Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th November 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th November 2024
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 you’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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Character.AI Is Hosting Pedophile Chatbots That Groom Users Who Say They're Underage
Three billion dollars and its going into Character AI AutoGroomer 4000s. Fuck this timeline.
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 who's actually good at physics could do a better job of sneering at this than me, but I mean but look at this:
My law can confirm how genetic information behaves. But it also indicates that genetic mutations are at the most fundamental level not just random events, as Darwin’s theory suggests.
A super complex universe like ours, if it were a simulation, would require a built-in data optimisation and compression in order to reduce the computational power and the data storage requirements to run the simulation.
If you're in the mood for a novel that dunks on these nerds, I highly recommend Jason Pargin's If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_This_Book_Exists,_You're_in_the_Wrong_Universe
I sneered that in a blog post last year, as it happens.
"feel free to ignore any science “news” that’s just a press release from the guy who made it up."
In particular, the 2022 discovery of the second law of information dynamics (by me) facilitates new and interesting research tools (by me) at the intersection between physics and information (according to me).
Gotta love "science" that is cited by no-one and cites the author's 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 can't have that now can we.
This feels like quackery but I can't find a goal...
But if they both hold up to scrutiny, this is perhaps the first time scientific evidence supporting this theory has been produced – as explored in my recent book.
There it is.
Has this person turned up shilling their book on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory yet? If not, I think it's a lock for 2025
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: it’s a non-starter. Either it’s false and we’ve gotta come up with better ideas for all this shit we’re in, or it’s true and nothing is real, so why bother with philosophical or metaphysical inquiry?
The "simulation hypothesis" is an ego flex for men who want God to look like them.
The SH is catnip to "scientific types" who don't recognize it as a rebrand of classical metaphysics. After all, they know how computers work, and it can't 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. It's basically elementary!
Despite the lack of evidence, this idea is gaining traction in scientific circles as well as in the entertainment industry.
lol
How sneerable is the entire "infodynamics" field? Because it seems like it should be pretty sneerable. The first referenced paper on the "second law of infodynamics" 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 there's 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. I'm 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 I'm way out of my depth here but it smells like BS and the limited pool of citations doesn't build confidence.
I read one of the papers. About the specific question you have: given a string of bits s, they're 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 they're calculating the entropy of. I have no idea on what basis they are making this choice.
The rest of the paper didn't make sense to me - they are somehow assigning a number N of "information states" which can change over time as the memory cells fail. I honestly have no idea what it's supposed to mean and kinda suspect the whole thing is rubbish.
Edit: after reading the author's quotes from the associated hype article I'm 100% sure it's rubbish. It's also really funny that they didn't manage to catch the COVID-19 research hype train so they've pivoted to the simulation hypothesis.
I don’t have the time to deep dive this RN but information dynamics or infodynamics looks to be, let’s say, “alternative science” for the purposes of trying to up the credibility of the simulation hypothesis.