For overdetermined reasons, I’ve lately found the world an increasingly terrifying and depressing place. It’s gotten harder and harder to concentrate on research, or even popular science writing. Every so often, though, something breaks through […]
Tag: scottaaronson
Even with everything happening in the Middle East right now, even with (relatedly) everything happening in my own family (my wife and son sheltering in Tel Aviv as Iranian missiles rained down), even with all […]
I posted this on my Facebook, but several friends asked me to share more widely, so here goes: I voted against Trump three times, and donated thousands to his opponents. I’d still vote against him […]
A week ago I attended LessOnline, a rationalist blogging conference featuring many people I’ve known for years—Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Zvi Mowshowitz, Sarah Constantin, Carl Feynman—as well as people I’ve known only online and was […]
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares are publishing a mass-market book, the rather self-explanatorily-titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. (Yes, the “it” means “sufficiently powerful AI.”) The book is now available for preorder from Amazon: […]
I’ve now been blogging for nearly twenty years—through five presidential administrations, my own moves from Waterloo to MIT to UT Austin, my work on algebrization and BosonSampling and BQP vs. PH and quantum money and […]
Yesterday, the Texas State Legislature heard public comments about SB37, a bill that would give a state board direct oversight over course content and faculty hiring at public universities, perhaps inspired by Trump’s national crackdown […]
Grant Sanderson, of 3blue1brown, has put up a phenomenal YouTube video explaining Grover’s algorithm, and dispelling the fundamental misconception about quantum computing, that QC works simply by “trying all the possibilities in parallel.” Let me […]
Last week I visited Harvard and MIT, and as advertised in my last post, gave the Yip Lecture at Harvard on the subject “How Much Math Is Knowable?” The visit was hosted by Harvard’s wonderful […]
Every week, I tell myself I won’t do yet another post about the asteroid striking American academia, and then every week events force my hand otherwise. No one on earth—certainly no one who reads this […]
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