“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
— Mary Oliver
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Politics
I was going to title this piece “Why Trump Is Stupid.” Then I thought that the real problem is that we’re being taught to be stupid by the coterie of Trump’s stupid agents. But both Trump and his people will be gone one day, and the real problem is that we don’t distinguish stupidness, which is a choice, from shortsightedness, which is a habit. And so I settled on the title above.
Being shortsighted is relative to the issues at hand. The traditional “long view” of wisdom is generations longer than the time frame most of us adopt. There is an insidious economic incentive to look no further than the next election, policy objective, or shareholder horizon. And since how far we look ahead is essentially dictated by the extent of what we take to be the relevant future, we only look ahead as far as things concern us.
This amount of foresight is insufficient when dealing with events that unfold over the long term, but whose immediate impacts don’t reflect the long term possibilities. Immigration is a great example.
When the country needed low wage workers, and the world had a surplus wanting to come to the US, immigration benefited everyone. The short-term cost of housing and caring for new immigrants was within the time frame of the economic reward they would provide. The East Coast became a welcome center. Communities, job opportunities, and cultural benefits, while not coordinated, were appreciated both within and without the immigrant communities.
The West Coast also saw an influx of Latin and Asian immigrants, but they were neither as welcome nor as easily assimilated. While the Europeans brought relevant knowledge, culture, art, and history, the Asian and Latin American contributions were less appreciated and less affluent.
These immigrants took the lowest paying jobs in the least important corners of Western culture. Indigenous and Asian philosophies had no place in progressive Western culture in the early 20th century. They still don’t, except now Asian progress in science and politics has passed the point of equality with the West and is moving into the lead.
Trump is spearheading this decline of the Western world, but this has followed decades of poor leadership and dumb decisions. To borrow a quote from Isaac Newton, “If our actions are shortsighted, it is because we have stood on the shoulders of midgets.”
Physics
I will illustrate shortsightedness with an example from physics. A defining characteristic of shortsightedness is that it doesn’t seem shortsighted when you’re only looking at what’s immediately in front of you. Shortsightedness is only apparent, and only has meaning, when you have a longer view. If all you can see is one step ahead, then there is no long view, there are only unjustifiable pronouncements about unforeseeable futures.
In 1935 the senior Albert Einstein and his juniors Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen co authored a paper that fundamentally criticized the approach that was being put forward by the then-new field of quantum mechanics. They said that if energy was conserved, and if a mass in motion has energy, then when a stationary object fractures and flies apart in two opposite directions, you must be able to tell exactly the position of one of the two pieces from the measurement and position of the other.
Einstein had only come to the US two years before and his English was not that fluent, so he let Rosen and Podolsky write the paper. He grumbled that the result was not entirely what he meant to say as it didn’t make the point he was aiming for.
His objection has since been cast as referring to quantum mechanics as relying on “spooky action at a distance.” This mistranslation of his word “spukhafte” as “spooky” when a better translation is “haunted” misdirects his objection. Spooky implies the supernatural, while haunted means there is something unseen. Nevertheless, the EPR paper became a benchmark for objections to the new quantum theory.
Quantum theory blossomed into a hugely successful field. The somewhat vague objections of EPR were brushed off by garbled excuses known as “the Copenhagen interpretation” that didn’t address the issue. Careful interpretation has never been a strong point in physics.
Twenty years went by during which no one addressed the EPR “paradox” and it was considered poor form to pay attention to the objections of old men. As a result of his continued objections, Einstein himself was socially and academically shunned by the physics community.
Quantum Mechanics
In 1951 David Bohm recast the EPR paradox in terms of the decomposition of spinning particles. He proposed a thought experiment using oppositely spinning particles that he claimed more clearly illustrated the core issues of the EPR paradox.
What was clear in Bohm’s reformulation was that remotely distant things affect each other through no known mechanism. We could say exactly what the effect was, so things could be accurately predicted, but there was no explanation of how. There was an outcome without a mechanism.
This reformulation was not the EPR paradox, which was an objection to the uncertainty principle. Instead, Bohm now presented an objection based on the observed correlation of widely separated objects for which quantum mechanics provided no mechanism.
Tim Maudlin (2014) explains that both EPR and Bohm dealt with both the issues of indeterminism and causality, they just emphasized different aspects of it. Nevertheless, the Bohm-EPR paper became the new benchmark for objections to the now well-established quantum theory.
Then, in 1964, John Bell published his now famous paper in which he hoped to endorse the EPR conclusion of the insufficiency of quantum mechanics in the context presented by Bohm-EPR. That is, he hoped to show that there must be some mechanism that was absent from the current theory.
Instead, and to his dismay, he showed the opposite. He claimed to prove that there was no way to make quantum mechanics sufficient by having local effects result from local causes. In the context of the EPR paper, which was vaguely framed, this was not emphasized. The recontextualizing by David Bohm brought this conflict to the fore. Maudlin notes that Einstein greatly appreciated this change in emphasis, which only strengthened his objection to this aspect of quantum mechanics.
Bell’s paper recast the issue in a context that could be tested with experiment, and this revitalized interest in the EPR question, which had never been seriously addressed. In the 1970s young physicists debated these questions and began to design experiments to test them. This was the quintessence of scientific progress even though Bohm’s reformulation didn’t address the whole EPR question, and even if Bell’s conclusions were wrong.
Showing False, What Was Claimed True, About What Was Insufficient
Bohm’s divergence from the original EPR question was indirect. There have been many refutations of Bell’s conclusions about quantum mechanics being uncorrectable, but the physics community accepts the status quo, and they do so largely without question.
A more plausible refutation of Bell’s work first appeared in 2016 in a paper by Joy Christian. Christian’s paper was retracted after publication because many people were unable to follow it. Christian claimed Bell made a small but consequential error. He made it difficult to see the error by clothing it in complexity and refusing to simplify things.
Like many before him, Christian insisted that rigor would prevail. It’s the old conflict between careful, farsighted judgement and the promise of immediate rewards. Despite pretensions to the contrary, politics moves the physics community, as it does all communities.
The respected journal The Annals of Physics first published and then retracted Christian’s paper. The journal’s editor at the time was Brian Greene, a well known physicist, science popularizer, and author of The Elegant Universe.
Christen has subsequently published his papers in IEEE, the journal for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. His denial of Bell’s conclusions continue to be discussed and other objections to Bell’s work continue to appear (Chen, 2019).
Progress is not a series of workable inventions as The Elegant Universe would have you believe; it’s a series of misdirections and mistakes. I make a point of avoiding Bryan Greene’s many books about science.
To Christian’s credit and the enduring benefit of physics, Christian engaged in a 2-year, online debate about the merits of his paper and the errors in the 1964 “theorem” of John Bell. I’m still reading the many hundreds of emails between Christian, his supporter Jay Yablon, and his many detractors (Retraction Watch, 2016).
It’s possible to give you a sense of the dispute without being mathematical. It’s the very accessible and interpretive nature of the dispute that keeps it alive. And beyond the point I’m going to describe, there is still the question of what it further implies. It does not provide a better theory, it only addresses whether or not a better theory can be constructed.
The error Christian claims in Bell’s 1964 paper is related to the difference between quantum mechanics and intuition. The error originates from Bell’s use of the equality between the average of a sum of separate experimental measurements versus single measurements that combine the factors. Christian claims Bell’s sound mathematics violated the physics, so he naturally got a negative result.
Normally, the sum of the averages is equal to the average of the sums. If you want to know the average color and the average size of the houses in your city, then it doesn’t matter if you first tabulate all the houses’ colors and then tabulate all the houses’ sizes, or if you go from house to house and tabulate the color and size of each. In the end, you’ll have the same set of data and you’ll find the same average values.
Cats, Mice, and Spinning Particles
Compare this with the question of the average number of mice and the average number of cats in your city. If you first count all the mice and then separately count all the cats you’ll get one pair of numbers, but if you put all the cats and the mice together, and the cats kill the mice, and then you count their populations, you’ll get another pair of numbers.
The problem arises when the way you tabulate things interferes with what you’re tabulating. You have to be careful how you count cats and mice because they interact. The colors and sizes of houses do not interact, so how you count them does not matter.
In physics, not all things exist at the same time. This was the problem that was pointed out in the EPR paper but was sort of lost in Bohm’s re-expression of it in terms of spinning particles. The problem is that particles don’t spin despite carrying the momentum of rotation. “Spin” is just a meaningless, friendly word when it comes to particles.
However, spinning particles do have similar anti-intuitive properties. In particular, you can’t measure the axis along which they’re spinning without completely upsetting the system. In fact, they’re not “spinning” at all, that’s just a fanciful analogy to the way solid, macroscopic objects rotate.
This spinning of particles in one direction and the spinning of the same particles in another direction is much like cats and mice. If you try to measure both in the same experiment you get nonsense. With particles, you cannot say they are “spinning” along one axis and not along another axis because—and this is the anti-intuitive part—whatever axis you measure them to be “spinning” along they will be spinning along. In other words, particles that spin along an axis will be found to be spinning along whatever axis you measure them.
You might be inclined to say that this shows they were never spinning along any axis, and that it was our measurement that set them to spinning along whatever axis we’re measuring. This is not the case. The particles do have a “spin,” it just not what we think of as spin, and it cannot be objectively measured.
As a result, you cannot say, as John Bell did say, that the average spin axis measured on a collection of particles measured at different angles is the same as the collection of the averages of spins separately measured along the same set of axes measured separately. The spins “eat” each other, so you get a different result when you measure them together from what you get if you measure them apart.
Tastes Like Chicken. Smells Like Rat
It’s been 60 years since Bell’s paper and still, up to this day, people are measuring the spin axes of particles to see whether or not their measurements conform or depart from Bell’s possibly flawed predictions. Despite the repeated explanations and sincere entreaties of the now posthumous geniuses, no one seems to understand the problem or has found any solution to it.
“A great many physicists, and indeed a great many great physicists, simply do not appreciate what Bell proved. But while von Neumann proved nothing of significance and was credited with genius, Bell proved something of epochal importance that is often presented as merely putting an already moribund theoretical project out of its misery.” — Tim Maudlin (2014)
Both John von Neuman and John Bell were wrong to some degree, though Christian’s disproof of Bell’s proof is neither widely known nor accepted. Undergraduate and graduate textbooks still assert Bell’s Theorem, and Bryan Green’s errors still appear in his best-selling books.
The 2022 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to John Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeilinger for experimentally confirming Bell’s Theorem, which their experiments do not do. Their experiments, which were performed over a 20-year period, demonstrate the truth of the quantum mechanical side of Bell’s equation. They do not demonstrate the falsity of the other side of Bell’s equation, which was supposed to represent the EPR suggestion that something might be missing, and that quantum mechanics is not “haunted” after all.
The result of all this might be that our intuition was correct all along: that things happen because of causes and that “spooky” supernatural effects do not occur. This was Einstein’s real point, which was not made clear in the original EPR paper and was made further unclear in the work of Bohm, Bell, Clauser, Aspect, Ziegler, all the textbooks, and all of my physics teachers!
“Even a contemporary physicist who is presented in a mainstream venue as qualified to answer a fairly straightforward question can be completely misinformed or confused about what the relevant facts are. This might seem incredible. It might seem equally incredible that entire generations of physicists could be convinced that an important physical question had been settled definitively by a rigorous mathematical proof when in fact the proof was “silly” and “foolish” because it relied on an axiom that we have no reason to believe. But like it or not, that is the situation.” — Tim Maudlin (2014)
The Easiest Solution: Denial
There is a simple resolution to all of this, and that is that the few of us are wrong and everyone else is right. But I don’t think that’s how it’s going to work out.
I support the objection to admitting as real those outcomes that have no cause. This was the attitude taken by the authors of the EPR paper. It was the same situation that led Newton to invent calculus and the Universal Law of Gravity. I support Bell’s intention to clarify this situation but, along with Christian, feel Bell’s conclusion was not as definitive as Bell claimed.
I do not find much of the current “battle over the truth” to be enlightening. I hope to make a positive contribution someday, but I must make my way through a flood of information. The real meaning of progress is not holding up the glaring light of truth, it’s working through a mountain of debris. The debris is necessary; there is no “golden yesterday.”
People who have more credibility than me, are more likable, and better at explaining things than Christian will eventually rewrite what all the generally indifferent physicists now believe. Time will tell, but it may be a long time. Only greater discussion will create more clarity sooner.
It’s fair to assume that this will have some important consequences somewhere, but it’s not clear where, when, or what that will be. But, since the matter concerns the foundations of reality, its resolution is likely to have consequences.
My point is that none of the people who did or do overlook these issues were or are stupid. I think they’ve been too accepting of the conclusions passed down to them. Physicists are swayed by fancy mathematical arguments just as everyone else accepts propaganda.
In 1960 my mentor Eugene Wigner famously asked, “Why is mathematics so unreasonably effective in the natural sciences?” In this story we have an answer to this question: it’s not. You have to use mathematics correctly, and the correspondence between things and abstract numbers is complicated.
The point is that science is not a monotonic march toward progress. In this example we see what will soon be 100 years of confusion, since the original 1935 EPR paper, that is still confusing the current crop of physicists and will probably confuse many more.
The Real Rat
And then we come to Trumpism’s denial of any learning curve at all. According to Trumpism, yesterday was great and we can regain our power and privilege by halting the migration of people, and the movement of research, ideas, and learning.
This would make a fine topic for a 9th grade discussion. It seems that most people in the US have not had this discussion in any form. If they did, they wouldn’t think yesterday was so great.
The early 20th century had ups and downs, certainly more downs for Europe and Asia. Things couldn’t have gotten worse for many people, so things naturally got better. This happened in context and it happened for reasons. Given the widespread acceptance of Trumpism, which is really another word for shortsightedness, it seems that many people have not considered this.
There is always a farther sight than what you have, and in our shortsighted culture almost any sight is farther than what we’ve got. But the appeal of Trumpism is worse than shortsightedness, it’s blindness.
Trump advocates the bully approach: the biggest stick wins. But what’s the benefit of winning if all it gains is an inaccurate recollection of yesterday? “MAGA” is really “MASA,” as in “Yes, masa,” the deprecating image of the deferential slave.
The only way to avoid MASA, Make America Stupid Again, is to encourage the road to progress. Progress means investment in novelty, discomfort, collaboration, mistakes, honesty, and mutual support. It means studying the past and learning from mistakes. There is no choice; progress requires investment and mistakes.
This doesn’t just happen, you have to advocate for it. You have to tell other people they need to consider the danger of small-minded, short-sighted thinking. It’s an evolutionary process you invest in regardless of its flaws. We learn as individuals and cultures by making mistakes and then correcting them.
“America should take a page from China by aggressively promoting experimentation in new fields… These new ecosystems will need supporting infrastructure: reliable and inexpensive energy generation, rare earths, modern shipping and universities with vibrant STEM programs.” — David Autor and Gordon Hanson (2025)
Trumpism is doing none of this. As Autor and Hanson say, “While gazing in the rear view mirror, we’ve lost sight of the road ahead.” Trump is just another mistake we can learn from. Learn from your mistakes!
References
Audor, D., and Hanson, G. (2025, July 14). “We Were Warned About the First China Shock. The Next One Will Be Worse.” New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/opinion/china-shock-economy-manufacturing.html
Chen, G. Y. (2019 Aug. 28). “Collapse of Bell’s Theorem.” Journal of Modern Physics 10: 1157-1165. https://doi.org/10.4236/jmp.2019.1010076
Maudlin, Tim (2014). “What Bell Did.” Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical, 47(42). https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.1826
Retraction Watch (2016). “Physics Journal Retracts Paper Without Alerting Author.” https://retractionwatch.com/2016/09/30/physicist-threatens-legal-action-after-journal-mysteriously-removed-study/
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