One of the main difficulties in coping with abusive parents is that it is often impossible to explain your motivations to others. I expressed to Dr. Cleve that I wanted to look for a research topic connected with engineering, and he was glad to assist me with this. But I never fully explained to him all of the restrictions that I was under, and I guess he must have been frustrated that I wasn’t as enthusiastic about many of his suggestions as I would have been if I didn’t have my parents’ reaction to them to consider.
Because I couldn’t find a way to disguise my research or to connect it to a topic that was acceptable to my parents, I was under a lot of stress while I carried it out. It’s very difficult to conduct scientific research unless one is excited about a topic, and it’s very difficult to be excited about a topic that causes one to experience physical and psychological pain. (I think even a masochist enjoys physical pain only because it gives him psychological pleasure.) My life in the Ph.D. program as a quantum computing researcher consisted of exactly the activities that my father had punished me so severely for in high school: reading scientific papers, going to the library, having scientific discussions with others, giving presentations, and so forth. And not only that, but some of the people I encountered were actually the authors of papers my father had specifically punished me for reading.
Despite my depression, I continued to work on my research. One of the most valuable experiences of being a Ph.D. student is that you get to witness some of the top scientists in your field at work. Dr. Cleve has an uncanny ability to identify important questions. For my research problem, he asked me to try to discover a quantum algorithm for And-Or trees (or, equivalently, Nand trees).
I worked on this for several months, but did not come up with anything. Actually, I did come up with some minor results, but a search of the literature showed that these were already known. This was very frustrating, because minor results are very difficult to locate in the literature, and they are often tacked on to a paper about a major result that is only marginally related (if at all). Furthermore, my research reminded me of my writings in high school about the future of computer science. I had written that quantum mechanics had consequences not only for the design of computer hardware, but also for the construction of algorithms (the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm was already known at the time). If my parents had not forced me to abandon my plans for university, I would have been working on exactly this kind of problem years ago. I felt very depressed because of this, and couldn’t focus on my work. The dates on many of the papers I had to read, which were in the mid-1990s around the time my parents coerced me into abandoning my studies, only re-inforced my depression.
One of the strategies I had developed to cope with my increasingly frequent inability to work throughout high school and university was to switch my attention to something else. This was probably not the best strategy to follow in a Ph.D. program, where one is expected to direct all of one’s attention at a narrowly focused set of topics — but without it I would not have been in the program to begin with. I started thinking about open notebook science again. I thought that if people wrote about their research while it was conducted, and posted their notes online, it would facilitate the process of scientific discovery. They could then make minor results available without having to attach it to something else. And in fact, blogging researchers, or researching bloggers, have been doing just that. See here for an example.
But I could not lead by example. My father was watching me, and he had derided both quantum computing and open notebook science as “worthless” ideas. I honestly don’t know how he would have reacted if I had created an open notebook on my research in quantum computing and made it publicly available online (the only worse thing would have been to somehow connect it to my interest in the Muslim world as well). I couldn’t even comment on other researchers’ blogs. Nevertheless, I began to experiment with different electronic notekeeping systems on my personal computer. In fact, I built a system very much like ★grads.net, but only for personal use.
On Valentine’s Day, 2007, Dr. Edward Farhi, Dr. Jeffrey Goldstone, and Dr. Sam Gutmann announced their discovery of a quantum algorithm for Nand trees by posting a paper[1] on the arXiv. On the same day, my father yelled at me on the phone for a lack of progress on my Ph.D. degree. He told me that I “should be writing” my thesis by now.
This is a man who clearly has no idea how the world works. But his mindset is one that is shared by all authoritarian parents, and it is this: at every point in life there are things which you are just supposed to do, and everything else is something you are just not supposed to do, and the path to success is exactly to do all of the former while not doing anything of the latter. I had been punished in high school not so much for doing things which are out-and-out wrong, but for doing things which I should be doing but later — earlier than I was supposed to do them. A high school student “should be studying” his high school textbooks. To do research with professors, to visit the university library, to read scientific papers, and to write about science — these are perversions of the natural order which must be met with punishment. And a Ph.D. student is just “supposed” to write papers (and apparently to have them published in Scientific American) and, after some time, his Ph.D. thesis. It has never occurred to him to think that maybe the reason I had so much trouble writing about my research was that he had beat me and threatened to disown me while I was in high school for studying the topics that I now “should be writing” about, and had discouraged me from writing at all throughout my life.
I think this mentality explains something that I had always attributed to his hypocrisy: the fact that he always took credit for my accomplishments which were the direct result of my acting contrary to his wishes. He had always dismissed my participation in my school’s math and computer science teams, and my role as editor-in-chief of its literary magazine, as “wastes of time”. And yet he took credit for the awards I won in mathematics, computer science, and creative writing in high school. But from an authoritarian parenting point of view, he had indeed been the originator of my accomplishments because he had ordered me to do well in my mathematics, computer science, and English classes. And he also held the mistaken view that the teachers/judges shared his disregard for anything but marks alone, when in fact participation in extracurricular activities was an important consideration for them (although I did, in fact, have the highest marks in the relevant classes).
Immediately after the breakthrough paper by Farhi, Goldstone, and Gutmann[2], a short follow-up note[3], on which I appeared as one of four co-authors, was posted to the arXiv. I felt that I didn’t have all that much to do with it, although it was only a very brief note.
Because of my parents, my goals were often quite different from those of other people. I began this post with the observation that one of the chief difficulties in dealing with abusive parents is that other people will not understand your motivations. Dr. Cleve had asked for my name to be included on the note because I had been working with him on the problem, and we had discussed the result presented, even though I didn’t contribute very much; but in any case, it was a very short and minor thing. Additionally, I understood that it was also intended to give me an incentive to develop the result further, since the connection of my name with the problem meant that I now had a stake in it. My concern, however, was that the appearance of a paper with my name on it next to the words “quantum algorithm” would trigger my father to scream at me and threaten to disown me, as he had done in reaction to very similar stimuli when I was in high school. I didn’t want to be a footnote to a major discovery, but if I was, I certainly did not want it to be under my father’s surname.
The sight of his surname on a paper about quantum computing, a subject he had consistently derided as “worthless”, made me sick. My counsellor had asked me why I saw it as his surname rather than as mine, and the answer — which I will admit is completely irrational — is that he was perpetually taking credit for anything on which my name appeared, no matter how much effort he had actually put into preventing me from doing that very thing in the first place. Anything done under that name was something that he might potentially take credit for. In retrospect, I should have invented a pseudonym (oh, for example, “D. L. Yonge-Mallo”) as soon as I came to Waterloo so that I wouldn’t have had to worry about my parents discovering what I was studying. But I would have had to explain this to people, and I didn’t want my parents’ abusive behaviour towards me to become public knowledge.
The fact that my father was perpetually claiming my achievements for himself also made me very sensitive to having my name attached to something that I didn’t feel I contributed very much to. But it would have caused more of a commotion to ask for my name not to be put on it, just as I couldn’t have asked for my name to be removed from IQC’s list of members. The whole episode made me depressed and again unable to work.
– davinci
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