Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
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      4 months ago

      Can an observer be a single photon, or does it have to be a conscious human being?

      The former. Iā€™m glad we can stop the article right there and go home.

      What the fuck is this question even? What the fuck is ā€œconsciousā€? Do you think in the double-slit experiment we closed a guy inside the box to watch?

      • V0ldek@awful.systems
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        4 months ago

        Under this, letā€™s charitably call it, ā€œinterpretationā€, the Schrƶdinger cat analogy makes no sense, surely THE CAT is bloody conscious about ITSELF BEING ALIVE??

    • self@awful.systems
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      4 months ago

      thereā€™s so much quantum woo in that article I want to sneer at, but I donā€™t know anywhere close to enough about quantum physics to do so without showing my entire ass

      • mountainriver@awful.systems
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        4 months ago

        To me, the most sneerable thing in that article is where they assume a mechanical brain will evolve from ChatGPT and then assume a sufficiently large quantum computer to run it on. And then start figuring out how to port the future mechanical brain to the quantum computer. All to be able to run an old thought experiment that at least I understood as highlighting the absurdity of focusing on the human brain part in the collapse of a wave function.

        Once we build two trains that can run near the speed of light we will be able to test some of Einsteinā€™s thought experiments. Better get cracking on how we can get enough coal onboard to run the trains long enough to get the experiments done.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        4 months ago

        Well a good thing to remember re quantum mechanics, Schrƶdinger Cat is intended as a thought experiment showing how dumb the view on QM was. So it is always a bit funny to see people extrapolate from that thought experiment without acknowledging the history and issues with it. (But I think that also depends on the various interpretations, and this means Iā€™m showing a cheekily high amount of ass here myself).

        • swlabr@awful.systems
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          4 months ago

          Pretty much any mention of a thought experiment in the wild gets my hackles up. ā€œIsnā€™t it cool that the cat is alive and dead at the same time?ā€ Shut up! Shut up shut up shut up!!! Tho to be honest it might just be schrodingerā€™s cat that comes up. I wish theyā€™d leave the poor cat alone, and stop trying to poison it.

          • blakestacey@awful.systems
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            4 months ago

            I have a whole series of rants about that cat, starting with how it doesnā€™t illuminate anything about quantum theory specifically ā€” as opposed to probabilistic or stochastic theories in general ā€” and culminating in ā€œHey, maybe we should stop naming things after pedo creeps.ā€

          • corbin@awful.systems
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            4 months ago

            What really gets me is that we never look past Schrƶdingerā€™s version of the cat. I want us to talk about Bellā€™s Cat, which cannot be alive or dead due to a contradiction in elementary linear algebra and yet reliably is alive or dead once the box opens. (I guess technically it should be ā€œaliveā€, ā€œdeadā€, or ā€œundeadā€, since weā€™re talking spin-1 particles.)

      • blakestacey@awful.systems
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        4 months ago

        There are some interesting ideas in that general direction (wrapping Bell inequalities within different new types of thought experiment, etc.), but some of the people involved have done rather a lot of overselling, and now bringing in talk of ā€œAIā€ just obscures the whole situation. Which was already obscure enough.

        • self@awful.systems
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          4 months ago

          awesome! these are going straight to the list of things I should be reading

    • aio@awful.systems
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      4 months ago

      I honestly think anyone who writes ā€œquantumā€ in an article should be required to take a linear algebra exam to avoid being instantly sacked

    • blakestacey@awful.systems
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      4 months ago

      According to one story at least, Wigner eventually concluded that if you take some ideas that physicists widely hold about quantum mechanics as postulates and follow them through to their logical conclusion, then you must conclude that there is a special role for conscious observers. But he took that as a reason to question those assumptions.

      (That story comes from Leslie Ballentine reporting a conversation with Wigner in the course of promoting an ensemble interpretation of QM.)

      • smiletolerantly@awful.systems
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        4 months ago

        Also thereā€™s a book by Stephen Baxter set in his Xeelee universe which takes this premise for the cult mentality of a terrorist cell

        Sorry this doesnā€™t really add anything, just thought it kinda funny

      • bunchberry@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Yes, the problem with quantum mechanics is itā€™s not just your Deepak Chopras of the world that get sucked into quantum woo, but even a lot of respectable academics with serious credentials, thus giving credence to these ideas. Quantum mechanics is a context-dependent theory, the properties of systems are context variant. It is not observer-dependent. The observer just occupies their own unique context and since it is context-dependent, they have to describe things from their own context.

        It is kind of like velocity in Galilean relativity, you have to take into account reference frame. Two observers in Galilean relativity could disagree on certain things, such as the velocity of an object but the disagreement is not ā€œconfusingā€ because if you understand relativity, youā€™d know itā€™s just a difference in reference frame. Nothing important about ā€œobserversā€ here.

        I do not understand what is with so many academics in fully understanding that properties of systems can be variant under different reference frames in special relativity, but when it comes to quantum mechanics their heads explode trying to interpret the contextual nature of it and resort to silly claims like saying it proves some fundamental role for the conscious observer. All it shows is that the properties of systems are context variant. There is nothing else.

        Once you accept that, then everything else follows. All of the unintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics disappear, you do not need to posit systems in two places at once, some special role for observers, a multiverse, nonlocality, hidden variables, nothing. All the ā€œparadoxesā€ disappear if you just accept the context variance of the states of systems.