Quantum Investment Bros: Have you no shame?
Near the end of my last post, I made a little offhand remark:
[G]iven the current staggering rate of hardware progress, I now think it’s a live possibility that we’ll have a fault-tolerant quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm before the next US presidential election. And I say that not only because of the possibility of the next US presidential election getting cancelled, or preempted by runaway superintelligence!
As I later clarified, I’ll consider this “live possibility” to be fulfilled even if a fault-tolerant Shor’s algorithm is “merely” used to factor 15 into 3×5—a milestone that seems a few steps, but only a few steps, away from what Google, Quantinuum, QuEra, and others have already demonstrated over the past year. After that milestone, I then expect “smooth sailing” to more and more logical qubits and gates and the factorization of larger and larger integers, however fast or slow that ramp-up proceeds (which of course I don’t know).
In any case, the main reason I made my remark was just to tee up the wisecrack about whether I’m not sure if there’ll be a 2028 US presidential election.
My remark, alas, then went viral on Twitter, with people posting countless takes like this:
A quantum expert skeptic who the bears quote all the time – Scott Aaronson – recently got very excited about a number of quantum advances. He now thinks there’s a possibility of running Shor before the next US president election – a timeline that lines up ONLY with $IONQ‘s roadmap, and NOBODY else’s! This represent a MAJOR capitulation of previously predicted timelines by any skeptics.
Shall we enumerate the layers of ugh here?
- I’ve been saying for several years now that anyone paranoid about cybersecurity should probably already be looking to migrate to quantum-resistant cryptography, because one can’t rule out the possibility that hardware progress will be fast. I didn’t “capitulate”: I mildly updated what I said before, in light of exciting recent advances.
- A “live possibility” is short not only of a “certainty,” but of a “probability.” It’s basically just an “I’m not confident this won’t happen.”
- Worst is the obsessive focus on IonQ, a company that I never mentioned (except in the context of its recently-acquired subsidiary, Oxford Ionics), but which now has a $17 billion valuation. I should explain that, at least since it decided to do an IPO, IonQ has generally been regarded within the research community as … err … a bit like the early D-Wave, intellectual-respectability-wise. They’ll eagerly sell retail investors on the use of quantum computers to recognize handwriting and suchlike, despite (I would say) virtually no basis to believe in a quantum scaling advantage for such tasks. Or they’ll aggressively market current devices to governments who don’t understand what they’re for, but just want to say they have a quantum computer and not get left behind. Or they’ll testify to Congress that quantum, unlike AI, “doesn’t hallucinate” and indeed is “deterministic.” It pains me to write this, as IonQ was founded by (and indeed, still employs) scientists who I deeply admire and respect.
- Perhaps none of this would matter (or would matter only to pointy-headed theorists like me) if IonQ were the world leader in quantum computing hardware, or even trapped-ion hardware. But by all accounts, IonQ’s hardware and demonstrations have lagged well behind those of its direct competitor, Quantinuum. It seems to me that, to whatever extent IonQ gets vastly more attention, it’s mostly just because it chose to IPO early, and also because it’s prioritized marketing to the degree it has.
Over the past few days, I’ve explained the above to various people, only to have them look back at me with glazed, uncomprehending eyes and say, “so then, which quantum stock should I buy? or should I short quantum?”
It would seem rude for me to press quarters into these people’s hands, explaining that they must make gain from whatever they learn. So instead I reply: “You do realize, don’t you, that I’m, like, a professor at a state university, who flies coach and lives in a nice but unremarkable house? If I had any skill at timing the market, picking winners, etc., don’t you think I’d live in a mansion with an infinity pool, and fly my Cessna to whichever conferences I deigned to attend?”
It’s like this: if you think quantum computers able to break 2048-bit cryptography within 3-5 years are a near-certainty, then I’d say your confidence is unwarranted. If you think such quantum computers, once built, will also quickly revolutionize optimization and machine learning and finance and countless other domains beyond quantum simulation and cryptanalysis—then I’d say that more likely than not, an unscrupulous person has lied to you about our current understanding of quantum algorithms.
On the other hand, if you think Bitcoin, and SSL, and all the other protocols based on Shor-breakable cryptography, are almost certainly safe for the next 5 years … then I submit that your confidence is also unwarranted. Your confidence might then be like most physicists’ confidence in 1938 that nuclear weapons were decades away, or like my own confidence in 2015 that an AI able to pass a reasonable Turing Test was decades away. It might merely be the confidence that “this still looks like the work of decades—unless someone were to gather together all the scientific building blocks that have now been demonstrated, and scale them up like a stark raving madman.” The trouble is that sometimes people, y’know, do that.
Beyond that, the question of “how many years?” doesn’t even interest me very much, except insofar as I can mine from it the things I value in life, like scientific understanding, humor, and irony.
There are, famously, many intellectual Communists who are ruthless capitalists in their day-to-day lives. I somehow wound up the opposite. Intellectually, I see capitalism as a golden goose, a miraculous engine that’s lifted the human species out of its disease-ridden hovels and into air-conditioned high-rises, whereas Communism led instead to misery and gulags and piles of skulls every single time it was tried.
And yet, when I actually see the workings of capitalism up close, I often want to retch. In case after case, it seems, our system rewards bold, confident, risk-taking ignoramuses and liars, those who can shamelessly hype a technology (or conversely, declare it flatly impossible)—with such voices drowning out the cautious experts who not only strive to tell the truth, but also made all the actual discoveries that the technology rests on. My ideal economic system is, basically, whichever one can keep the people who can clearly explain the capabilities and limits and risks and benefits of X in charge of X for as long as possible.
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Comment #1 November 20th, 2025 at 2:12 am
“Communism led instead to misery and gulags and piles of skulls every single time it was tried.” This is a great oversimplification, and probably you only heard of the most famous ones. Anyhow, none of the ‘claimed’ communist states were ever truly communists, as defined by Marx, who also said that communism would emerge in the most developed capitalist state, which hasn’t happened until now.
Comment #2 November 20th, 2025 at 2:28 am
Domotor Palvolgyi #1: Yes, I’m well aware that “true Communism has never been tried,” as they say. Except it has been.
Comment #3 November 20th, 2025 at 3:20 am
Scott #2: Socialism for software development and maintenance, the guild system for higher education and scientific research, social democracy for public services including pre-college education and health care, and capitalism without much regulation for everything else.
Comment #4 November 20th, 2025 at 4:02 am
Quantum schmantum, even a quantum computer can’t play Magic the Gathering perfectly. In fact not even an unbounded Turing machine, in fact even a *super* Turing machine, even a *super duper pooper* Turing machine, etc. etc. can play it perfectly. This is a few years old but I just came across it and wow.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.05119
Comment #5 November 20th, 2025 at 4:04 am
Thank you for qualifying your statement on the possibility of fault-tolerant quantum computing! As an engineer who is responsible for tracking the progress in the field, I humbly rely on your reviews, as well as that of two or three trusted experts, to cut through the noise and the ambient hype, and decide on whether our company (a major player in the semiconductor field) should invest engineering effort into quantum computing. I think you are one of the few experts who not only has no clear financial interest in these quantum startups, but also provides an understandable, critical evaluation of progress in the field to a larger audience on a timely basis. In that context, I was immediately taken aback by your previous post, so thanks again for clarifying what you meant.
Comment #6 November 20th, 2025 at 5:17 am
When I read pop sci articles I grieve for the US educational system. It is like a pox on my sense of scientific reasonableness. I know that it is about clicks and not science but still painful that such tripe is considered scientific news by the wider audience. The total disregard for facts that are no where in dispute and purposely misleading introductions are terribly disturbing. Clicks plus content that invites naive investment is the nadir of science journalism. The internet is a cornucopia of fiction crudely disguised as fact
On the subject of opposing fictions couched as facts, good luck with the Marxists. You might look to Sisyphus for strategic guidance.
Comment #7 November 20th, 2025 at 7:18 am
[…] even if a fault-tolerant Shor’s algorithm is “merely” used to factor 15 into 3×5. See this post where he further elaborates on his expectations.) Further updates (Dec. 2023): In the comment […]
Comment #8 November 20th, 2025 at 7:27 am
I think there is a distinct possibility, though, that artificial superintelligence could make capitalism and even the concepts of personal property and wealth basically irrelevant. Imagine an economy with exponential and, on a human scale, virtually unlimited resources, centrally planned by a superintelligent AI. Owning a house won’t mean much when there’s infinite energy and the entire material of the solar system is converted into habitats and solar panels. Something like “fully automated space socialism.” Far-fetched, but if the AI 2027 people are right, could be just around the corner of the singularity.
Comment #9 November 20th, 2025 at 8:59 am
Domotor:
“Nazism led to gas chambers and crematoria when it was tried.” This is a great oversimplification.
Of course, when ordinary, untheorized people speak about “Nazism,” what they really mean is the historically contingent regime of Hitler from 1933 to 1945—an accidental crystallization of forces, a crude and, frankly, philosophically unsophisticated implementation of a far more nuanced ideological project.
To the serious student of theory (that is, to anyone who has read at least some mimeographed pamphlets in German), it should be obvious that what we call “Nazism” is better understood as a vulgarized Hitlerism: a pragmatic, compromise-ridden coalition between heavy industry, reactionary military elites, and a petit-bourgeois mass base in existential crisis. In other words: the sort of thing any capitalist society might cough up when it is pathologically stressed.
“Real Nazism,” by contrast, has—tragically, yet predictably—never been tried.
Let me be precise. If we return to the early ideological ferment, we see a spectrum of tendencies. On one end, we find the familiar reactionary-nationalist bloc, desperately courting industrial capital. On the other, an authentically “revolutionary” current, represented (however imperfectly) by figures like Otto Strasser. This latter strand envisioned a thorough reorganization of society: not merely chauvinistic rhetoric and militarism, but a complete economic and social restructuring to transcend both liberal capitalism and the timid half-measures of conventional conservatism.
What triumphed in 1933 was not Nazism in any philosophically rigorous sense; it was a compromise formation, a historically contingent deviation from the more “pure” ideological line. The Night of the Long Knives, in this reading, is not merely a brutal purge; it is the decisive liquidation of theoretical consistency. The very elements that might have produced a coherent synthesis are annihilated in favor of a grubby, ad hoc, power-preserving bloc with big business and the army.
And yet, we are constantly told that “Nazism was tried and failed catastrophically,” as though this were some kind of decisive empirical refutation of the ideology. This is embarrassingly naïve. One might as well claim that “real democracy” has been refuted by the existence of corrupt parliaments, or that “real Christianity” has been disproven by the Inquisition. Theoreticians—those of us who can read more than a Wikipedia article—understand that an ideal type cannot be invalidated by its vulgar instantiations.
The regime of 1933–1945 was, at best, a bastardized hybrid: some aesthetic trappings of the ideology, some half-digested programmatic planks, and a great deal of opportunistic improvisation. To confuse this with “real Nazism” is like confusing a franchise fast-food burger with haute cuisine simply because both involve meat and bread.
Had genuine Nazism ever been implemented—guided by the more systematic, anti-capitalist, “revolutionary” elements you find in the early programmatic writings—its historical trajectory might have been radically different. This is not to endorse such a trajectory, of course; it is simply to insist on analytical rigor. One cannot claim that an ideology has been “tried and failed” if the historical case in question is, by every serious theoretical criterion, a revisionist dilution of the original program.
So when people say, “Nazism has been discredited by history,” what they are really saying is: a particular historically contingent misapplication of certain slogans, symbols, and rhetorical devices ended in disaster. That is undeniably true—and morally important—but it is not the same thing as a philosophically robust test of the ideology itself. For that, one would have to examine a regime in which the full programmatic logic was allowed to unfold without compromise, sabotage, or bourgeois capture.
Such a regime never existed. Which is precisely why the slogan “Nazism has been tried and failed” is, in the strictest theoretical sense, untenable. The uncomfortable truth is that “real Nazism”—the pure, internally coherent, textually faithful Nazism of the early ideologues—has never, in fact, been tried.
Comment #10 November 20th, 2025 at 9:33 am
Julian #9: LOL, I didn’t want to get too far off-track from quantum computing but I enjoyed that. One could even say that, for Communism, we have at least a half-dozen separate examples of it descending into the “piles of skulls” phase, whereas for Nazism we only have the one.
Comment #11 November 20th, 2025 at 11:04 am
Do you even think it is possible for a normal human investor to have a realistic insight into the true progress of these publicly traded quantum companies?
You may have the luxury to speak to a scientist friend who works there, off the record and get a nuanced update.
I think it is lunacy that these can publicly listed without quarterly “scientist q and a” calls- to give the public a peephole into how actual scientists would probe.
Seems unrealistic, given (rightful?) the privilege of secrecy in r and d.
Comment #12 November 20th, 2025 at 12:15 pm
Julian #9
Very nice post, exceptionally good analysis and response .
The recent bridge collapse (and less publicized shipyard debacles) brings up Chinese Tofu Projects that claim the lives of Chinese citizens. This paper from 2012 provides some of the history of these and were named as such by a former Chinese premier. This paper attributes it solely to corruption but the Marxist argument that prioritizes quantity over quality also has a fundamental impact in my view.
https://thediplomat.com/2012/02/chinas-dangerous-tofu-projects/
Comment #13 November 20th, 2025 at 7:43 pm
William #11: Actual scientists, who specialize in precisely this topic, and have access to the best available public information, back-room gossip, and sometimes NDAed information, almost uniformly choose *not* to bet money either for or against quantum computing companies. Scott is one of many great examples.
In other words, it’s a reasonable conclusion that even the most expert and informed people do not feel they have enough of “a realistic insight into the progress of these publicly traded companies” to buy or sell their stock. Normal humans are probably just as good at guessing as we are, and *investors* — whether normal and/or human, or not — are probably better, because they’re trained to make informed guesses about the success of companies without understanding their products.
Comment #14 November 20th, 2025 at 8:39 pm
Scott, I appreciate the clarification on your “live possibility” remark about fault-tolerant Shor’s algorithm before 2028. The Twitter reaction was predictably absurd, though I suspect you knew what you were walking into?
Your characterization of IonQ is… diplomatic. I’ll be more direct: IonQ’s $17-18 billion market cap represents one of the more spectacular disconnects between valuation and technical reality in the quantum space.
I just hope that when these listed companies spectacularly blow up (and the current valuations suggest “when” not “if”), it doesn’t set back the rest of the field too much. The companies and research labs around the world actually advancing quantum computing are getting drowned out by marketing noise from companies that haven’t demonstrated comparable technical capabilities.
Comment #15 November 20th, 2025 at 8:41 pm
Just bought some ionQ puts, thanks for the tip
FWIW “my cessna” usually means a shitty single engine plane(something you could actually afford to buy).
If you have a private jet build by cessna you would say “my citation”
Comment #16 November 21st, 2025 at 12:11 am
Scott #2. When I clicked on the “Except it has been.” link I was expecting it to connect me to something about kibbutzim, e.g., Schwartz, “Democracy and collectivism in the kibbutz” https://www.jstor.org/stable/798793 or Abramitzky, “Lessons from the kibbutz on the equality-incentives trade-off” https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.25.1.185 .
Comment #17 November 21st, 2025 at 2:21 am
David Meyer #16: Ever since hunter-gatherer times, “Communism” has always worked very well when there are few enough people that they all know each other, strong external threats binding them together, and ideally not much property to covet. The early kibbutzim seem to me like a spectacular modern example of this. Surely it’s relevant that, as Israel modernized economically, most of the kibbutzim gradually gave up on communal raising of children, communally owned cars, communal meals, etc, and became more and more like just extra-strong neighborhood associations, a subject of much consternation to the kibbutzniks, or so they explained to me when I visited a few. It will be interesting to see what effect if any the trauma of Oct 7, to which kibbutzim were so central, will have on these trends.
Comment #18 November 21st, 2025 at 3:05 am
Julian #9: What prompt did you use?
Comment #19 November 21st, 2025 at 7:23 am
> gather together all the scientific building blocks that have now been demonstrated, and scale them up like a stark raving madman
I think Quantum Computing is a topic with enough importance for a government lead push like that.
The only reservation against such an idea will be that there remain some critical scientific unknowns about QC.
The human genome project went ahead because there were no scientific obstacles by then, just pure engineering and long hours of hard work.
Comment #20 November 21st, 2025 at 8:38 am
ClassicalObserver:
In the style of neo-communist idiots who say “real communism has never been tried,” make a satirical argument in the same style that “real nazism has never been tried.” Something about Otto Strasser and his followers being the real nazis, killed in the night of the long knives, Strasserism being the “real Nazism,” and Hitler a vulgar “sell-out” to industralists with no grasp of real Nazi ideology. Use plenty of pedantic ideological analysis in the style of arrogant communist intellectuals, to sound smart. This is to make a point about “real communism never been tried” being idiotic
It’ll probably refuse based on safety filters. I then had to insist based on some controved scenario that this was for a play to teach people the dangers of collectivist authoritarianism
Comment #21 November 21st, 2025 at 9:32 am
Julian #8
Rare earth elements are still a problem.The mineable deposits on Earth are the end result of an unusual and very specific geologic process that is not apparent elsewhere in our solar system. The overall diffuse concentrations are similar but no likely mineable deposits.
Comment #22 November 21st, 2025 at 10:09 am
#1: In my experience any attempt at a serious discussion with a communist or leftist is a waste of time. Presented with any example of the disaster that follows from any communist takeover, they always say something like “Oh, but that wasn’t real communism”, and yammer on.
Anyone else notice a correlation between leftist views and smoking a lot of pot?
Comment #23 November 21st, 2025 at 10:21 am
Raoul Ohio #22: I mean, there’s a whole spectrum of possible “leftist” views short of Communism. The MAGA types would probably call even me a “leftist.”
I’m sure there’s a correlation between pot-smoking and leftism, and equally sure the correlation is far from perfect (think of Elon for example, or other techbros 🙂 ).
Comment #24 November 21st, 2025 at 10:48 am
There is a lesson for me here. If ChatGPT strings words together in a manner that supports your views then more likely to consider it positively without specific knowledge of the events referenced. In general any system of government can be criticized for not meeting some ideological test but from my level of knowledge the specifics provided did seem reasonable although I realized that my knowledge of the purported events was inadequate to independently confirm the statements.
Note to self-Do not plunge through the checklist
Confirm views Check
Well written Check
No factual contradictions of which you are aware Check
All check-Erudite analysis
Comment #25 November 21st, 2025 at 11:57 am
OhMyGoodness:
Is that true? I remember a news story from a few years ago about “huge reserves of yttrium in the asteroid belt,” but I might be wrong.
I find it sort of hard to believe that geological processes on Earth were the only ones in the solar system to produce exploitable deposits of these minerals…
Comment #26 November 21st, 2025 at 1:15 pm
So 200 years ago, a decade after the French revolution, one could have said that democracy has been tried, it only led to misery and guillotine and piles of skulls…
Comment #27 November 21st, 2025 at 2:12 pm
domotorp #26: No, because by the time of the French Revolution, democracy (or at least republicanism) was already doing much better in America—crucially, having been established on a better basis than the French revolutionaries’ “guillotine all those who crossed us.” And democracy was soon to do better in many other countries as well.
And Communism is not a decade-old idea being tried for the first time! It’s now a 200-year-old idea that’s been tried at least a dozen times, and delivered on its promise not even once.
Comment #28 November 21st, 2025 at 4:27 pm
Ionq is definitely damaging the health of the overall field of quantum computing with how it’s furiously milking the hype. On the other hand, for better or for worse, Quantinuum seems to be led entirely by former Intel, Honeywell, and Rigetti execs who will I guarantee will mishandle things if they ever IPO in the opposite fashion (out of touch business, bloated processes, misreading the market, no thought of curating talent).
I am guessing the scientists are succeeding *despite* their leadership over there, so major kudos to them. I wish I could say the same of Ionq, but their scientific results aren’t very impressive (recently at least). Quera is definitely my personal curiosity in terms of many interesting results given the small team
Comment #29 November 21st, 2025 at 5:32 pm
I’m sorry (well, a little sorry) for using AI to make my point. I’m a little disappointed, if you thought I came up with all that, and only later discovered that I used AI to make my point.
But: I’ve discovered that AI is especially useful against the kind of person who uses extremely verbose and technical reasoning to make a point—where the technicalities are really based on language more than any deeper “theory.” For instance, a neo-marxian who uses annoying marxian thoeory and technical vocabulary to argue that “real marxism has never been tried.” This isn’t rooted in any real repository of deeper theory, like NP reductions or quantum field theory or whatever; only intellectual pedantics, and text AI is brilliant for destroying this.
I actually think that text AI will thoroughly destroy the intellectual Western communist, because any pedantic argument for gulags and murdering kulaks they can give me, I can reproduce and dispel with AI in far greater definition than they would ever be capable of.
Yes, commies: AI is coming for your jobs.
Comment #30 November 21st, 2025 at 5:34 pm
Scott:
Anyway, what did you think of this bizarre turn of events? Is our politics an impossible-to-predict reality show of spectacles, or what?
A remarkable scene played out this afternoon in the Oval Office: President Trump sat next to Zohran Mamdani — a democratic socialist he has described as a “lunatic,” a “radical” and an existential threat to New York City — and spent nearly half an hour showering him with compliments. Trump said he expected Mamdani to do some great things as the next mayor of their shared hometown.
“We agree on a lot more than I would have thought,” the president said after the two met privately. “I think he is going to surprise some conservative people, actually.”
Comment #31 November 21st, 2025 at 7:05 pm
Julian #30: Yup, you can’t make this up.
We live in interesting times.
Comment #32 November 21st, 2025 at 8:33 pm
1. Long time reader of the blog following “Quantum Computation Since Democritus”.
2. Following my experience in 1970s and 1980s in the United Kingdom (where the Cold War had a particular expression), I was fortunate to study “The Communist Manifesto”, Trotsky’s “The November Revolution”, Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulage Archipelago”, and Eric Hobsbawm’s “Age of Extremes” advised by E. B. Segel (a historian with specialty in the Cold War / Soviet Union). These experiences piqued my curiosity and led me to cursory study, in my idle time, of various communist experiments (Greek Civil War 1946 -1949, Cuba, China, Southeast Asia). Long story short, I cannot think of any examples where the project was ever successful or ever delivered. I vaguely recall that the proponent, spectator and Historian Eric Hobsbawm long advocated that it was ‘always right around the corner’ and always ‘just about to happen’ but had never been truly implemented consistently with the ideal (utopian) vision of Marx / Engels; e.g., what was implemented instead were watered down interpreted versions such as ‘Leninism’ / ‘Stalinism’ / Maoism etc.
3. Based on the views of IonQ described; a position long in Puts on IonQ appears attractive (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IONQ/options/)
Comment #33 November 21st, 2025 at 11:08 pm
The inner “workings of capitalism” one can typically see “up close” — nearly “in real time” (as exemplified, e.g., by this brilliant blogpost of yours). Quite a few particulars of the inner workings of “communism/socialism” up close (at least insofar as it pertains to USSR) remain — to an extent which is difficult to overstate– out of bounds even to the most credentialed and professional historians of the period.
Comment #34 November 22nd, 2025 at 12:25 am
Scott, thanks for quoting my X post. My response here:
https://x.com/genejchan/status/1992116963775050001
Cheers!
Comment #35 November 22nd, 2025 at 2:21 am
Julian #25
There is Yttrium in the asteroid belt at a concentration of 2 ppm but no indication of any rich deposits. 16 Psyche was in the news but it has deposits of gold and platinum that were deposited in planetary (planetoid) cores in molten iron. The rare earths are concentrated from crustal material by long term geologic processes associated with tectonic activity.
I don’t believe anyone can say conclusively that there are no rich rare earth deposits in the solar system other than on earth but prospecting for them will be intensely speculative (at best).
Comment #36 November 22nd, 2025 at 3:53 am
Julian #30
I wonder if he will pardon the turkey this year. The turkey must be concerned.
Comment #37 November 22nd, 2025 at 7:00 am
Scott, the people you deplore here exist in any system.
Capitalism just keeps them relatively productive.
If you think capitalism looks bad on the inside, I’d say you better avoid looking at how real world socialism worked (and still works).
Comment #38 November 22nd, 2025 at 7:54 am
“. . . It would seem rude for me to press quarters into these people’s hands, explaining that they must make gain from whatever they learn. So instead I reply: “You do realize, don’t you, that I’m, like, a professor at a state university, who flies coach and lives in a nice but unremarkable house? If I had any skill at timing the market, picking winners, etc., don’t you think I’d live in a mansion with an infinity pool, and fly my Cessna to whichever conferences I deigned to attend?”
Eh Scott, a well funded group of us is making proxy bets when a Cessna inspired bet will appear on polymarket sponsored by Scott Aaronson himself, as to when we’ll have a fault-tolerant quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm (or other, similar relevant bets).
Comment #39 November 22nd, 2025 at 10:13 am
Gene #34: Since you write in a way that makes clear your goal is not to uncover the truth but say whatever will best pump up your “$IONQ” investment — i.e. since you start from that objective and then work backwards — I don’t see any point to engaging further.
Comment #40 November 22nd, 2025 at 10:20 am
Scott: anyone paranoid about cybersecurity should probably already be looking to migrate to quantum-resistant cryptography
I’ll raise that by a lot and say anyone working on accelerating quantum computing before quantum-resistant cryptography has been deployed represents the banality of evil. Is there any world where simulating quantum materials, slightly better machine learning algorithms, and being able to say “yep quantum mechanics still works..” blah blah blah is worth risking wrecking all of civilization’s critical infrastructure? You’ve gotta wonder about the psychology of researchers choosing to work in this field. The mix of careerism, dopamine hits from progress, herd following obliviousness, in group fealty to their research community and self rationalization must be a lot like what you’d see in biologists working on gain of function experiments.
Comment #41 November 22nd, 2025 at 10:54 am
QC=GoF #40: It’s an interesting question, but yes, I do think there’s such a world. After all, breaking current public-key crypto is a one-time hit—a hit for which (just like with the Y2K bug) the solutions are already known, just waiting for widespread deployment—whereas being able to simulate nature at the molecular scale is a permanent gain. And absent the looming threat of QC, civilization would probably never get its act together to migrate to quantum-resistant crypto, despite knowing full well that this would need to be done eventually (since QCs would eventually get built) — so this seems to me like a band-aid that might as well be ripped off now rather than later. Unlike with (say) AGI or gain-of-function research, the maximum damage here seems bounded.
Comment #42 November 22nd, 2025 at 3:17 pm
QC=GoF #40: To add a bit more to Scott’s reply, a dream of any intelligence agency would be to have a quantum computer capable of running Shor’s algorithm, but have the rest of the world ignorant of that fact and for the world to keep using broken crypto. Given this incentive, quantum computers will be developed eventually, whether in secret or in public. It’s vastly better to have the developments be public, so we all know where things stand.
Comment #43 November 22nd, 2025 at 8:09 pm
Mark #42: Sure.
BTW, did you know the reason it is so hard to get a good crystal ball these days is because the CIA is hoarding all the best ones?
Comment #44 November 26th, 2025 at 6:16 pm
In Soviet system, a fraudster didn’t need to convince investors, he needed to convince some political leaders:
“Lysenko became prominent during this period by advocating radical but unproven agricultural methods, and also promising that the new methods provided wider opportunities for year-round work in agriculture.”
“Party officials were looking for promising candidates with backgrounds similar to Lysenko’s: born of a peasant family, lacking formal academic training or affiliations to the academic community.”
Lysenko didn’t need to drown the voices of his scientific opponents, he could order them sent to labour camps:
“Several geneticists who refused to denounce the theory were executed (including Izrail Agol, Solomon Levit, Grigorii Levitskii, Georgii Karpechenko and Georgii Nadson) or sent to labor camps. One prominent critic of Lysenko, the famous Soviet geneticist and president of the Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko
Comment #45 November 27th, 2025 at 5:50 am
Sampo Smolander #44: Yes, unlike some academics, I’m acutely aware that the Soviet system inherited all the problems of capitalism and made them a thousand times worse, and I said as much in the post. I was thinking more about (for example) the US in the few decades after WWII, when listening to actual experts seems to have been a thing in a way it no longer is — when you read standard pop-science discourse from 50s and 60s, it’s sufficiently elevated compared to today as to make you want to cry. Maybe it was all awe over the Bomb that’s now faded.
Comment #46 November 30th, 2025 at 6:36 pm
Abstracting a bit: pretty much any collection of >100 people will include some blowhards, some charlatans, some honest people, and a large number of folks who just want to get through their day. And people flow between categories, I suppose – a blowhard today is irate tomorrow about someone else blowing bubbles.
Designing a system (any system) which is resistant to the charlatans and blowhards is nigh-impossible. I guess one can imagine an idyllic little commune of 3 people which lives out its perfect communist ideals … and even that falls apart if one of them acts less than benevolently. Similarly, I can imagine a perfect little market of ideal rational capitalists, small enough that there’s no information hoarding and asymmetry …. and then enters someone who’d rather yell ‘Scott Aaronson says Buy Quantum Stock!’
Sigh.
Comment #47 December 2nd, 2025 at 10:35 am
Julian #30 OMG #36
My post #36 was meant to point out the unpredictability of Trump but unpredictability is often just due to not having pertinent facts. In this case not knowing the fact that Mamdani’s mother is good friends with the sister of the Emir of Qatar who has provided his mother’s foundation with very generous funding. This is of course the same Emir that recently gifted the jet.
Comment #48 December 23rd, 2025 at 7:08 am
I simply wanted to leave a little footprint here and say how thoroughly I enjoyed this piece.