
Quantum Dominance, Hegemony, and Superiority - weinzierl
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4450
======
marcus_holmes
Pinker also talks about the "Euphemism Treadmill", where words that were
specific medical terms turned into general insults and became unusable because
of it ("spastic" in my lifetime has gone from a medical description, to a
playground insult, to being effectively unusable, a non-word).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Huge shrug...

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

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

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

~~~
api
> it's very few people

> They just happen to be very vocal

> The internet tends to amplify things, especially twitter.

Yeah, that's kind of what I suspected.

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

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

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

~~~
sanxiyn
> Standard Model particle names

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
mc32
I _think_ that [x]-supremacists don’t use the label for themselves. It’s
usually applied to such groups as a descriptor by people who watch those
groups like law enforcement and civil groups who monitor groups that espouse
those ideologies, but I’m not sure the groups in question use those words to
describe themselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
zozbot234
An important note, from the comments to OP's post:

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

[clarifications added]

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

------
AllegedAlec
Much ado about nothing.

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

~~~
zozbot234
> Do we really have to change every bit of jargon which someone gets offended
> about?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crazy to see the term completely 180.

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

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

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

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/john-preskill-explains-
quantu...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/john-preskill-explains-quantum-
supremacy-20191002/)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
nabla9
"quantum wokeness" would be perfect :)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brilliant! Will join...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
buboard
do dominant alleles next

------
ngcc_hk
Quantum Singularity

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

>this performative wokeness is a cancer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
adamsea
LOL.

