{"id":2612,"date":"2016-01-03T09:25:46","date_gmt":"2016-01-03T14:25:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2612"},"modified":"2016-12-10T04:46:39","modified_gmt":"2016-12-10T09:46:39","slug":"edging-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2612","title":{"rendered":"Edging in: the biggest science news of 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

For years, I was forced to endure life with my nose up against the glass of the Annual Edge<\/em> Question<\/a>. \u00a0What are you optimistic about?<\/a> \u00a0Ooh! ooh! Call on me! \u00a0I’m optimistic about someday being able to prove<\/em> my pessimistic beliefs (like P\u2260NP). \u00a0How is the Internet changing the way you think?<\/a> \u00a0Ooh, ooh! I know! Google and MathOverflow are saving me from having to think at all! \u00a0So then why are they only asking Steven Pinker, Freeman Dyson, Richard Dawkins, David Deutsch, some random other people like that?<\/p>\n

But all that has changed. \u00a0This year, I was invited to participate in Edge<\/em> for the first time. \u00a0So, OK, here’s the question:<\/p>\n

What do you consider the most interesting recent [scientific] news? \u00a0What makes it important?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My response is here<\/a>. \u00a0I wasn’t in love\u00a0with the question, because of what I saw as an inherent ambiguity in it: the news that’s most interesting to me<\/em>, that I have a comparative advantage in talking about, and that people probably want to hear me talk about (e.g., progress in quantum computing), is not necessarily what I’d regard as the most important\u00a0in any objective sense (e.g., climate change). \u00a0So, I decided to write my answer precisely about my internal tension in what I should consider most interesting: should it be the recent progress by John Martinis and others toward building a quantum computer? \u00a0Or should it be the melting glaciers, or something else that I’m confident will affect the future of the world? \u00a0Or possibly the mainstream attention now\u00a0being paid to the AI-risk movement? \u00a0But if I really want to nerd out, then why not\u00a0Babai’s graph isomorphism algorithm? \u00a0Or if I actually<\/em>\u00a0want to be honest about what excited me, then why not the superquadratic separations between classical and quantum query complexities for a total Boolean function, by Ambainis et al. and my student Shalev Ben-David? \u00a0On the other hand, how can I justify even caring about such things while the glaciers are melting?<\/p>\n

So, yeah, my response tries to meditate on all those things. \u00a0My original title was “How nerdy do you want it?,” but John Brockman of Edge had me change it to something blander (“How widely should we draw the circle?”), and made a bunch of other changes from my usual style. \u00a0Initially I chafed at having an editor<\/em> for what basically amounted to a blog post; on the other hand, I’m sure I would’ve gotten in trouble much less often on this blog had I had someone to filter my words for me.<\/p>\n

Anyway, of course I wasn’t the only person to write about the climate crisis. \u00a0Robert Trivers<\/a>, Laurence Smith<\/a>, and Milford Wolpoff<\/a> all wrote about it as well\u00a0(Trivers most chillingly and concisely), while Max Tegmark<\/a> wrote about the mainstreaming of AI risk. \u00a0John Naughton<\/a> even wrote about Babai’s graph isomorphism breakthrough (though he seems unaware that the existing GI algorithms were already extremely fast in practice, and therefore makes misleading claims about the new algorithm’s practical applications). \u00a0Unsurprisingly, no one else wrote about breakthroughs in quantum query complexity: you’ll need to go to my<\/em> essay for that! \u00a0A bit more surprisingly, no one besides me wrote about progress in quantum computing at all (if we don’t count the loophole-free Bell test).<\/p>\n

Anyway, on reflection, 2015 actually\u00a0was a pretty awesome year for science<\/strong>, no matter how nerdy you want it or how widely you draw the circle. \u00a0Here are other advances that\u00a0I easily could’ve\u00a0written\u00a0about but didn’t:<\/p>\n