{"id":2011,"date":"2014-09-22T16:11:58","date_gmt":"2014-09-22T20:11:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2011"},"modified":"2017-01-12T16:36:19","modified_gmt":"2017-01-12T21:36:19","slug":"speaking-truth-to-parallelism-the-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2011","title":{"rendered":"Speaking Truth to Parallelism: The Book"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few months ago,\u00a0I signed a contract with MIT Press to publish a new book: an edited anthology of selected posts from this blog, along with all-new updates and commentary. \u00a0The book’s tentative title (open to better suggestions) is Speaking Truth to Parallelism: Dispatches from the Frontier of Quantum Computing Theory<\/em>. \u00a0The new book should be more broadly accessible than Quantum Computing Since Democritus<\/em>, although still far from\u00a0your typical\u00a0pop-science\u00a0book. \u00a0My goal is to have STTP\u00a0out by next fall, to coincide with\u00a0Shtetl-Optimized<\/em>‘s tenth anniversary.<\/p>\n

If you’ve been a regular\u00a0reader, then this book is my way of thanking you for … oops, that doesn’t sound right. \u00a0If it were a gift, I should give it away for free, shouldn’t I?\u00a0 So let me rephrase: buying this reasonably-priced book can be your<\/em> way of thanking me<\/em>, if you’ve enjoyed my\u00a0blog all these years. \u00a0But it will also (I hope) be a value-added proposition: not only will you be able to put the book on your coffee table to impress an extremely nerdy subset of your\u00a0friends, you’ll also get “exclusive content” unavailable on the blog.<\/p>\n

To be clear, the posts that make it into the book will be\u00a0ruthlessly\u00a0selected: nothing that’s pure procrastination, politics, current events, venting, or travelogue, only the\u00a0choice fillets\u00a0that could\u00a0plausibly be claimed\u00a0to advance\u00a0the public understanding of science. \u00a0Even for those, I’ll add additional background material, and take out digs\u00a0unworthy of a book (making exceptions for anything that really<\/em>\u00a0cracks me up on a second reading).<\/p>\n

If I had to pick a unifying theme for the book, I’d sigh and then say: it’s about a certain\u00a0attitude<\/em>\u00a0toward\u00a0the so-called “deepest questions,” like the nature of quantum mechanics\u00a0or the ultimate limits of computation or the mind\/body problem or the objectivity of mathematics or whether our\u00a0universe is a computer simulation. \u00a0It’s an attitude that I wish\u00a0more\u00a0popular articles managed\u00a0to get across, and at any rate, that\u00a0people ought to\u00a0adopt\u00a0when reading<\/em> those articles. \u00a0The attitude combines an openness to extraordinary claims, with an unceasing demand for clarity about the nature of those claims, and an impatience whenever that demand is met with evasion, obfuscation, or a “let’s not\u00a0get into technicalities right now.” \u00a0It’s an attitude that constantly asks questions like:<\/p>\n

“OK, so what can you actually do that’s different?”
\n“Why doesn’t that produce an absurd result when applied to simple cases?”
\n“Why isn’t that just a fancy way of saying what I could’ve said in simpler\u00a0language?”
\n“Why couldn’t you have achieved\u00a0the same thing without your ‘magic ingredient’?”
\n“So what’s your alternative account for how that happens?”
\n“Why isn’t that obvious?”
\n“What’s really\u00a0at stake here?”
\n“What’s the catch?”<\/p>\n

It’s an attitude that accepts\u00a0the possibility that such\u00a0questions might have satisfying answers—in which case, a change\u00a0in worldview will be in order. \u00a0But not before answers are offered, openly debated, and understood\u00a0by the community of interested people.<\/p>\n

Of all the phrases I use on this blog, I felt “Speaking Truth to Parallelism” best captured the attitude in question. \u00a0I coined the phrase back in 2007, when D-Wave’s claims to be solving Sudoku puzzles with a quantum computer\u00a0unleashed a tsunami of journalism\u00a0about QCs—what they are, how they would work, what they could do—that (in my opinion) perfectly\u00a0illustrated\u00a0how not<\/em> to approach\u00a0a metaphysically-confusing new technology. \u00a0Having said that, the endless debate around D-Wave won’t by any means be the focus of this book: it will surface, of course, but only when it helps to illustrate some broader point.<\/p>\n

In planning this book, the trickiest issue was what to do with comments. \u00a0Ultimately, I decided that the comments make Shtetl-Optimized<\/em>\u00a0what it is—so for each post I include, I’ll\u00a0include a brief\u00a0selection of the most interesting comments, together with my responses to them. \u00a0My policy will be this: by default<\/em>, I’ll consider any comments on this blog to be fair game for quoting in the book, in whole or in part, and\u00a0attributed to whatever handle the commenter used. \u00a0However, if you’d like to “opt out” of having your comments quoted, I now offer you a three-month window in which to do so: just email me, or leave a comment (!) on this thread. \u00a0You can also request that certain specific<\/em> comments of yours not be quoted, or that your handle be removed from your comments, or your full name added to them—whatever you want.<\/p>\n

Update (9\/24):<\/strong><\/span> After hearing from several of you, I’ve decided on the following modified policy. \u00a0In all cases where I have an email address<\/em>, I will contact the commenters about any of their comments that I’m thinking of using, to request explicit permission to use them. \u00a0In the hopefully-rare cases where I can’t reach a given commenter, but where their comment raised\u00a0what seems like a crucial point requiring a response in the book, I might quote from the comment anyway—but in those cases, I’ll be careful not to reproduce\u00a0very long passages, in a way that might run afoul of the fair use exception.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few months ago,\u00a0I signed a contract with MIT Press to publish a new book: an edited anthology of selected posts from this blog, along with all-new updates and commentary. \u00a0The book’s tentative title (open to better suggestions) is Speaking Truth to Parallelism: Dispatches from the Frontier of Quantum Computing Theory. \u00a0The new book should […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[31,7,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements","category-self-referential","category-speaking-truth-to-parallelism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2011"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2090,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2011\/revisions\/2090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}