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In which Scott Aaronson creates the most offensive trolley problem imaginable
(scottaaronson.blog)
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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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SneerClub
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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I'll raise the question here instead of in the thread that gave me the idea, since it feels not quite right to bring the awful to NotAwfulTech:
At this point, I have real reservations recommending anything that Scott Aaronson has written for any purpose. I'm not going to elide his actual contributions to science, but I can't suggest that a student read any expository writing of his, not without such heavy caveats and contextualizing that my conscience would welcome any alternative. So, then: What do people read him for, and what are the alternatives?
I suppose one prominent thing is his book, Quantum Computing Since Democritus. I know of various other books about quantum information/computing, written from a physicist perspective. There are David Mermin's Quantum Computer Science: An Introduction (Cambridge UP, 2007) and Eleanor Rieffel and Wolfgang Polak's Quantum Computing: A Gentle Introduction (MIT Press, 2014). If anyone knows a decent undergrad introduction to Gödel incompleteness and its relation to the halting problem, that would probably cover a lot of the rest, apart from what I recall as rather shallow pseudophilosophical faffling. (I am going off decade-old memories and the table of contents here.)
Gödel makes everyone weep. For tears of joy, my top pick is still Doug Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is suitable for undergraduates. Another strong classic is Raymond Smullyan's To Mock a Mockingbird. Both of these dead-trees are worth it; I personally find myself cracking them open regularly for citations, quotes, and insights. For tears of frustration, the best way to fully understand the numerical machinery is Peter Smith's An Introduction to Gödel's Theorems, freely available online. These books are still receiving new editions, but any edition should suffice. If the goal is merely to ensure that the student can diagonalize, then the student can directly read Bill Lawvere's 1968 paper Diagonal arguments & Cartesian closed categories with undergraduate category theory, but in any case they should also read Noson Yanofsky's 2003 expository paper A universal approach to self-referential paradoxes, incompleteness & fixed points. The easiest options are at the beginning of the paragraph and the hardest ones are at the end; nonetheless any option will cover Cantor, Russell, Gödel, Turing, Tarski, and the essentials of diagonalization.
I don't know what to do about stuff like the Complexity Zoo. Their veterinarian is Greg Kuberberg, a decent guy who draws lots of diagrams. I took some photos myself when I last visited. But obviously it's not an ideal situation for the best-known encyclopedia to be run by Aaronson and Habryka.
And hardly run, at that: this changelog is all spam. Tsk, tsk.
They don't even try to catch the page spammers? Ow god. (the account creation is hard to do something about, but the page spammers is just bad, in this case it is also bad because all the new accounts end with 4 numbers). Less than the bare minimum.
(how are the very online, worried about robots killing everybody, have enough time to write book sized blogposts, so bad at this, when I was active trying to maintain a wiki I checked the recent changes somewhat regularly, for shame).
Give me admin rights Scott, I can keep the toxic elements off ~~my~~ your wiki.
I recently searched “shtetl” on facebook to see what my friends had ever shared from the blog, literally only three posts:
So in terms of the content worth sharing and alternatives, it appears it’s just the CS based stuff.
E: Joke answer: clearly the go-to contrablog is Scott’s nemesis Arthur Chu’s archived twitter feed, or just watching Jeopardy episodes.