Category: scottaaronson

I don’t have time to write a full post right now, but hopefully this is self-explanatory. Regardless of their broader views on the AI industry, the eventual risks from AI, or American politics, right every […]

So, a group based in Sydney, Australia has put out a preprint with a new estimate of the resource requirements for Shor’s algorithm, claiming that if you use LDPC codes rather than the surface code, […]

The following are prepared remarks that I delivered by Zoom to a student group at my old stomping-grounds of MIT, and which I thought might interest others (even though much of it will be familiar […]

This is just a quick announcement that I’ll be hosting Nate Soares—who coauthored the self-explanatorily titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies with Eliezer Yudkowsky—tomorrow (Tuesday) at 5PM at UT Austin, for a brief talk […]

Friend-of-the-blog Salil Vadhan has asked me to share the following. The Trevisan Award for Expository Work is a new SIGACT award created in memory of Luca Trevisan (1971-2024), with a nomination deadline of April 10, 2026. The award is intended […]

Last night, I was taken aback to discover that my name appears in the Epstein Files, in 26 different documents. This is despite the fact that I met Jeffrey Epstein a grand total of zero […]

The following guest post was written by a Shtetl-Optimized fan in Iran, who’s choosing to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. I’m in awe of the courage of this individual and the millions of other Iranians […]

Here’s a 53-minute podcast that I recorded this afternoon with a high school student named Micah Zarin, and which ended up covering …[checks notes] … consciousness, free will, brain uploading, the Church-Turing Thesis, AI, quantum […]

Those of us who tried to stop Trump from ever coming to power—and who then tried to stop his return to power—were accused of hysterics, of Trump Derangement Syndrome, when we talked about authoritarianism and […]

Scott Alexander has put up one of his greatest posts ever, a 10,000-word eulogy to Dilbert creator Scott Adams, of which I would’ve been happy to read 40,000 words more. In it, Alexander trains a […]