{"id":2620,"date":"2016-02-28T06:25:57","date_gmt":"2016-02-28T11:25:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2620"},"modified":"2016-12-10T04:44:21","modified_gmt":"2016-12-10T09:44:21","slug":"from-boston-to-austin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2620","title":{"rendered":"From Boston to Austin"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have some big news—well, not for the world, but for me personally.\u00a0 Starting this summer, I’ll be leaving MIT, and starting a new phase of my life, as David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. \u00a0I’ll also\u00a0be the founding director of UT Austin’s new quantum computing center, whose motto will be “Hook ’em<\/a> Hadamards<\/a>“, and whose logo will depict a fierce longhorn bull, whose horns are bra and ket signs<\/a>\u00a0enclosing an inner product between two quantum states. \u00a0My brilliant and talented wife, Dana Moshkovitz Aaronson<\/a>, will also be joining UT Austin, as a tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science. \u00a0Our current PhD students will remain enrolled at MIT, while also spending as much time as they like in Austin.<\/p>\n

I’ll deeply miss MIT and Boston. \u00a0More than anything else, I’ll miss the phenomenal\u00a0students at MIT, who I’ve had the immense privilege to teach and learn from for nine years. \u00a0Go Beavers! \u00a0I’m grateful as well to my many friends and colleagues who made my years\u00a0at MIT so rewarding:\u00a0a time of personal growth, in which I developed\u00a0from a skinny, insecure 26-year-old\u00a0nerd, blogging and trying to prove\u00a0oracle separations, into a pot-bellied, tenured, 34-year-old married-father nerd, still blogging and trying to prove the same oracle separations (but no longer as diligently).<\/p>\n

To nip\u00a0an otherwise-inevitable rumor: I wasn’t forced to leave MIT\u00a0over anything here on Shtetl-Optimized<\/em>. \u00a0I feel the need to say this\u00a0because, within the last year, I’ve spent\u00a0hundreds of miserable hours<\/em>\u00a0scrolling through\u00a0social media\u00a0threads wherein stranger after stranger proclaimed\u00a0me basically the world’s worst scum\u00a0(tied<\/a>, perhaps, with the other Scott A.),\u00a0and even called on MIT to fire me. \u00a0Given that experience,\u00a0it was repeatedly jarring for me to reenter reality\u00a0and\u00a0discover how irrelevant this\u00a0all\u00a0was, either to MIT or to any of the universities\u00a0that recruited\u00a0me and Dana. \u00a0Bizarre as it sounds, CS departments mostly cared about what actual\u00a0research we were\u00a0doing and could bring to them! \u00a0So\u00a0students and faculty afraid to debate\u00a0anything controversial online under their real names, however politely,\u00a0should know\u00a0that even in 2016, the banner of academic\u00a0freedom yet waves.<\/p>\n

Without further ado, let me list\u00a0ten things that are awesome about Austin and that helped attract me and Dana there.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. One of the strongest CS departments and\u00a0theory groups in the world.<\/strong>\u00a0 From 1984 until his death in 2002, UT Austin was home to Edsger Dijkstra<\/a>, who not only discovered Dijkstra’s algorithm but also penned\u00a0the immortal words\u00a0that might as well be tattooed on\u00a0my stomach:\u00a0computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes<\/em>. \u00a0Today, Austin’s\u00a0CS department is rapidly expanding, and\u00a0just within theory<\/a>, is\u00a0home to David Zuckerman<\/a>, Anna Gal<\/a>, Vijaya Ramachandran<\/a>, Brent Waters<\/a>, Eric Price<\/a>, and Greg Plaxton<\/a>. \u00a0With me and Dana there as well, I can say with all due modesty that we intend\u00a0to\u00a0compete against any CS theory program anywhere in the world.<\/li>\n
  2. Adam Klivans<\/a>.<\/strong>\u00a0 The closest I’ve had to a mentor in the exceedingly\u00a0narrow field of theoretical computer science humor.<\/li>\n
  3. An outstanding recent track record with\u00a0CS theory PhD students.<\/strong>\u00a0 Since the turn of the century, UT Austin has produced Sasha Sherstov<\/a>, Anup Rao<\/a>, Allison Bishop Lewko<\/a>,\u00a0Seth Pettie<\/a>, Vladimir Trifonov<\/a>, Raghu Meka<\/a>, and other stars of the CS theory world. \u00a0That record lets me without the slightest hesitation<\/em> tell hotshot undergrads who want to do classical and\/or quantum complexity theory to apply to Austin for grad school.<\/li>\n
  4. The opportunity to build—or rather, rebuild—a UT presence in quantum computing.<\/strong>\u00a0 While I’m excited to help build a new group—and I feel like it’s the right time in my career to do that—I can’t say that this is the first time UT Austin will have a significant\u00a0presence in\u00a0quantum computing. \u00a0Way back in the late 70s and early 80s, UT was home to most of the (proto) “quantum computing research” that existed on earth. \u00a0It’s there that John Archibald Wheeler<\/a> philosophized about “It from Bit,” that Bryce deWitt<\/a> popularized the Many-Worlds Interpretation and Hugh Everett<\/a> gave his only public lecture on\u00a0the subject, that David Deutsch<\/a> did a four-year\u00a0postdoc in which he formed the seeds of the idea of quantum computing, and that Wojciech Zurek<\/a>, William Wootters<\/a>, and Benjamin Schumacher<\/a> (who between them, founded decoherence theory, proved the No-Cloning Theorem, and coined the term “qubit”) did their PhDs. \u00a0I’m honored to tread\u00a0in their footsteps.<\/li>\n
  5. Money.<\/strong> \u00a0Texas, as it turns out, has a lot of it. \u00a0Now, the conventional wisdom would be that Texas’ wealth\u00a0is mostly irrelevant to academic scientists, because it’s\u00a0controlled by reactionary\u00a0oilmen\u00a0for whom curiosity-driven\u00a0research is not exactly the top\u00a0priority. \u00a0That might<\/em> have been true about the administrations of George W. Bush or Rick Perry. \u00a0But Texas’\u00a0current governor, Greg Abbott, while still\u00a0a right-wing\u00a0Republican, also\u00a0pushed through<\/a> an aggressive $4-billion measure called the Governor’s University Research Initiative, one of whose central\u00a0goals\u00a0is to recruit\u00a0leading scientists to Texas.<\/li>\n
  6. Weather.<\/strong>\u00a0 To a first approximation, Austin is lovely\u00a0and pleasant during the academic year (even as the planet warms, this should remain true for at least a few more decades)—and while I’d sort of vaguely imagined all of Texas as a giant desert, Austin turns out to be lush and green and full of swimming holes. \u00a0The summers, of course, are hot enough to fuse hydrogen. \u00a0But for academics like me and Dana, it turns out that there’s an elegant solution to that, one unavailable for dealing with New England\u00a0winters. \u00a0That solution is\u00a0to leave town<\/em>,\u00a0to use June, July, and August\u00a0for\u00a0miscellaneous academic\u00a0travel.<\/li>\n
  7. Quality of life.<\/strong>\u00a0 If we’re being honest, I’m not someone likely to spend much time\u00a0at indie-rock\u00a0festivals, or whatever quirky cultural stuff it is that’s\u00a0made\u00a0Austin the fastest-growing city in the US. \u00a0But here’s something I do<\/em> care about: even though\u00a0highway traffic in Austin is bad and getting worse, that need not affect my life too\u00a0much. \u00a0Research indicates that, for roughly the price of our current 2-bedroom condo in Cambridge,\u00a0we could get a lovely\u00a04-bedroom with a yard that’s in walking distance to the UT campus, as well as to stores, restaurants, good schools, and parks.<\/li>\n
  8. Schools.<\/strong>\u00a0 I had a pretty\u00a0miserable experience growing up. \u00a0I don’t know if Lily (or any future children Dana and I have)\u00a0will be anything like I was, but given that\u00a0she’s in an “at-risk population” for nerdiness,\u00a0I’d love\u00a0to live in a place with nerd education options\u00a0that don’t stink. \u00a0Austin, happily, has two renowned math\/science magnet schools—Kealing Middle School and LASA High School—which admit based on test scores. \u00a0(By contrast, in most parts\u00a0in the US, such programs either don’t exist or admit purely by lottery.) \u00a0Austin also has the only elementary school, anywhere, whose admissions director told me that sure, they’d\u00a0let a student skip a grade if it made sense academically.<\/li>\n
  9. Steven Weinberg<\/a>.<\/strong>\u00a0 I confess: it probably affected me more than it should that arguably\u00a0the greatest scientist\u00a0now walking the earth, a legend of physics who could go wherever the hell he wanted, has chosen to spend the past thirty-plus years at UT Austin. \u00a0On our last visit there, Dana, my parents, and I had the honor\u00a0of having dinner with Weinberg. \u00a0After we’d exchanged stories about Telluride House at Cornell, where Weinberg and I both lived as undergrads (and which apparently changed little between\u00a0the 1950s and the 1990s), Weinberg sung the praises of Austin for hours<\/em>. \u00a0(Admittedly, part of why Weinberg enjoys\u00a0Austin so much is that there it’s easy to\u00a0be on a first-name basis with the mayor, tech billionaires, and all the other leaders of the city—an advantage that might<\/em> be Nobel-laureate-specific!)<\/li>\n
  10. Adventure.<\/strong>\u00a0 By background and temperament, I’m probably one of the “least Texan” Americans\u00a0imaginable: a nerdy east-coast Jewish intellectual who enjoys\u00a0snow, can’t much tolerate spicy food, is bored by\u00a0cowboy movies and fears physical confrontation. \u00a0Indeed, until I actually visited the place, my only real associations with Texas were tumbleweeds blowing across a parched desert hellscape, oilmen with giant belt buckles guffawing about so-called global warming, crazed football hooligans filling city-sized stadiums, shotguns, rattlesnakes, and George W. Bush. \u00a0But then, the contrast between the over-the-top image and the pleasant reality of Austin\u00a0had the paradoxical effect of making moving to Texas feel like an adventure<\/em>—an adventure\u00a0with an acceptable risk profile. \u00a0Like, if I’m going to uproot at all, why not to a place that’s strange and different and interesting?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Even given the above, some people will ask about things they’d consider obvious dealbreakers for moving to Texas. \u00a0In particular, what about the\u00a0infamous new law<\/a>\u00a0that essentially forces UT Austin to let\u00a0students carry concealed firearms\u00a0to class? \u00a0Well, I oppose that law. \u00a0Indeed, when I haven’t been angering\u00a0the social-justice left, I’ve been angering\u00a0the right by (for example)\u00a0blogging about<\/a> my strong support for gun control. \u00a0To me, it seems like\u00a0a terrible\u00a0idea\u00a0for the Texas state legislature, which provides\u00a0only 14% of the UT system’s budget, to force on UT a gun policy that its faculty and students overwhelmingly hate. \u00a0And I admired Steven Weinberg’s\u00a0announcement<\/a>\u00a0that he intends\u00a0to defy\u00a0the law in his classroom, and fight it out in court if necessary. \u00a0(Weinberg also gave, as one reason to oppose the law, how much harder it will make it for UT to recruit faculty.)<\/p>\n

    But at the same time … Dana is Israeli. \u00a0For her, it’s perfectly normal<\/em> to go outside and see 18-year-old girls chatting\u00a0and laughing with huge-ass machine guns slung over their shoulders. \u00a0Having spent a month of each year in Tel Aviv, seeing\u00a0passersby with guns has become, if not exactly\u00a0normal to me, then not something I fear 2% as much as I fear crashing my car. \u00a0And indeed, if one\u00a0takes a statistical approach to risk, Austin has a much lower<\/a> per-capita violent crime rate than Boston does.<\/p>\n

    And yes, I know, the US and Israel have completely\u00a0different gun cultures: in Israel, for example,\u00a0the only\u00a0people carrying\u00a0around semiautomatics are trained and monitored conscripts; there’s no concept of a private “right” to such a weapon. \u00a0And yes, the principle matters. \u00a0But if one is\u00a0unwilling to move to any place that has any laws\u00a0one\u00a0disagrees with, one\u00a0should probably look into faculty positions on offshore barges or Jupiter.<\/p>\n

    Austin itself, of course, is only slightly less liberal than Portland<\/a>,\u00a0the blueberry in the tomato soup<\/a> as Rick Perry so memorably\u00a0put it. \u00a0Even so, the maps insist that\u00a0Austin is<\/em> in Texas, which means that while there one will probably\u00a0encounter Texans. \u00a0(A friend, on hearing that Dana took a\u00a0quick\u00a0liking to Austin\u00a0when she visited, quipped that it was probably because Austin reminded her of Israel: “hot and surrounded by hostile territory.”)<\/p>\n

    Now, the actual Texans who I’ve met so far have been\u00a0frighteningly<\/em> warm and hospitable. \u00a0But the question stands: what will I do if, while living there, I meet (let’s suppose) some sun-calloused\u00a0cattle ranchers\u00a0who\u00a0consider me an arrogant, effete coastal liberal who patronizes them in blog posts like this one? \u00a0What if they tell me to scram, head\u00a0back east,\u00a0and\u00a0never\u00a0mess with Texas again?<\/p>\n

    Well, I’ve already decided what I’d like<\/em> to do in this hypothetical situation. \u00a0I’d like to invite the ranchers over to my place\u00a0for some barbecued beers and ice-cold steaks, or whatever it is you eat in Texas, and tell them all about quantum query algorithms, and ask them about cattle\u00a0feed, and try to find common ground, just\u00a0like I tried to find common ground with\u00a0the other<\/em> end of the political spectrum—with the folks who called me a clueless, patriarchal, entitled white male douchebro who silenced their already-marginalized voices by not agreeing with everything they said. \u00a0For I’ve increasingly come to the\u00a0conviction that, while you might<\/em> fail to\u00a0find common ground with someone, you’ve got\u00a0to try, you’ve got\u00a0to\u00a0steelman<\/a> their\u00a0argument\u00a0and learn whatever you can from it. \u00a0I once, for example, thought about the\u00a0Religious Right\u00a0as purely contemptible, deserving only unthinking snark, and I was completely\u00a0wrong<\/em>. \u00a0Even when I was right on the underlying issues, I was wrong on the epistemology. \u00a0In Texas, hopefully I’ll have a chance to do better.<\/p>\n

    In summary:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Wherever you’re at in your career, if you’d like to do quantum information\u00a0and\/or theoretical computer science\u00a0research on the wild\u00a0frontier—if QMA<\/a>, QCMA<\/a>, and BQP\/qpoly<\/a> strike you as little more than wayward calves\u00a0to be lassoed in—then please consider joining us at UT Austin. \u00a0To be concrete: we’ll be looking for distinguished senior faculty to hire\u00a0under the Governor’s University Research Initiative, we’ll be looking for tenure-track junior faculty in both\u00a0CS\u00a0and ECE, we’ll be looking for postdocs, we’ll be looking for grad students, and finally we’ll be looking for undergrads who’d like to join the innovative Turing Scholars<\/a>\u00a0honors program.<\/li>\n
    2. If you’d just like to come for a week and\u00a0give a seminar, we’ll have money for that too.<\/li>\n
    3. Hook ’em Hadamards!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
      \n

      Totally Unrelated Update (Feb. 29):<\/span><\/b> Michael Mitzenmacher has asked me to announce that nominations are open for the SIGACT Distinguished Service Prize. More information is available here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      I have some big news—well, not for the world, but for me personally.\u00a0 Starting this summer, I’ll be leaving MIT, and starting a new phase of my life, as David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. \u00a0I’ll also\u00a0be the founding director of UT Austin’s new quantum […]<\/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":[10,31,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventures-in-meatspace","category-announcements","category-self-referential"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2620","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=2620"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3024,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2620\/revisions\/3024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}