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On the destruction of America’s best high school
[C]hildren with special abilities and skills need to be nourished and encouraged. They are a national treasure. Challenging programs for the “gifted” are sometimes decried as “eli…
Scott Aaronson
I'm Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin , and director of its Quantum Information Center . My research interests center around the capabilities and limits of quantum computers, and computational complexity theory more generally.
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Visit scottaaronson.com → On Hacker News May 2009 – Jan 2021
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2
Review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now
It’s not every day that I check my office mailbox and, amid the junk brochures, find 500 pages on the biggest questions facing civilization—all of them, basically—by possibly the …
3
Memrefuting
(in which I bring this blog back to the “safe, uncontroversial” territory of arguing with people who think they can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time) A few people have aske…
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The destruction of graduate education in the United States
If and when you emerged from your happiness bubble to read the news, you’ll have seen (at least if you live in the US) that the cruel and reckless tax bill has passed the House of Representat…
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What I believe II
Unrelated Update: To everyone who keeps asking me about the “new” P≠NP proof: I’d again bet $200,000 that the paper won’t stand, except that the last time I tried that, it d…
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Once we can see them, it’s too late
[updates: here’s the paper, and here’s Robin’s brief response to some of the comments here] This month Robin Hanson, the famous and controversy-prone George Mason University econo…
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Pseudonymity as a Trivial Concession to Genius
Update (6/24): For further thoughts and context about this unfolding saga, see this excellent piece by Tom Chivers (author of The AI Does Not Hate You, so far the only book about the rationalist co…
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Malthusianisms
(See also: Umeshisms, Anthropicisms) Why, in real life, do we ever encounter hard instances of NP-complete problems? Because if it’s too easy to find a 10,000-mile TSP tour, we ask for a 9,0…
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The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Independence of the Continuum Hypothesis
A global pandemic, apocalyptic fires, and the possible descent of the US into violent anarchy three days from now can do strange things to the soul. Bertrand Russell—and if he’d done no…