEgAmWG/a-mechanistic-model-of-meditation

 https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZbmRyDN8TCpBTZSip

 Reply
 [ - ]Alexander_Berger 8mo 67

 I wrote a long twitter thread with some replies here FWIW: https://twitter.com/albrgr/status/1532726108130377729

 Reply
 [ - ]Ben Stewart 8mo 7

 I loved this bit: "comfortable modernity is consistent with levels of altruistic impact and moral seriousness that we might normally associate with moral heroism"

 Reply
 [ - ]Geoffrey Miller 8mo 5

 It's a good thread, and worth a look!

 Reply
 [ - ]Guy Raveh 8mo 5

 I think this maybe has the neoliberal flavor that Srinivasan objected to, but on my better days, it just seems good - better for those people who can wholeheartedly say “I can carry this load” to do so, and to be able help others materially.

 I find this tweet interesting - because rather than being neoliberal, the second half exemplifies the Marxist idea of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

 I do think EA is too neoliberal, but IMO this isn't it :)

 Reply
 [ - ]Sergei Garrison 8mo 3

 Correct me if I'm wrong--

 I think part of what you're saying is that EA has innovated in bringing philanthropy down to a much 'lower' level. It's not just billionaires that can do it. If we look across at other societies with less developed economies, there are plenty of people with worse problems than our own. Even as a middle-class professional in the US, there is plenty of good you can do with a little bit of giving.

 Maybe part of the innovation is bringing this to a (largely, I assume) secular community and taking an international perspective? I think of church communities and mutual aid organizations as having done this for many years on highly localized and personalized scales.

 Also, re this: "yes, this set of self-proclaimed altruists isn’t having as much fun as they could be or other people are, that’s correct, and an intentional tradeoff they're making in pursuit of their moral goals."

 Are we just talking about the survivors' guilt of being born in an advanced capitalist society, benefitting from hundreds of years of imperialist exploitation of other parts of the world?


 Reply
 [ + ] [comment deleted] 8mo 1
 Deleted by Sergei Garrison, 06/04/2022
 Reason: accidentally reposted...not familiar with this interface
 [ - ]Jeff Kaufman 8mo 47

 The "misery trap" section feels like it is describing a problem that EA definitely had early on, but mostly doesn't now?

 In early EA, people started thinking hard about this idea of doing the most good they could. Naively, this suggests doing things like giving up things that are seriously important to you (like having children), illegibily make you more productive (like a good work environment), or provide important flexibility (like having free time), and the author quotes some early EAs struggling with this conflict, like:

 > my inner voice in early 2016 would automatically convert all money I spent (eg on dinner) to a fractional “death counter” of lives in expectation I could have saved if I’d donated it to good charities. Most EAs I mentioned that to at the time were like ah yeah seems reasonable

 I really don't think many EAs would say "seems reasonable" now. If someone said this to me I'd give some of my personal history with this idea and talk about how it turns out that in practice this works terribly for people: it makes you miserable, very slightly increases how much you have available to donate, and massively decreases your likely long-term impact through burnout, depression, and short-term thinking.

 One piece of writing that I think was helpful in turning this around was http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/cheerfully.html Another was https://www.benkuhn.net/box/

 I think it's not a coincidence that the examples the author links are 5+ years old? If people are still getting caught in this trap, though, I'd be interested to see more? (And potentially write more on why it's not a good application of EA thinking.)

 In case people are curious: Julia and I now have three kids and it's been 10+ years since stress and conflict about painful trade-offs between our own happiness and making the world better were a major issue for us.

 Reply
 [ - ]Devin Kalish 8mo 20

 I think this has gotten better, but not as much better as you would hope considering how long EAs have known this is a problem, how much they have discussed it being a problem, and how many resources have gone into trying to address it. I think there's actually a bit of an unfortunate fallacy here that it isn't really an issue anymore because EA has gone through the motions to address it and had at least some degree of success, see Sasha Chapin's relevant thoughts:

 https://web.archive.org/web/20220405152524/https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/your-intelligent-conscientious-in?s=r

 Some of the remaining problem might come down to EA filtering for people who already have demanding moral views and an excessively conscientious personality. Some of it is probably due to the "by-catch" phenomenon the anon below discusses that comes with applying expected value reasoning to having a positively impactful career (still something widely promoted, and probably for good reason overall). Some of it is this other, deeper tension that I think Nielson is getting at:

 Many people in Effective Altruism (I don't think most, but many, including some of the most influential) believe in a standard of morality that is too demanding for it to be realistic for real people to reach it. Given the prevalence of actualist over possiblist reasoning in EA ethics, and just not being totally naive about human psychology, pretty much everyone who does believe this is onboard with compartmentalizing do-gooding or do-besting from the rest of their life. The trouble runs deeper than this unfortunately though, because once you buy an argument that letting yourself have this is what will be best for doing good overall, you are already seriously risking undermining the psychological benefits.

 Whenever you do something for yourself, there is a voice in the back of your head asking if you are really so morally weak that this particular thing is necessary. Even if you overcome this voice, there is a worse voice that instrumentalizes the things you do for yourself. Buying icecream? This is now your "anti-burnout icecream". Worse, have a kid (if you, like in Nielson's example, think this isn't part of your best set of altruistic decisions), this is your "anti-burnout kid".

 It's very hard to get around this one. Nielson's preferred solution would clearly be that people just don't buy this very demanding theory of morality at all, because he thinks that it is wrong. That said, he doesn't really argue for this, and for those of us who actually do think that the demanding ideal of morality happens to be correct, it isn't an open avenue for us.

 The best solution as far as I can tell is to distance your intuitive worldview from this standard of morality as much as possible. Make it a small part of your mind, that you internalize largely on an academic level, and maybe take out on rare occasions for inspiration, but insist on not viewing your day to day life through it. Again though, the trickiness of this, I think, is a real part of the persistence of some of this problem, and I think Nielson nails this part.

 (edited on 10/24/22 to replace broken link)

 Reply
 [ - ]nananana.nananana.heyhey.anon 8mo 14

 Throwaway account to give a vague personal anecdote. I agree this has gotten better for some, but I think this is still a problem (a) that new people have to work out for themselves, going through the stages on their own, perhaps faster than happened 5 years ago; (b) that hits people differently if they are “converted” to EA but not as successful in their pursuit of impact. These people are left in a precarious psychological position.

 I experienced both. I think of myself as “EA bycatch.” By the time I went through the phases of thinking through all of this for myself, I had already sacrificed a lot of things in the name of impact that I can’t get back (money, time, alternative professional opportunities, relationships, etc). Frankly some things got wrecked in my life that can’t be put back together. Being collateral damage for the cause feels terrible, but I really do hope the work brings results and is worth it.

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 [ - ]Michael Große 8mo 1

 Somehow, that givinggladly.com link is broken for me. Here is an archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20220412232153/http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/cheerfully.html

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 [ - ]Jay Bailey 8mo 41

 Passage 5 seems to prove too much, in the sense of "If you take X philosophy literally, it becomes bad for you" being applicable to most philosophies, but I very much like Passage 4, the EA judo one.

 While it is very much true that disagreeing over the object-level causes shouldn't disqualify one from EA, I do agree that it is not completely separate from EA - that EA is not defined purely by its choice of causes, but neither does it stand fully apart from them. EA is, in a sense, both a question and an ideology, and trying to make sure the ideology part doesn't jump too far ahead of the question part is important.

 "Again: if your social movement "works in principle" but practical implementation has too many problems, then it's not really working in principle, either. The quality "we are able to do this effectively in practice" is an important (implicit) in-principle quality."

 I think this is a very key thing that many movements, including EA, should keep in mind. I think that what EA should be aiming for is "EA has some very good answers to the question of how we can do the most good, and we think they're the best answers humanity has yet come up with to answer the question. That's different from thinking our answers are objectively true, or that we have all the best answers and there are none left to find." We can have the humility to question ourselves, but still have the confidence to suggest our answers are good ones.

 I dream of a world where EA is to doing good as science is to human knowledge. Science isn't always right, and science has been proven wrong again and again in the past, but science is collectively humanity's best guess. I would like for EA to be humanity's best guess at how to do the most good. EA is very young compared to science, so I'm not surprised we don't have that same level of mastery over our field as science does, but I think that's the target.

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 [ - ]Endless 8mo 2

 Thank you Jay, this is such a great response, I especially liked this paragraph:

 While it is very much true that disagreeing over the object-level causes shouldn't disqualify one from EA, I do agree that it is not completely separate from EA - that EA is not defined purely by its choice of causes, but neither does it stand fully apart from them. EA is, in a sense, both a question and an ideology, and trying to make sure the ideology part doesn't jump too far ahead of the question part is important.

 Also, to me I think EA is essentially about applying the scientific revolution to the realm of doing good (as a branch of science of sorts).

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 [ - ]Devin Kalish 8mo 26

 These are interesting critiques and I look forward to reading the whole thing, but I worry that the nicer tone of this one is going to lead people to give it more credit than critiques that were at least as substantially right, but much more harshly phrased.

 The point about ideologies being a minefield, with Nazis as an example, particularly stands out to me. I pattern match this to the parts of harsher critiques that go something like "look at where your precious ideology leads when taken to an extreme, this place is terrible!" Generally, the substantial mistake these make is just casting EA as ideologically purist and ignoring the centrality of projects like moral uncertainty and worldview diversification, as well as the limited willingness of EAs to bite bullets they in principle endorse much of the background logic of (see Pascal's Mugging and Ajeya Cotra's train to crazy town).

 By not getting into telling us what terrible things we believe, but implying that we are at risk of believing terrible things, this piece is less unflattering, but is on shakier ground. It involves this same mistake about EA's ideological purism, but on top of this has to defend this other higher level claim rather than looking at concrete implications.

 Was the problem with the Nazis really that they were too ideologically pure? I find it very doubtful. The philosophers of the time attracted to them generally were weird humanistic philosophers with little interest in the types of purism that come from analytic ethics, like Heidegger. Meanwhile most philosophers closer to this type of ideological purity (Russell, Carnap) despised the Nazis from the beginning. The background philosophy itself largely drew from misreadings of people like Nietzsche and Hegel, popular anti-semitic sentiment, and plain old historical conspiracy theories. Even at the time intellectual critiques of Nazis often looked more like "they were mundane and looking for meaning from charismatic, powerful men" (Arendt) or "they aesthetisized politics" (Benjamin) rather than "they took some particular coherent vision of doing good too far".

 The truth is the lesson of history isn't really "moral atrocity is caused by ideological consistency". Occasionally atrocities are initiated by ideologically consistent people, but they have also been carried out casually by people who were quite normal for their time, or by crazy ideologues who didn't have a very clear, coherent vision at all. The problem with the Nazis, quite simply, is that they were very very badly wrong. We can't avoid making the mistakes they did from the inside by pattern matching aspects of our logic onto them that really aren't historically vindicated, we have to avoid moral atrocity by finding more reliable ways of not winding up being very wrong.

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 [ - ]Stefan_Schubert 8mo 15

 These are interesting critiques and I look forward to reading the whole thing, but I worry that the nicer tone of this one is going to lead people to give it more credit than critiques that were at least as substantially right, but much more harshly phrased.

 I agree there's such a risk. But I also think that the tone actually matters a lot.

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 [ - ]Devin Kalish 8mo 6

 To be clear, I also agree with this.

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 [ - ]Hauke Hillebrandt 8mo 17

 Trending on hacker news now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31609325

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 [ - ]Charles He 8mo 6

 I just wanted to say that, as of Sat afternoon PST, EA seems to be holding up very very well on HN.

 The top comments are currently:

 1. JeffK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31619037
 2. Balanced piece about over demandingness and JSM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31618941
 3. Technical comment about kidneys, which is nice object level discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31619775
 4. Piece that says "This actually makes me more interested in EA, because the criticism only really chips away small caveats in the idea it presents" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31619831

 Hacker news has this nice mixture: high signal to noise, being ruthless to hacks, and senior anonymous people who can excavate very inconvenient content.

 With this context, the current discussion and thoughts seems like a genuinely good signal.

 Like, it's more than just nice PR, but goes a bit farther and amounts to almost a good review.

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 [ - ]Charles He 8mo 8

 Someone I know speaks to some pretty nice, reasonable people. Something that person hears, in private, high-trust situations, about EA is that "it's too demanding" and "I don't want to give up my life to charity, man".

 So very talented, virtuous, people are saying they don't want to engage in EA not because of bad values, bad epistemics, or culture, but because it's just seems too much.

 This is not a defect, I'm saying it's sort of the opposite.

 EA gets a lot of criticism like "the people fell in love with AI" and "too much measurement", "we just need to start the left/libertarian revolution and the markets/democracy will fix everything".

 But what if these ideas are just the chaff that appears online?

 What if 50% of “criticism” (or maybe 95% of the potential population, weighted by potential contribution) amounts to mundane yet important things like, "Hey, this seems good, but I don't want to give up my series A to figure out how to contribute."[1]

 That's not something a lot of people will write publicly, especially people who don't have a philosophical bent or a culture of writing online, and work 50+ hours in pretty demanding jobs.

 1. ^

 There's issues about dilution here and I'm not saying EA should try to get most or even 10% of these people. Even a small fraction of these people a huge amount of talent.

 Many of these people aren't ideological, materialistic, or selfish, it's more like, "Wow, this seems like a lot, and I don't know how to engage."

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 [ - ]Nathaniel 8mo 13

 Thanks for link-posting, I enjoyed this!

 I didn't understand the section about EA being too centralized and focused on absolute advantage. Can anyone explain?

 EA-in-practice is too centralized, too focused on absolute advantage; the market often does a far better job of providing certain kinds of private (or privatizable) good. However, EA-in-practice likely does a better job of providing certain kinds of public good than do many existing institutions.

 And footnote 11:

 It's interesting to conceive of EA principally as a means of providing public goods which are undersupplied by the market. A slightly deeper critique here is that the market provides a very powerful set of signals which aggregate decentralized knowledge, and help people act on their comparative advantage. EA, by comparison, is relatively centralized, and focused on absolute advantage. That tends to centralize people's actions, and compounds mistakes. It's also likely a far weaker resource allocation model, though it does have the advantage of focusing on public goods. I've sometimes wondered about a kind of "libertarian EA", more market-focused, but systematically correcting for well-known failures of the market.↩

 Don't global health charities provide private goods (bed nets, medicine) that markets cannot? Markets only supply things people will pay for and poor people can't pay much.

 X-risk reduction seems like a public good, and animal welfare improvements are either a public good of a private good where the consumers definitely cannot pay.

 I take it that centralization is in contrast to markets. But it seems like in a very real way EA is harnessing markets to provide these things. EA-aligned charities are competing in a market to provide QALYs as cheaply as possible, since EAs will pay for them. EAs also seem very fond of markets generally (ex: impact certificates, prediction markets).

 How is EA focused on absolute advantage? Isn't earning to give using one's relative advantage?

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 [ - ]Charles He 8mo 2

 I didn't understand the section about EA being too centralized and focused on absolute advantage. Can anyone explain?

 EA-in-practice is too centralized, too focused on absolute advantage; the market often does a far better job of providing certain kinds of private (or privatizable) good. However, EA-in-practice likely does a better job of providing certain kinds of public good than do many existing institutions.

 It's interesting to conceive of EA principally as a means of providing public goods which are undersupplied by the market. A slightly deeper critique here is that the market provides a very powerful set of signals which aggregate decentralized knowledge, and help people act on their comparative advantage. EA, by comparison, is relatively centralized, and focused on absolute advantage. That tends to centralize people's actions, and compounds mistakes. It's also likely a far weaker resource allocation model, though it does have the advantage of focusing on public goods. I've sometimes wondered about a kind of "libertarian EA", more market-focused, but systematically correcting for well-known failures of the market.↩

 I think he's saying something like:

 Imagine the Soviet Union producing one model of dishwashers for all its people. We would expect them to do a terrible job. This is even true if the Soviet Union dedicates teams of specialists, like literally a team of 200 engineers, designers, manufacturers, and marketers. It's obvious that isn't enough, and it would be a stilted final product. In the US and market economies, many companies rise and fall making dishwashers. The innovation makes for a much better product.

 So, by having an intervention focused on provisioning malaria nets, Give Well is making the same error. I think "absolute advantage" here refers to focusing obtaining and distributing the "most and cheapest nets to the most people". This is in place of a more flexible solution, less top down, which would be more effective somehow. Maybe even more, the writer is saying that, GiveWell's entire team, by focusing on "maximizing good" in "one office", is committing the same sin as the Soviet planners. I think this is close to or saying that having that "one cost effective spreadsheet is bad".

 I don't think this is a good take.

 It's just wrong. We can't actually provision hundreds of millions of dollars of mosquito nets a better way, or one that would be close to cost efficient, by say, making a bounty in each of the malaria plagued countries or something.

 There are many other sets of interventions which require a lot of coordination and where social, political and other capital is essential to setup. Like, there's no way a major AI safety org would be produced and handle all of the complexities.

 Also, as you point out, almost all EA activity involving spending uses market methods.

 The other content "A slightly deeper critique here is that the market provides a very powerful set of signals which aggregate decentralized knowledge, and help people act on their comparative advantage..." Is not good.

 To be specific, they recap arguments about markets (e.g. libertarian, "Road to Serfdom" style) in theoretical ways that pattern match to something that is ideological (and sort of basic, like dinner party talk). Mentioning externalities and public goods doesn't help.

 The issue is that this colors their entire essay—thinking the market can solve most problems of the world, to the degree, that a focused, talented team trying to find a new global health problem is stilted or marginal, is a really strong statement.

 It's hard to trust that this same model of the world has anything robust to say about much more complicated and esoteric things, like EA or AI safety.

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 [ - ]Guy Raveh 8mo 1

 I agree with your basic interpretation, but I think a different conclusion can be drawn. You're framing the argument as saying "A completely centralised government is bad, so we should use markets to do these things". Then you explain why markets alone can't really provide the things people need.

 This is an argument on why not to jump from full centralisation to full libertarian decentralisation. But as in economic policy, there's vast middle ground. One can, as in social democracy, have that centralised guiding organisation but still rely on the power of markets as a tool.

 In practice this means, for example, looking for opportunities like AMF where collective organisation allows for much more efficient allocation of goods than would otherwise be possible; but also giving a substantial part of the resources through GiveDirectly for other goods to be allocated more dynamically by the market. Which is someone "we" (i.e. GiveWell) don't currently do.

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 [ - ]Stefan_Schubert 8mo 13

 Thanks for posting this. I also appreciated this thoughtful essay.

 There was also this passage (not in your excerpts):

 An alternate solution, and the one that has, I believe, been adopted by many EAs, has been a form of weak-EA. Strong-EA takes "do the most good you can do" extremely seriously as a central aspect of a life philosophy. Weak-EA uses that principle more as guidance. Donate 1% of your income. Donate 10% of your income, provided that doesn't cause you hardship. Be thoughtful about the impact your work has on the world, and consult many different sources. These are all good things to do! The critique of this form is that it's fine and good, but also hard to distinguish from the common pre-existing notion many people have, "live well, and try to do some good in the world".

 My emphasis. (I'm not quite sure whether Nielsen endorses this - see his comment further down.)

 I wouldn't agree with that. I think that one can increase one's impact very substantially over the baseline referred to in the bold sentence by, e.g. working directly on a high-impact cause, even if one doesn't donate a large fraction of one's income.

 (Fwiw I also wouldn't call that weak-EA.)

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 [ - ]RyanCarey 8mo 10

 Right. Donating 10-50% of time or resources as effectively as possible is still very distinctive, and not much less effective than donating 100%.

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 [ - ]Lorenzo Buonanno 8mo 7

 and not much less effective than donating 100%


 Wouldn't it be roughly a tenth to half as effective?

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 [ - ]RyanCarey 8mo 23

 Whereas choosing the wrong cause could cost orders of magnitude.

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 [ - ]Stefan_Schubert 8mo 6

 Fwiw, I think the logic is very different when it comes to direct work, and that phrasing it in terms of what fraction of one's time one donates isn't the most natural of thinking about it.

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 [ - ]nananana.nananana.heyhey.anon 8mo 3

 Can you say why?

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 [ - ]Stefan_Schubert 8mo 12

 You can usually relatively straightforwardly divide your monetary resources into a part that you spend on donations and a part that you spend for personal purposes.

 By contrast, you don't usually spend some of your time at work for self-interested purposes and some for altruistic purposes. (That is in principle possible, but uncommon among effective altruists.) Instead you only have one job (which may serve your self-interested and altruistic motives to varying degrees). Therefore, I think that analogies with donations are often a stretch and sometimes misleading (depending on how they're used).

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 [ - ]Mauricio 8mo 12

 [Cross-posting from the comments]

 I want to express two other intuitions that make me very skeptical of some alternatives to effective altruism.

 As you write:

 "By their fruits ye shall know them" holds for intellectual principles, not just people. If a set of principles throws off a lot of rotten fruit, it's a sign of something wrong with the principles, a reductio ad absurdum.

 I really like this thought. We might ask: what are the fruits of ineffective altruism? Admittedly, much good. But also the continued existence, at scale, of extreme poverty, factory farming, low-probability high-impact risks, and threats to future generations, long after many of these problems could have been decimated if there had been widespread will to act.

 That's a lot of rotten fruit.

 In practice, by letting intuition lead, ineffective altruism systematically overlooks distant problems, leaving their silent victims to suffer and die in masses. So even if strong versions of EA are too much, EA in practice looks like desperately needed corrective movement. Or at least, we need something different from whatever allows such issues to fester, often with little opposition.

 Lastly, one thing that sometimes feels a bit lost in discussions of effectiveness: "effective" is just half of it. Much of what resonates is the emphasis on altruism (which is far from unique, but also far from the norm)--on how, in a world with so much suffering, much of our lives should be oriented around helping others.

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 [ - ]Guy Raveh 8mo 6

 Nielsen's critique is humble, well-written, and actually quite compelling. I also encourage people not to skip the footnotes.

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 [ - ]Sergei Garrison 8mo 5

 I'm still relatively new to the large body of historic EA discussion, so I apologize in advance for retreading any ground that the community has already covered.

 Recently I've been thinking more and more about the idea that individual altruism is simply not a scalable and sustainable model to improve the world. We have to achieve systemic change that re-aligns incentives across society. I sense a little bit of this between the lines of this article.

 There really is nothing an individual can do alone in terms of personal sacrifice of resources that will fix the world simply with that transfer of resources. What we need is systems of government that redistribute resources at scale, taking the burden of such choice away from individuals. Besides this being the only way to alleviate human suffering at scale, it's also the only way to reliably account for externalities.

 Imagine an anarchic society that relied solely on individual altruism to help the needy. Would we sit here debating how much individuals should give, or would we be advocating for some sort of government to centralize and formalize the process of resource allocation? Similarly, 10% or 20% is not the issue -- it's about fixing a society that has to rely on individual good will rather than a (better) built-in system of redistribution according to need.

 Is the "final form" of EA simply radical, much-more-inclusive democracy?

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 [ - ]Guy Raveh 8mo 4

 I agree with this message, but I still think EA has something important to contribute to the mindset of systemic change advocates. E.g. scientific thinking, measuring outcomes, checking the accuracy of our beliefs, etc.

 Recognizing the existence of systemic problems is far from enough to solve them. We have to carefully analyze how to apply our resources to that, and to make sure we're not letting the poor fall between the cracks in the meantime (or the entire world go extinct).

 Is the "final form" of EA simply radical, much-more-inclusive democracy?

 I don't think it's possible to reliably predict now the "final form of EA", if such a constant limit even exists. But IMO the inability of any currently existing ideology or social movement to solve the world's problems so far, probably precludes the definition of our aspirations entirely in terms of those.

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 [ - ]Misha_Yagudin 8mo 4

 A useful piece of context. When asked about recommendations on charitable giving Michael Nielsen writes:

 Same answer as @TheZvi's earlier, I'm afraid. I'm pretty Hayekian; I wish there were good price signals here! In some ways I view that as what EA is doing: it is trying to use community argument and institutions to price public goods (& the like) appropriately.

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 [ - ]RedStateBlueState 8mo 4

 (Crossposting)

 This is a wonderful critique - I agreed with it much more than I thought I would.

 Fundamentally, EA is about two things. The first is a belief in utilitarianism or a utilitarian-esque moral system, that there exists an optimal world we should aspire to. This is a belief I believe to be pretty universal, whether people want to admit it or not.

 The second part of EA is the belief that we should try to do as much good as possible. Emphasis on “try” - there is a subtle distinction between “hope to do the most amount of good”(the previous paragraph) and “actively try to do the most amount of good”. This piece points out many ways in which doing the latter does not actually lead to the former. The focus on quantifying impact leads to a male/white community, it leads to a reliance on nonprofits that tend to be less sustainable, it leads to outsourcing of intellectual work to individual decision-makers, etc.

 But the question of “does trying to optimize impact actually lead to optimal outcomes?” is just an epistemic one. The critiques mentioned are simply counter-arguments, and there are numerous arguments in favor that many others have made. But this is a question on which we have some actual evidence, and I feel that this piece understates the substantial work that EA has already done. We have very good evidence that GiveWell charities have an order of magnitude higher impact than the average one. We are supporting animal welfare policy that has had some major victories in state referenda. We have good reason to believe AI safety is a horribly neglected issue that we need to work on.

 This isn’t just a theoretical debate. We know we are doing better work than the average altruistic person outside the community. Effective Altruism is working.

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 [ - ]Luke Freeman 8mo 9

 EA is about two things.

 [1] belief in utilitarianism or a utilitarian-esque moral system, that there exists an optimal world we should aspire to.

 [2] belief that we should try to do as much good as possible

 I would say that is a reasonable descriptive claim about the core beliefs of many in the community (especially more of the hardcore members), but IMHO neither are what "EA is about".

 I don't see EA as making claims about what we should do or believe.

 I see it as a key question of "how can we do the most good with any given unit of resource we devote to doing good" and then taking action upon what we find when we ask that.

 The community and research field have certain tools they often use (e.g. use scientific evidence when it's available, using expected value reasoning) and many people who share certain philosophical beliefs (e.g. that outcomes are morally important) but IMHO these aren't what "EA is about".

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 [ - ]Erin Braid 8mo 4

 I see [EA] as a key question of "how can we do the most good with any given unit of resource we devote to doing good" and then taking action upon what we find when we ask that.

 I also consider this question to be the core of EA, and I have said things like the above to defend EA against the criticism that it's too demanding. However, I have since come to think that this characterization is importantly incomplete, for at least two reasons:

 1. It's probably inevitable, and certainly seems to be the case in practice, that people who are serious about answering this question overlap a lot with people who are serious about devoting maximal resources to doing good. Both in the sense that they're often the same people, and in the sense that even when they're different people, they'll share a lot of interests and it might make sense to share a movement.
 2. Finding serious answers to this question can cause you to devote more resources to doing good. I feel very confident that this happened to me, for one! I don't just donate to more effective charities than the version of me in a world with no EA analysis, I also donate a lot more money than that version does. I feel great about this, and I would usually frame it positively - I feel more confident and enthusiastic about the good my donations can do, which inspires me to donate more - but negative framings are available too.

 So I think it can be a bit misleading to imply that EA is only about this key question of per-unit maximization, and contains no upwards pressures on the amount of resources we devote to doing good. But I do agree that this question is a great organizing principle.

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 [ - ]Luke Freeman 8mo 2

 Thanks Erin! I wouldn't say that EA is only about the key question, I just disagree that utilitarianism and an obligation to maximise are required or 'what EA is about'. I do agree that they are prevalent (and often good to have some upwards pressure on the amount we devote to doing good) 😀

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 [ - ]Guy Raveh 8mo 4

 Is "better than average" that good? Most people and projects with a really high positive impact were not related to EA (even if simply because their impact happened before EA existed). It certainly doesn't seem like "our version of EA" is necessary to have the most impact. Wether it's sufficient, we don't know yet.

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 [ - ]Vasco Grilo 8mo 1

 (I have crossposted the comments below here.)

 Thanks for this article! Below are some comments.

 Perhaps we need a Center for Effective Effective Altruism? Or Givewellwell, evaluating the effectiveness of effectiveness rating charities.

 Note there are some external evaluations of EA-aligned organisations and recommendations made by them. Some examples:

 * 2018-2019 Long-Term Future Fund Grantees: How did they do?.
 * Shallow evaluations of longtermist organizations.
 * A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform.
 * Type Checking GiveWell's GiveDirectly Cost Effective Analysis.
 * Quantifying Uncertainty in GiveWell's GiveDirectly Cost-Effectiveness Analysis.

 Again: if your social movement "works in principle" but practical implementation has too many problems, then it's not really working in principle, either. The quality "we are able to do this effectively in practice" is an important (implicit) in-principle quality.

 I think this is an important point.

 This is a really big problem for EA. When you have people taking seriously such an overarching principle, you end up with stressed, nervous people, people anxious that they are living wrongly. The correct critique of this situation isn't the one Singer makes: that it prevents them from doing the most good. The critique is that it is the wrong way to live.

 In practice, it is unclear to me how different the 2 critiques are. I would say doing the most good is most likely not compatible with "living in a wrong way", because too much stress etc. are not good (for yourself or other).

 Furthermore, the notion of a single "the" good is also suspect. There are many plural goods, which are fundamentally immeasurable and incommensurate and cannot be combined.

 "The" good is a very complex function of reality, but why would it be fundamentally immeasurable and incommensurate?

 Indeed, the more illegibility you conquer, the more illegibility springs up, and the greater the need for such work.

 I am not sure I fully understand the concept of illegibility, but it does not seem to be much different from knowledge about the unknow. As our knowledge about what was previously unknown increases, knowledge about what is still unknown also increases. Why is this problematic?

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 [ - ]Locke 8mo 1

 Some of what Michael is talking about reminds me of the well known "savior complex" that's fairly common among "change the world" types, a category which would include many EA members methinks. How common is that complex in the EA community? Is there any data or surveys on EA mental health?

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Quantum physicist Michael Nielsen has published a powerful critical essay about EA.  Summary:   Long and rough notes on Effective Altruism (EA). Written to help me get to the bottom of several questions: what do I like and think is important about EA? Why do I find the mindset so foreign? Why am I not an EA? And to start me thinking about: what do alternatives to EA look like? The notes are not aimed at effective altruists, though they may perhaps be of interest to EA-adjacent people. Thoughtful, informed comments and corrections welcome (especially detailed, specific corrections!) - see the comment area at the bottom.   Some passages I highlighted:  I have EA friends who donate a large fraction of their income to charitable causes. In some cases it's all their income above some fairly low (by rich developed world standards) threshold, say $30k. In some cases it seems plausible that their personal donations are responsible for saving dozens of lives, helping lift many people out of poverty, and preventing many debilitating diseases, often in some of the poorest and most underserved parts of the world. Some of those friends have directly helped save many lives. That's a simple sentence, but an extraordinary one, so I'll repeat it: they've directly helped save many lives.   As extraordinary as my friend's generosity was, there is something further still going on here. Kravinsky's act is one of moral imagination, to even consider donating a kidney, and then of moral conviction, to follow through. This is an astonishing act of moral invention: someone (presumably Kravinsky) was the first to both imagine doing this, and then to actually do it. That moral invention then inspired others to do the same. It actually expanded the range of human moral experience, which others can learn from and then emulate. In this sense a person like Kravinsky can be thought of as a moral pioneer or moral psychonaut, inventing new forms of moral experience.   Moral reasoning, if taken seriously and acted upon, is of the utmost concern, in part because there is a danger of terrible mistakes. The Nazi example is overly dramatic: for one thing, I find it hard to believe that the originators of Nazi ideas didn't realize that these were deeply evil acts. But a more everyday example, and one which should give any ideology pause, is overly self-righteous people, acting in what they "know" is a good cause, but in fact doing harm. I'm cautiously enthusiastic about EA's moral pioneering. But it is potentially a minefield, something to also be cautious about.   when EA judo is practiced too much, it's worth looking for more fundamental problems. The basic form of EA judo is: "Look, disagreement over what is good does nothing directly to touch EA. Indeed, such disagreement is the engine driving improvement in our notion of what is good." This is perhaps true in some God's-eye, omniscient, in-principle philosopher's sense. But EA community and organizations are subject to fashion and power games and shortcomings and biases, just like every other community and organization. Good intentions alone aren't enough to ensure effective decisions about effectiveness. And the reason many people are bothered by EA is not that they think it's a bad idea to "do good better". But rather that they doubt the ability of EA institutions and community to live up to the aspirations. These critiques can come from many directions. From people interested in identity politics I've heard: "Look, many of these EA organizations are being run by powerful white men, reproducing existing power structures, biased toward technocratic capitalism and the status quo, and ignoring many of the things which really matter." From libertarians I've heard: "Look, EA is just leftist collective utilitarianism. It centralizes decision-making too much, and ignores both price signals and the immense power that comes from having lots of people working in their own self-interest, albeit inside a system designed so that self-interest (often) helps everyone collectively ." From startup people and inventors I've heard: "Aren't EAs just working on public goods? If you want to do the most good, why not work on a startup instead? We can just invent and scale new technology (or new ideas) to improve the world!" From people familiar with the pathologies of aging organizations and communities, I've heard: "Look, any movement which grows rapidly will also start to decay. It will become dominated by ambitious careerists and principal agent problems, and lose the sincerity and agility that characterized the pioneers and early adopters" All these critiques have some truth; they also have significant issues. Without getting into those weeds, the immediate point is that they all look like "merely" practical problems, for which EA judo may be practiced: "If we're not doing that right, we shall improve, we simply need you to provide evidence and a better alternative". But the organizational patterns are so strong that these criticisms seem more in-principle to me. Again: if your social movement "works in principle" but practical implementation has too many problems, then it's not really working in principle, either. The quality "we are able to do this effectively in practice" is an important (implicit) in-principle quality.   I've heard several EAs say they know multiple EAs who get very down or even depressed because they feel they're not having enough impact on the world. As a purely intellectual project it's fascinating to start from a principle like "use reason and evidence to figure out how do the most good in the world" and try to derive things like "care for children" or "enjoy eating ice cream" or "engage in or support the arts" as special cases of the overarching principle. But while that's intellectually interesting, as a direct guide to living it's a terrible mistake. The reason to care for children (etc) isn't because it helps you do the most good. It's because we're absolutely supposed to care for our children. The reason art and music and ice cream matter aren't because they help you do the most good. It's because we're human beings – not soulless automatons – who respond in ways we don't entirely understand to things whose impact on our selves we do not and cannot fully apprehend. Now, the pattern that's been chosen by EA has been to insert escape clauses. Many talk about having a "warm fuzzies" budget for "ineffective" giving that simply makes them feel good. And they carve out ad hoc extension clauses like the one about having children or setting aside an ice cream budget or a dinner budget, and so on. It all seems to me like special pleading at a frequency which suggests something amiss. You've started from a single overarching principle that seems tremendously attractive. But now you've either got to accept all the consequences, and make yourself miserable. Or you have to start, as an individual, grafting on ad hoc extension clauses.   EA is an inspiring meaning-giving life philosophy. It invites people to strongly connect with some notion of a greater good, to contribute to that greater good, and to make it central in their life. EA-in-practice has done a remarkable amount of direct good in the world, making people's lives better. It's excellent to have the conversational frame of "how to do the most good" readily available and presumptively of value. EA-in-practice also provides a strong community and sense of belonging and shared values for many people. As moral pioneers EA is providing a remarkable set of new public goods. All this makes EA attractive as a life philosophy, providing orientation and meaning and a clear and powerful core, with supporting institutions. Unfortunately, strong-EA is a poor life philosophy, with poor boundaries that may cause great distress to people, and underserves core needs. EA-in-practice is too centralized, too focused on absolute advantage; the market often does a far better job of providing certain kinds of private (or privatizable) good. However, EA-in-practice likely does a better job of providing certain kinds of public good than do many existing institutions. EA relies overmuch on online charisma: flashy but insubstantial discussion of topics like the simulation argument and x-risk and AI safety have a tendency to dominate conversation, rather than more substantial work. (This does not mean there aren't good discussions of such topics.) EA-in-practice is too allied with existing systems of power, and does little to question or change them. Appropriating the term "effective" is clever marketing and movement-building, but intellectually disingenuous. EA views illegibility as a problem to be solved, not as a fundamental condition. Because of this it does poorly on certain kinds of creative and aesthetic work. Moral utilitarianism is a useful but limited practical tool, mistaking quantification that is useful for making tradeoffs with a fundamental fact about the world. I've strongly criticized EA in these notes. But I haven't provided a clearly and forcefully articulated alternative. It amounts to saying that someone's diet of ice cream and chocolate bars isn't ideal, without providing better food; it may be correct, but isn't immediately actionable. Given the tremendous emotional need people have for a powerful meaning-giving system, I don't expect it to have much impact on those people. It's too easy to arm-wave the issues away, or ignore them as things which can be resolved by grafting some exception clauses on. But writing the notes both helped me better understand why I'm not EA, and also why I think the EA principle would, with very considerable modification, make a valuable part of some larger life philosophy. But I don't yet understand what that life philosophy is.
Michael Nielsen's "Notes on effective altruism" - EA Forum
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JBAPssaYMMRfNqYt7/michael-nielsen-s-notes-on-effective-altruism