1
First they came for the Iranians
Action Item: If you’re an American academic, please sign the petition against the Immigration Executive Order. (There are already more than eighteen thousand signatories, including Nobel Laur…
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.
- Popular posts
- 50
- Total points
- 10,542
- HN comments
- 4,956
- Rank
- #73 personal
Visit scottaaronson.com → On Hacker News May 2009 – Jan 2021
Science & Space 26Math & Algorithms 26Society, Policy & Culture 15Life, Learning & Writing 9Software Engineering 8AI & Machine Learning 7
2
Eigenmorality
This post is about an idea I had around 1997, when I was 16 years old and a freshman computer-science major at Cornell. Back then, I was extremely impressed by a research project called CLEVER, wh…
3
I will not log in to your website
Two or three times a day, I get an email whose basic structure is as follows: Prof. Aaronson, given your expertise, we’d be incredibly grateful for your feedback on a paper / report / gr…
4
What does the NSA think of academic cryptographers?
Brighten Godfrey was one of my officemates when we were grad students at Berkeley. He’s now a highly-successful computer networking professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, …
5
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…
6
Grading Trudeau on quantum computing
Update (4/19): Inspired by Trudeau’s performance (which they clocked at 35 seconds), Maclean’s magazine asked seven quantum computing researchers—me, Krysta Svore, Aephraim Steinb…
7
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 …
8
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…
9
My Conversation with “Eugene Goostman”
If you haven’t read about it yet, “Eugene Goostman” is a chatbot that’s being heavily promoted by the University of Reading’s Kevin Warwick, for fooling 33% of judges …
10
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…
11
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…
12
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…
13
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…
14
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…
15
Tell President Obama to support the Federal Research Public Access Act
If you’re tired of blog posts about open science, sorry dude—but it feels great to be part a group of blogging nerds who, for once, are actually having a nonzero (and positive, I think!…