You’ll hear that it’s not as simple as the Israelis are good guys and Palestinians are bad guys, or vice versa. And that’s true. But it’s also not so complicated that there are no clearly […]
Category: scottaaronson
For those who read my reply to Richard Borcherds on “teapot supremacy”: seeking better data, I ordered a dozen terra cotta flowerpots, and smashed eight of them on my driveway with my 4-year-old son, dropping […]
Peter Singer, in the parable that came to represent his whole worldview and that of the effective altruism movement more generally, asked us to imagine that we could save a drowning child at the cost […]
Richard Borcherds is a British mathematician at Berkeley, who won the 1998 Fields Medal for the proof of the monstrous moonshine conjecture among many other contributions. A couple months ago, Borcherds posted on YouTube a […]
Last week I got an email from Dina Katabi, my former MIT colleague, asking me to call her urgently. Am I in trouble? For what, though?? I haven’t even worked at MIT for five years! […]
Oded Goldreich is a theoretical computer scientist at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel. He’s best known for helping to lay the rigorous foundations of cryptography in the 1980s, through seminal results like the Goldreich-Levin […]
My son Daniel had his fourth birthday a couple weeks ago. For a present, he got an electric train set. (For completeness—and since the details of the train set will be rather important to the […]
For years, I’d sometimes hear discussions about the ethics of quantum computing research. Quantum ethics! When the debates weren’t purely semantic, over the propriety of terms like “quantum supremacy” or “ancilla qubit,” they were always […]
Many of you will have seen the happy news today that Avi Wigderson and László Lovász share this year’s Abel Prize (which now contends with the Fields Medal for the highest award in pure math). […]
Back at MIT, whenever I taught my graduate course on Quantum Complexity Theory (see here for lecture notes), I had a tradition of showcasing the student projects on this blog: see here (Fall 2010), here […]
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