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 […]
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 […]
This deserves to become one of the iconic images of human history, alongside the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square and so forth. Here’s Sharifi Zarchi, a computer engineering professor at Sharif University in Tehran, posting […]
The blog-commenters come at me one by one, a seemingly infinite supply of them, like masked henchmen in an action movie throwing karate chops at Jackie Chan. “Seriously Scott, do better,” says each henchman when […]
I woke up yesterday morning happy and relieved that the Venezuelan people were finally free of their brutal dictator. I ended the day angry and depressed that Trump, as it turns out, does not seek […]
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