[jack6e]

This is awesome work, and kudos to Tang, but I am also really impressed with how his advisor, Scott Aaronson, seems to have so selflessly supported his research and given him full credit. Even in Aaronson's quotes within the article he talks about it entirely as Tang's work, and he seems to have considered Tang's best interests in deciding how and when to let him present the work - even that he let Tang present it!

Given a different person, we may have read about "UT-Austin Professor and Quantum Researcher Finds Classical Alternative to Quantum Recommendation Algorithm" (with generic help from students in a footnote somewhere). It's great to see this type of collegial mentorship.

[jackpirate]

Keep in mind that Scott Aaronson is about as famous as CS professors come. He no longer can get anymore famous by doing great work himself. Instead, he gets more famous by having his students do great work and having them become famous as well. A more junior researcher (or a researcher outside the theory community), on the other hand, would have more incentive to claim research as their own to become more famous themselves.

That's not to diminish Aaronson's generosity here, just to put it in the context of his actual career motivations.

[jlg23]

> just to put it in the context of his actual career motivations.

Unless you have some deeper insights into his psychology, your guess is as good as mine: "Scott Aaronson is simply a decent human being."

[kohanz]

I had no idea who Scott Aaronson is, so the context was useful to me.

[shaklee3]

He runs this blog:

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/

[denzil_correa]

The preprint has no mention of Scott Aaronson as an author though.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.04271

[jessriedel]

Scott is famous enough that people reading this article are more likely to remember the author as "Scott's student" than the author's name. Additionally, having famous and successful students has great career benefits when they champion your ideas (even when uncited).

[lisper]

Scott Aaronson is just one of the most awesome human beings ever. He is brilliant yet modest, and his writing is at once deeply enlightening and eminently accessible. The world would be a better place if more academics adopted him as a role model.

[paulpauper]

yeah i enjoy his blog as well

[cambalache]

Just to provide a counterpoint based on the scant evidence of his blog (post and comments). He is , of course , brilliant, and has a refreshing no-nonsense approach. Modest, he is not, not that is anything wrong with that, I would call modest for example Terence Tao a far more accomplished academic. This is something that should be a "law", the more accomplished a person is the most it can "afford" to be modest. So for example Einstein was more modest than say Feynman, and Edward Witten is way way more modest than your typical string theorist.

The other thing I dont like about Aaronson is his weird fetish with STEM people , he seems to think scientists and technologists are somehow superior or more worthy than regular folk. I also dont agree with some of his opinions on the actions of the state of Israel, but I will avoid that, being this the Internet.

[jessriedel]

I've never known Scott to be anything but unfailingly modest, both in person and on his blog. What specifically are you referring to?

[lostlogin]

I had a look and the first thing I found was him calling for an academic boycott against New Zealand - presumably for NZs support of the UN resolution against Israel’s Palestinian settlements. This is an interesting approach to dealing with criticism.

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=247

[edanm]

I think you're misunderstanding the post. It's a satire of similar such blog posts which are calling for the boycott of Israel. It's trying to (humorously) make the case that boycotting Israel makes about as much sense as boycotting New Zealand for their treatment of the native population, or likewise boycotting China over Tibet, etc, etc.

[loco5niner]

It's satire

[JadeNB]

> This is something that should be a "law", the more accomplished a person is the most it can "afford" to be modest. So for example Einstein was more modest than say Feynman, and Edward Witten is way way more modest than your typical string theorist.

Your examples seem different from your law. Your law says that a more accomplished person can afford to be more modest, whereas your examples suggest that a more accomplished person automatically is more modest. While it would be nice if there were some such causative effect, I think that your examples in evidence of one are very cherry picked (and speculative: do you really know whether or not Einstein was a modest person?).

[akchin]

It is kinda cool to think that Scott himself was a really young undergraduate at Cornell. I believe he was 16 when he was a freshman at Cornell and we would hear whispers of the child prodigy in the CS department. He then graduated in 3 years and has gone on to do great things. He is a really nice person and I met him a few times since I was a CS undergrad at Cornell at the same time - He actually helped us run the programming contest we ran at Cornell. I presume if he participated, he would probably have won it hands down :-)