Scott Aaronson - Quantum Computing, Complexity, and Creativity

Dwarkesh Patel opens by asking Scott Aaronson about his unusual early path: he finished a PhD at 22 and left high school at 15. Aaronson corrects the framing slightly. He did not actually graduate; he obtained a GED from New York State. He says he was unhappy in high school both socially and academically, and wanted out.

The chain of events began with a mismatch between school systems. After public junior high in Pennsylvania, his family moved to Hong Kong for a year because his father worked there. At the American international school, the way math was sequenced meant he could not be given work at his level. The only fix was to skip a grade and go straight to the high school. That success changed his sense of what was possible: he could escape the environment, and what he really wanted was college, which he admits he idealized as a place where ideas mattered more than popularity and students could choose what to study and advance at their own pace.

Back in the US, he spent a year in public high school, ran out of math after AP calculus, and his parents proposed that he take differential equations through Stanford's EPGY online program, which they offered to pay for. The school refused. Aaronson used the refusal as his excuse to try something he had seen in a brochure: the Clarkson School in upstate New York, part of Clarkson University, where high school students live on campus for a year and take college courses. With little knowledge of the program, he decided to try it, and his parents agreed. A sympathetic math teacher at his old school then won approval for the EPGY option just as the car was packed, but Aaronson says they told the teacher it was too late.

Clarkson was a generally good experience. The social problems resembled those of high school, but he could take far more interesting courses, meet professors and start research. The program is designed so that students then apply to colleges as freshmen with a year of credit. His results at the time were disappointing: he was rejected by almost every college he applied to because of his strange background, though Cornell and Carnegie Mellon accepted him, and he chose Cornell.

Paperwork then nearly derailed the plan. Cornell required a high school diploma. His old high school would not issue one, saying he lacked physical education credits and would have to spend a summer making them up. New York State would not issue a GED because applicants had to be 17 and he was 15. His mother eventually persuaded the state to make an exception. Aaronson notes that he has met homeschooled people who did more radical things; in his case he was accelerated by three years, and he did not accelerate further once he reached college, because from then on the main limits were internal rather than external.

Asked whether it was intimidating to sit in classes with people three or four years older, Aaronson says most of his classmates did not know he was younger, and those who did found it a mild oddity and did not care much. He was 16 when he started at Cornell, not a ten-year-old. Academically it was fine. The real difficulty was social. His parents had warned him that skipping grades would wreck his social life and make dating extremely difficult, and he brushed this aside; he says all of it turned out to be true.

He finished his PhD before he really learned to drive or to have a social or dating life, so he did things in a weird order, and this caused him enormous stress. His reasoning at the time was that he was already socially miserable in high school without having skipped anything, so if he was going to be unhappy socially anyway, he could at least be learning, and at least the academics could be better.

On the advantages and disadvantages of specializing so early, Aaronson says he cannot re-run his life and compare, but he is mainly grateful for the chance to learn what interested him. It was not a case of taking only math and computer science: he took plenty of humanities in college. His complaint is about high school, where humanities means the five-paragraph essay, regurgitating what the teacher wants, and where trying to write in your own way will make you fail. He says he knows this from experience rather than theory. He was much happier with the humanities in college, so his early move was about freedom to choose as much as specialization.

He also says that by about 16 he knew what he was passionate about: the fundamentals of computing and what computers can and cannot do. He questions the whole idea of teenagerhood as a period when people up to 18 or even 20 are treated as children, calling it largely a modern construction. A few hundred years ago a teenager would already be an apprentice who could work while learning a chosen trade. On that view his own wish to get started at 15 or 16 seems natural to him rather than unusual.

Patel mentions that Tyler Cowen knew in his early teens that he wanted to be an economics professor and prepared accordingly, and asks whether learning a field's fundamentals early offers anything beyond extra years of accumulation. Aaronson calls it a very interesting question and says he is not sure. One possibility is that exposure while the brain is still developing matters, as with language, where children absorb languages like sponges during a window and later learners can succeed but treat it as a difficult intellectual puzzle and never match a native five-year-old.