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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
OK to start us off how about some Simulation Hypothesis crankery I found posted on ActivityPub: Do we live in a computer simulation? (Article), The second law of infodynamics and its implications for the simulated universe hypothesis (PDF)
Someone whoās actually good at physics could do a better job of sneering at this than me, but I mean but look at this:
If youāre in the mood for a novel that dunks on these nerds, I highly recommend Jason Parginās If This Book Exists, Youāre in the Wrong Universe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_This_Book_Exists,_You're_in_the_Wrong_Universe
oh damn, I just gave the (fun but absolute mess of a) movie another watch and was wondering if they ever wrote more stories in the series ā I knew they wrote a sequel to John Dies at the End, but I lost track of it after that. it looks like Iāve got a few books to pick up!
Someone (maybe you) recommended this book here awhile back. But itās the fourth book in a series so I had to read the other three first and so have only just now started it.
I sneered that in a blog post last year, as it happens.
āfeel free to ignore any science ānewsā thatās just a press release from the guy who made it up.ā
Gotta love āscienceā that is cited by no-one and cites the authorās previous work which was also cited by no one. Really the media should do better about not giving cranks an authoritative sounding platform, but that would lead to slightly fewer eyes on ads and we canāt have that now can we.
https://awful.systems/post/2876657
This feels like quackery but I canāt find a goalā¦
There it is.
Edit: oh God itās worse than I thought
The web design almost makes me nostalgic for geocities fan pages. The citations that include himself ~10 times and the greatest hits of the last 50 years of physics, biology, and computer science, and Baudrillard of course. The journal of which this author is the lead editor and which includes the phrase āinformation as the fifth state of matterā in the scope description.
Oh God the deeper I dig the weirder it gets. Trying to confirm whether the Information Physics Institute is legit at all and found their list of members, one of whom listed their relevant expertise as āWriter, Roleplayer, Singer, Actor, Gamerā. Another lists āHyperspace and machine elvesā. One very honestly simply says āN/Aā
I am not making this up.
The Gmail address also lends the whole thing an air of authority. Like, youāve already paid for the domain, guys.
Has this person turned up shilling their book on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory yet? If not, I think itās a lock for 2025
OK this membe list experience is just šØāš³šš
Perfect. No notes.
I havenāt seen qualifications this relevant and high-quality since āarchitects and engineers for 9/11 truth.ā
the terrible tryfecta
Still a bit sad we are not doing nano anymore.
Wait for AI and Crypto 2.0 to burn out, weāll get there
I had a flash of a vision of tomorrow, it is Nano crypto AI
Sadly it seems the next one is gonna be Quantum.
Finally computer science is a real field, there are cranks! Suck it physics and mathematics, we are a real boy now!
General sneer against the SH: I choose to dismiss it entirely for the same reason that I dismiss solipsism or brain-in-a-vat-ism: itās a non-starter. Either itās false and weāve gotta come up with better ideas for all this shit weāre in, or itās true and nothing is real, so why bother with philosophical or metaphysical inquiry?
The āsimulation hypothesisā is an ego flex for men who want God to look like them.
The SH is catnip to āscientific typesā who donāt recognize it as a rebrand of classical metaphysics. After all, they know how computers work, and it canāt be that hard to simulate the entire workings of a universe down to the quark level, can it? So surely someone just a bit smarter than themselves have already done it and are running a simulation with them in it. Itās basically elementary!
Ha very clever, but as quantum level effects only occur when somebody is looking at it, they dont have to simulate it at quark level all the time. I watched what the bleep do we know, im very smart.
Youāre missing the most obvious implication, though. If itās all simulated or thereās a Cartesian demon afflicting me then none of you have any moral weight. Even more importantly if we assume that the SH is true then it means Iām smarter than you because I thought of it first (neener neener).
But this quickly runs into the ādonāt create your own unbreakable crypto systemā problem. There are people out there who are a lot smarter who quickly can point out the holes in these simulation arguments. (The smartest of whom go ānah, that is dumbā sadly Iām not that enlightened, as I have argued a few times here before how this is all amateur theology, and has nothing to do with STEM/computer science (E: my gripes are mostly with the āancestor simulationā theory however)).
lol
How sneerable is the entire āinfodynamicsā field? Because it seems like it should be pretty sneerable. The first referenced paper on the āsecond law of infodynamicsā seems to indicate that information has some kind of concrete energy which brings to mind that experiment where they tried to weigh someone as they died to identify the mass of the human soul. Also it feels like a gross misunderstanding to describe a physical system as gaining or losing information in the Shannon framework since unless the total size of the possibility space is changing thereās not a change in total information. Like, all strings of 100 characters have the same level of information even though only a very few actually mean anything in a given language. Iām not sure it makes sense to talk about the amount of information in a system increasing or decreasing naturally outside of data loss in transmission? IDK Iām way out of my depth here but it smells like BS and the limited pool of citations doesnāt build confidence.
I read one of the papers. About the specific question you have: given a string of bits s, theyāre making the choice to associate the empirical distribution to s, as if s was generated by an iid Bernoulli process. So if s has 10 zero bits and 30 one bits, its associated empirical distribution is Ber(3/4). This is the distribution which theyāre calculating the entropy of. I have no idea on what basis they are making this choice.
The rest of the paper didnāt make sense to me - they are somehow assigning a number N of āinformation statesā which can change over time as the memory cells fail. I honestly have no idea what itās supposed to mean and kinda suspect the whole thing is rubbish.
Edit: after reading the authorās quotes from the associated hype article Iām 100% sure itās rubbish. Itās also really funny that they didnāt manage to catch the COVID-19 research hype train so theyāve pivoted to the simulation hypothesis.
Oh the author here is absolutely a piece of work.
Hereās an interview where heās talking about the biblical support for all of this and the ancient Greek origins of blah blah blah.
I canāt definitely predict this guyās career trajectory, but one of those cults where they have to wear togas is not out of the question.
Not only is the universe a simulation, the Catholics just had it right, isnt that neat.
I donāt have the time to deep dive this RN but information dynamics or infodynamics looks to be, letās say, āalternative scienceā for the purposes of trying to up the credibility of the simulation hypothesis.