This is what happens when calling bullshit is shushed as incivility. It's not a new problem by any means, but just as a diet of fast food is correlated with diabetes and dementia, a culture of hype correlates with mediocrity and mendacity.
I find that surprising. My wife used to work as a lab tech in microbiology research and from what I heard there they were very openly questioning a lot of published research and there seemed to be a culture of challenging claims in papers.
I think the general public is more impacted by the problem. Especially with the "heresy" part, especially in public forums with lots of mildly interested but not-too-deep-into-it laypeople, like reddit, for example, outside maybe of heavily moderated places like /r/science or /r/AskHistorians.
There its more about reputation of a source than the actual facts, because few have the ability to evaluate the latter. Actually, if they spent even a little bit of time and thought they might actually be able to, it's just that almost nobody does. When the interest in "science" is to read publications for the general public, but never touch any of the by now quite numerous deeper equally easily available resources e.g. in the form of courses. For example, sooo many people interested in quantum physics articles - how many bother, even after years, to just go e.g. to edx (https://www.edx.org/learn/quantum-physics-mechanics -- or, archived, https://www.edx.org/course/quantum-mechanics-for-everyone specifically) and just take a course?
I remember a physicist saying that those folks do show up in classes and start the class talking about how excited they are to learn about QM, and they disappear after a few weeks and drop the course.
there should be a class that is just low-math "implications of QM on natural philosophy" to satisfy those with the curiousity but not the inclinations towards heavy math.
At the very least the class should be able to get through the two-slit experiment, EPR, and Bell's tests with a clear point being that nobody currently understands "how" entanglement works at the physical level.
Yeah, I agree with the GP comment, but QM is a bad example. It is not an approachable subject by any means. I don't say that as somebody who knows it, I know people with physics PhDs than confirm that a layperson is just not going to be able to learn anything useful about it without doing the equivalent work of a degree/masters etc.
"Modern Physics" is a much better name for it. At my university it was called "Physics for Engineers" and was a mix of quantum mechanics and relativity.
I always found the name weird because it didn't seem particularly geared towards engineering needs.
The average person is unlikely to have even a basic grasp of college algebra, let alone be able to understand complex valued wave functions/matrices.
Your comment is seriously trivializing that experience. Studying quantum mechanics is a multi year effort of serious study for them, not just taking a course on edx.
Why do you even bother to comment when you you don't bother to actually read what I wrote? That alone would have been sufficient, but I also posted this link specifically: https://www.edx.org/course/quantum-mechanics-for-everyone
> ...the basic ideas of quantum mechanics with a method that requires no complicated math beyond taking square roots
A 6 week online course, taken at your leisure.
Please do read comments before you reply, next time. I don't need another reddit.
It's not about putting in years of effort for a Master in Physics - it's about using the effort already invested, but instead of always not-learning, just START taking even the most basic course. I linked one, and such are very easy to find.
Sorry, but such an arrogant reply makes me a bit mad. I provided good links and you ignored everything - thereby helping to support exactly my point. People are lazy, even with good resources available at their fingertips, or even in front of them, not reading what the author wrote but what their own brain after lots of processing and filtering very freely interprets into it.
> the basic ideas of quantum mechanics with a method that requires no complicated math beyond taking square roots
False^
From the faq:
> Q: What level of math is needed for this class?
> A: High school algebra and trigonometry.
the average person does not have this level of mathematics mastered
I’m sure the content is good, but I have no way to evaluate that without actually going through the course. I still highly doubt it’s claim that you’ll learn qm “better than Einstein” from it.
There is a difference between a a random person calling bullshit on a topic on which they're entirely uninformed in and a person which has studied the topic for years.
The people that complain about scientific findings being held in to high esteem usually have no clue about the topic they're talking about and are petulant that their uninformed opinion based on their feelings isn't taken seriously.
Definitely. Scientists can't function (literally aren't working at the professional level yet) unless they can read critically. The scientific literature is full of holes, mistakes, irrelevant junk, work that the authors don't even realize is 40 years out of date ... all kinds of nonsense. That's always been the case, and it works fine.
The people who insist that anything "peer reviewed" * must be / needs to be gospel are outside science, almost by definition. A few have credentials but are not functioning professionals; some see themselves as lay champions of science; others see themselves as wise lay critics of science. None of them have almost anything relevant to say about how science is doing, because they literally don't know what's under the hood.
Challenging claims is a process best done with delicacy and foresight. In particular, it's best to pretend to be humble, collect lots of data, show your work/thinking in detail, and understand the psychology of your adversary.
Be prepared for disappointment; be prepared for vicious attacks. Expect that the power structures of the establishment will make things uncomfortable to you. But continue on, humbly collecting your data and showing your thinking.
I've watched several key paradigms fall after 20-30 years of dogged work.
My man, if covid2 came out of the same… place tomorrow, we would do it all over again.
Fear was made into a virtue, and every government body on earth discovered powers they didn’t know they had. It would play out same or worse, no one learned anything.
This is "covid 2". Covid 1 was called SARS. This one is called SARS-COV-2.
COVID 1 managed to die out before becoming a pandemic. That's one reason people treated SARS-COV-2 as harmless until it already was a pandemic.
Epidemiologists and public health planners learned a lot from both. But when SARS-COV-3 comes around, they will still not have learned how to deal with the large numbers of people who will say it's not a problem even after it has caused the death of millions.
You need to balance the public health response with the opinion of the people. Ignoring those with valid concerns about the power balance between the government and those ruled by it is not a way to do so. You may believe others are stupid for not believing the same things you do, and that is your right, but that severely hampers the ability to make correct decisions.
If you look at China, that is basically the worst nightmare of anyone who expresses doubts about how much we should trust the government to handle a pandemic. The situation is much different from ours no doubt, but it cannot be said that it's totally unreasonable to be scared of a government using a crisis to enforce authoritarian policies (what about terrorism? or drugs?).
IMO this is the same problem as the current left vs right divide in America: no one wants to concede that the other side might have a point. Instead, they'd rather make snide comments about how the other side is a bunch of children/stupid/racist/whatever, instead of understanding that other humans may have been raised different and have different opinions. There is no attempt to resolve, just overpower.
The problem, as I see it, is that the other side may not have a point.
Consider a similar scenario: climate change. Either this is a real, serious thing that needs to be dealt with, or it is a hoax. Whichever one it is, many millions of people constituting at least a large minority are wildly deluded.
There's not a ton of room for middle ground. If climate change is not real, then it is a vast power-grab on an utterly unprecedented scale that would justify any efforts to thwart it. If it is real, then the widespread belief in that power grab is a dangerous delusion.
Public policy responses do need to take everything into account, including people who believe things that are wrong. But science allows only so much flexibility there, and when the scales have been upped to the point where the alternatives are "numerous deaths" or "a vast hoax for perpetrating harm on millions", there's not a ton of room for middle ground.
Resolution is not always possible. I wish it were, but it is not. Somebody here is behaving very, very badly, and it may be more effective to simply ignore them -- assuming you can figure out which one they are. If they complain about being ignored, there's no alternative to treating it as a deadweight loss.
Fair enough, but besides the US, almost everybody does believe in climate change. It's not even a question in Europe. In the developing parts of the world the question is whether it is fair that the developed world has profited and enriched itself through industrialism without caring about global warming, and now the developing world is not allowed to. The situation in the US is quite different since there's a disinformation campaign that has been going on for a long time in order to protect the interests of the rich.
In my experience, even my very pro-vaccine friends eventually became more and more unsure whether the government was doing the right thing as the pandemic went on. The fact that we're debating this topic but not climate change also shows it might have more merit than it.
Also as a small-scale experiment: whenever I post these kinds of opinions my comment score does a funny dance where I can see a lot of people are up/downvoting, but the comment score basically stays at 1. That shows that HN itself is pretty split on this issue!
I find it baffling that this comment is downvoted so heavily. To me it seems quite spot on, and I wonder what is it that people downvoting it think is incorrect?
Yeah, I do need some more explanation before understanding this one. Are you talking about the use of social media for propaganda? If that's the case, I have some news for you, the pandemics only destroyed it, it was being used that way for years already.
> destroying small businesses in favor of large corporations
I suspect this refers to small mom-and-pop shops and restaurants that couldn’t survive the lock downs. Much bigger chains seem to have survived better.
* Austria made vaccines mandatory. You got a letter from the government saying "present yourself at this time and place to get a vaccine". Making a vaccine whose long term effects are not known mandatory is an abuse of power IMO. There were talks of this in Germany too but luckily the officials were more level headed there.
* Despite taking literally daily tests, I was not allowed into any establishment inside Germany since I did not have a vaccine pass. The only place I could go for months was the supermarket -- it got so bad I left Germany temporarily get away from the measures.
* Lockdowns and curfews abound. My grandparents (not in Germany) were not allowed outside the house except for 1 hour a day, and they had to write down their route exactly in case the police checked them.
* This is from the people, not the government, but the amount of people who would blindly say "trust the science behind the vaccines" is.. insane. Do they understand the concept of science at all? You cannot prove there are no long term effects of a newly developed vaccine, also using a newly developed method of creating vaccines, without an experiment. No matter how smart the scientists are. Trust is not a thing in science. (The same can be said of COVID, but then _let me make my own choice_, based on my own risk factors)
Ok... but that mostly just seems like Germany. At least the stereotype of Germany is that all the rules are very strict and it's very important to follow them.
On the high-speed train gliding smoothly from Berlin to Düsseldorf, a young man started chatting to me. He eventually asked, “What are some of the cultural differences you’ve noticed between Germans and Americans?”
As if on cue, a middle-aged woman hovered over us and gave a harsh, “Shh!” with her finger pressed against her lips. She pointed to a sign of a mobile phone with a cross through it, indicating that we were in the Ruhebereich, the quiet carriage of the train.
“You must be quiet,” she said, before returning to her seat.
“That,” I said to the man sitting next to me. “That’s different.”
As their eyes alight on the small sign that goes with it, which reads “barefoot zone” in German, grown men freeze as though they have hit a force field, or had an electric shock administered for being foolish enough to try to pass it still shod. But I can not say what the repercussions would be. This being Germany, I have never seen anyone wearing shoes on the far side of the line and certainly would not risk it myself.
These are articles published in respectable, mainstream, western news. I'm not alone in thinking that German society is somewhat stricter than most other western societies.
You are right in saying Germans love to follow rules. The restrictions in Italy were also not as hard as in Germany. I gave the example of Germany since that's where I lived during the pandemic, but Poland for example I heard was similar to Germany, and much of Eastern Europe was _worse_ (since for them it was properly life or death -- all the doctors left, and the medical infrastructure is in shambles).
>Italian citizens and permanent residents can get a super green pass when they get vaccinated or recover from Covid. The green pass is the equivalent of the EU Digital COVID Certificate, issued to EU citizens and residents as digital proof that a person has either:
- been vaccinated against COVID-19
- recovered from COVID-19
- received a negative test result
I don't disagree that governments have imposed restrictive COVID measures, especially in Europe. I just am pointing out some limitations and caveats in your examples that makes them less damning than they seem as supposed "abuses of power". At a high level, I agree with you.
Edit: the shift from "use of power" to talking about "abuse of power" was itself a strawman by marcosdumay. We all got baited.
About the cultists repeating "trust the science" or even better, the attack "you don't believe on the science!", yeah, those are about as stupid as the people doubting the main vaccines are safe up to now.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, many people in the West took for granted the freedom and mobility that we enjoy in our societies. We assumed that the government would never impose drastic measures such as curfews or lockdowns, because these measures are often associated with authoritarian regimes. However, the pandemic has forced us to reevaluate these assumptions, because as soon as some governments in the West saw how well it "worked" in China they decided to implement the same thing.
Where in the West were there actual curfews? In the U.S. I don't remember there being any; just some talk about potentially quarantining NYC which of course never actually happened.
These comment threads about covid drive me nuts. At times more people were dying _per day_ from covid than died from the terror attack on 9/11, but there has been far more long term government overreach from 9/11 than there was the short term blip of emergency measures from covid.
It worked out well for governments once. I don't see any clear indication that it would again. I think people are tired of - in some cases - arbitrary measures and I wouldn't be so certain that they'd go along with it in the same way.
The real bitch of it is, that if we would now be facing a much more dangerous virus, people might not take it seriously enough due to covid turning out to be not as dangerous as initially thought.
I'm usually that guy, or at least I try to be. Some recommendations:
** Try to avoid insults like
fake quote> They are a bunch of liars _or_ morons
in spite you think they are a bunch of liars _and_ morons
** Avoid oneliners
Try to expand the explanation to 3 or 5 paragraph. Explain clearly what they did, what they claim and the difference. I try to use a ELI25 level (the reader has a technical degree, but not in the subject).
** Explain if it break some physics rule
Some articles make claims that break a physic rule. Some even give a wrong explanation about how they are somehow not bounded by the rule. Explain what they are breaking it. Try to give a high level explanation (like it breaks the conservation of energy) and a low level explanation (exactly in which part they are miscounting the energy).
** Expect to make a few mistakes.
I always make a mistake in a detail. Luckily most of the time someone will make make a comment fixing it. Acknowledge the error, thanks the comment, and remember it
** If it's bad enough it will be reposted :(
The good part, is that you can reuse your comment, with all the fix contributed by other users, and perhaps improve it a little.
This is how you lose. You drown in a mountain of frivolous claims endlessly batting away BS while an OP just keeps on raining comments in new threads. You may feel better refuting something in 3 paragraphs but often a quick flick on the nose is an apt response.
>Try to expand the explanation to 3 or 5 paragraph.
In the age of twitter, you expect paragraphs? Your comment is longer than a lot of news coverage, or at least, what passes as news coverage these days. You can try to be the change you want to see in the world, but this is like arguing with a fence post. As the audience becomes predominately younger, the trends of the times will come with them. You can "educate" till you're blue in the face, but being the internet, it's not going to listen.
This started as a discussion about calling bullshit on research in general, then veered into doing so on HN. Are you still talking about HN specifically or do you mean arguing on the internet in general?
Because in my experience a large portion of the HN crowd comes here for the civil and nuanced debate.
> To a first approximation, the internet is wrong about everything anyhow, so for sanity's sake we all need to learn how to let go. Believe me, I know that's not easy, but it's what we all have to do if we want a forum that doesn't suck.
It's about a personal insult in that thread, but I think it can be extrapolated to comment length. I agree that many news coverage are bad, or just a copy&paste of the press release. It's difficult to change the world, but at least we can try to have a nice discussion here. And part of the trick to get a nice discussion is to encourage comments of the correct length, not too short, not too long.
I call bullshit on this comment. Lots of times when a study of some sort is posted the comments are filled with people calling bullshit on the study either due to sampling bias or too small of a sample or flawed experimental protocols.
Just yelling "bullshit" certainly is, and hn has a bit of a positivity bias, nonetheless, comments that say something is BS and explain why are usually reasonably well recieved.
Problem is that due to the bullshit asymmetry principle, explaining why takes orders of magnitude more effort than producing the bullshit in the first place.
If you unconditionally accept bullshit but require an explanation in order to reject it, then you're going to wind up believing a lot of bullshit.
The same thing applies to people yelling bullshit. Its a lot easier to just falsely yell bullshit than it is to explain why something is not actually bullshit.
Generally i go with the imputus is on the person making the claim. I want the original person to back up their claim before i will care, but i also want anyone counterclaiming BS to also back up their claim before i care.
In reality most people tend to back one side or the other based on their "gut" and if they've had a similar showerthought before and it backs up their own ego, while requiring extensive proof to change their mind.
Also in an ideal world you shouldn't just passively consume arguments on the internet, but do actual reading on the subject. Neither side on an internet debates actually owes you anything.
> Neither side on an internet debates actually owes you anything.
I disagree, the person trying to convince you of something always owes you an explanation.
Actual reading on something, while a good thing, never resolves an argument because you can't replace the person you are arguing with's premises with a generic premise from somewhere else and come to a reasonable conclusion.
I mean, i think we agree here. One post explaining your position is what i think is owed - if you gave zero explanation but still expected people to believe you (e.g. just yelled "bullshit" and walked away), i think that would be an unreasonable position.
This is worthy of expansion into a blog post or similar discussion piece. Public discourse has long been weaponized for economic or political profit, but otherwise well-intentioned people keep falling for the same tricks over and over.
If anything I think HN has the opposite problem. Authoritative-sounding rebuttals to the submission tend to collect more upvotes than the quality of the rebuttal deserves. The key is to maintain a disinterested tone and write enough words that people just assume you must know what you're talking about.
Calling bullshit and calling names are different things.
If a comment explains why something is bullshit in a way that readers can learn from, and is reasonably free of extraneous noise such as personal attacks, fulmination, and so on, that's a positive contribution. The trick is to (1) add correct, relevant information, and (2) avoid poisoning the ecosystem—like a healthy immune system that can go after pathogens without destroying normal cells.
The submitted URL was https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13229, but it's mostly quoting from Aaronson's post, so I've changed the URL to the latter. Interested readers might want to read both, though (including the comemnts).
I thought about that, but the point of the OP is the "Update (Dec. 6)" bit, which is actually a separate post consed onto the original one. It doesn't have a title of its own, and is fairly summarized by Woit's title, so I kept the latter.
Once I thought I had a title,
So clever and so true,
But Dang changed it 'fore anyone could sue.
My title was so simple,
Just a statement of the facts,
Yet Dang liked the title from the clickbait hacks.
Now I sit and wonder,
What's the point of coming up with a name?
When Dang will change it, regardless of fame.
Still I try and post,
In hopes that my title might stay,
Though Dang is always lurking, ready to change it in some sneaky way.
So I'll keep on posting,
With a resigned and weary mind,
Because I know Dang will win, as my title is left behind.
(ChatGPT has allowed me to express my frustrations in folkloric prose but this is an opportunistic post - it's the first time I've seen dang express the title resolution logic since ChatGPT became available. This is kinda the opposite of what the poem is criticizing, which I think just adds to the poetic justice)
I'm afraid so. But if anyone else wants their comment edited after the edit window has expired, they can always ask us to do it for them (hn@ycombinator.com is the best way).
As a compulsive self-editor, I'd rather not have any timeout on edits for anybody, but unfortunately that would leave threads open to really bad forms of abuse.
As much as I love going back and editing things, I think this is a good solution. On Reddit it's even a recurring game to challenge people to ask questions and then edit them to make the answer look bad.
I'm not convinced this argument holds for the time window limiting deletion of comments.
That helps, but if you forget to do it you can end up getting hosed. Also, it's confusing to the reader if the quote is no longer present in the comment being quoted.
These researchers are trying really hard to start a Quantum Winter.
It's already looking pretty grim, but lying about results is a sure way to accelerate the decrease in funding for their departments and bring about professional repercussions.
"Quantum" is losing its magic. The researchers in the field really over-promised, and so far they have delivered almost nothing to show for it on general-purpose computing problems. 15 was factored some time ago, and the record number that has been factored with Shor's algorithm as of 2022 is 21.
Personally, I think D-wave and the other attempted Ising machines took the right approach: use quantum computing to solve problems that are essentially reducing to energy minimization of a system.
I mean i think it was the companies overhyping. Actual researchers have been much more cautious in their predictions, and we are basically on thecpredicted trajectory of people actually doing research.
Every growth function looks exponential until it's not. Most things in science and technology aren't exponential, though. Computers have been (through force of will by many physicists and engineers), and if we think they are the model for everything, I give you the airplane and the car as counterexamples.
As far as quantum computing goes, IBM and Google were promising us exponential growth in quantum chip size, but what we have actually seen so far is exponentially faster decoherence that comes with size.
> Every growth function looks exponential until it's not.
What is this about?
Discovering the shape of a curve near the origin is one of the oldest and most mature estimation techniques people have. It has been done for centuries, and it's pretty trivial to differentiate exponential curves from other common shapes.
Anyway, IBM and Google have been delivering exponential growth in quantum chip size with faster (but really doesn't look exponential) decoherence each time. Any promises are irrelevant.
Are you sure you aren't looking at the bottom of an S curve? Extrapolation is a dangerous thing to engage in, particularly from the nascent forms of a technology. Many technologies hit walls early on in their lives and are discovered to be infeasible or not useful.
Also, differentiating an exponential from even a low-order polynomial is not trivial at all given only a few points (we have <10) and a lot of noise. However, the trajectory of each is markedly different when you extrapolate.
Of course it's the bottom of an S curve. Anybody that talks about exponential growth on the real world is talking about the bottom of an S curve.
What is your point? That the curve will inflect soon?
Also, about the "differentiating an exponential from even a low-order polynomial is not trivial at all given only a few points" part. Well, if you want to propose that the curve is a low-order superlinear polynomial, the onus is on you to propose a mechanism or show some analysis. That's not a very ordinary way for things to behave on practice.
Well, much of the current field is about increasing the number of high fidelity q-bits. With the idea being that interesting problems will finally occur (IE, a slam-dunk, yes that was useful to know, sort of result that couldn't possibly be done with classical computers) when some qbit threshold is achieved.
No, but a lot of us think it's on the exponential-looking part of a sigmoid that will hit its asymptote lower than other people think. At least this quantum computing technology is.
This bit form Sabine Hossenfelder's comment is something that I've personally also started to think about lately:
> It’s easy enough to address the problem: Give every scientist a basic education on the sociology and philosophy of science, and social and cognitive biases.
Granted, I'm not a scientist, but even from the very far outside (i.e. the position from where I'm writing this comment) one can see that that knowledge about the "sociology and philosophy of science" seems to be lacking in today's scientific community.
A relative has just graduated with a PhD in philosophy of science and has zero job prospects, so he is leaving academia. Nobody wants to know this stuff. He’s a good teacher if anyone does know a place trying to teach it, though.
String Theory, "It from (Qu)bit", etc. have been putting out a large amount of B.S. for many years now, and the hype itself became so common that, to compete with other B.S. the hype has now become over-the-top blatant nonsense.
Many fields of science these days suffer from dishonest and attention seeking researchers and professors, overhyping their results on media, fudging experiments etc.
We need to make science actively painful (cut all funding, regularly jail them, condemn them to obscurity, make sure no one wants to date them etc.) so it only attracts people in it for the right reasons :)
One commenter on that article points out that there is a symbiotic relation between scientists, the press and the public.
All of them desire spectacular results and there is little incentive to ever play down a paper.
The result is that scientists "polish" their results when communicating to the press, who again make sure that it "sounds good". In the end the public usually gets the truth only in so far as "could" means "there is a low but nonzero chance of this ever working, but only if there are massive engineering efforts and many more breakthroughs and economic and resource incentives line up right".
Putting scientists into the media game, instead of isolating them was a grave mistake. It even creates competition for gtants, based on how "flashy" the results are.
In the realm of technology, scientists are the idea guys. Lots of good ideas out there. But you need entrepreneurs and engineers and capital in order to see if it is something that will be useful to the public.
It may takes years of work, PhDs, and lots of research costs to get the findings (idea), but in the end ideas themselves are cheap.
> Many fields of science these days suffer from dishonest and attention seeking researchers and professors, overhyping their results on media, fudging experiments etc.
And the administration loves them for it! And they will happily book expensive influencers and self-made media personalities to arrange workshops and courses in how to present your research in the simplest and most emotional ways - to maximize engagement and outreach. It's almost funny to see the disbelief in researchers' eyes when the extroverted influencer brings them the microphone and asks: ignore for a moment the specifics of your research, what are the three qualities that makes YOU unique and special?
> cut all funding, regularly jail them, condemn them to obscurity
I can't even begin to describe how overjoyed I am to finally have found a fellow campaigner for implementing the glorious techniques of Maoist China in dealing with free thought.
String theory as it currently exists is very different to how it started. The original use case was actually as a precursor to the current model for partons: QCD.
(Side note: there is still another theory in QCD research that is used, called the Lund string model, but it is not related to string theory and should not be compared. I just bring it up for completeness)
This is not to say that I disagree with being more critical of science initiatives, but that heavy-handed approaches like jail and social punishment are not the silver bullet you may think they are. Theories get repurposed very frequently between departments and the relationship between a line of enquiry and the results it may produce is not always linear.
Really, science communication (especially from news outlets) itself should be defunded, as it misrepresents the topics discussed. In its place, (structured, public) science EDUCATION should be funded.
We have those. We tend to ignore them or call them kooks.
For good reason in (Large percentage) of cases. But I do feel that there are a few that are getting marginalized. Often because they are semi related to stuff that is politically unpopular.
Several of them are absolutely marginalized and not kooks at all. The reputation, unfortunately, sticks with them.
David Shaw is the poster child of rich people who succeeded at breaking through the elitism into the scientific establishment, but he went through the whole PhD process before "settling" for becoming a finance billionaire.
Isn’t he more of a poster child for “academics create academics”? His dad was a professor, his stepdad was a professor and he went straight through college and grad school to become a professor. What kind of elitism are you arguing that he faced?
1) The tools available to an individual are always progressing.
By "tools" I mean all of direct physical tools and materials, computational, theories and understandings, services, etc.
2) Big funded labs have business owners, stockholders, academic department heads, and grant comittees that have specific goals and ideas and topics they are willing to pay for.
Many of the most important discoveries were never on anyone's list of things they will pay for (until after it happened some other way first).
They only happened either by accident in real labs despite all conscious intention to be working on something else, or by people who didn't need anyone's permission and were just satisfying their own curiosity, and couldn't be told to work on something more sensible by any boss or other funding source.
3) It is true that some large scale things probably won't be advanced in a garage.
Then again, a lot of times large scale things are up-ended specifically from a garage exactly because the garage researcher does not have the option to address problems with (expensive/large/dangerous) brute force.
They need to somehow make pressure of a zillion psi, but they can't build a zillion psi machine, so instead they figure out how to align sound waves to create a zillion psi just where the waves meet or something, and that goes on to obsolete a huge industry and now everyone's making MrFusion's in their spare bedrooms and selling them on Etsy.
The smallness of the operation is the very cause of the discovery and would not have happened in a normal funded lab.
Most of it, but there are some corners. For example, high temperature superconductivity was discovered in 1986 [1]. The process is not so complicated, and can be done at home. Well, at least in a very good personal lab, for example see this video by Applied Science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLFaa6RPJIU
I think the original team made like 100 samples using different metals and different oxygen proportion. Discovering the first one requires some brute force that needs a small team, and is too much for a single person. Anyway, it doesn't look too far away from something a single person can discover.
"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote… Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."
The thing that makes that quote so incredible is that it's from Albert Michelson in 1903. The same Michelson of the Michelson-Morley experiment [1] that was completed in 1887. The experiment he performed 16 years prior set the stage for the period of exponential and revolutionary progress that was about to be discovered by some unknown guy writing scientific papers while working as a low level inspector at a patent office [2] because no university was willing to take him on board.
Humanity, at any snapshot in time, believes they are on the bleeding edge of human progress, and that's because they are! Yet invariably we look back marveling at how little they knew. There's zero reason to think this trend has ended, or that we're even near the end of time where knowledge can be simply 'thought up', especially given the vast free resources available to all. The problem is that 'thinking it up' is extremely difficult.
That's a horrible out-of-context quote. The full quote:
"It may be well to reply to the very natural question: What would be the use of such extreme refinement in the science of measurement? Very briefly and in general terms the answer would be that in this direction the greater part of all future discovery must lie. The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. Nevertheless, it has been found that there are apparent exceptions to most of these laws, and this is particularly true when the observations are pushed to a limit, i.e., whenever the circumstances of experiment are such that extreme cases can be examined. Such examination almost surely leads, not to the overthrow of the law, but to the discovery of other facts and laws whose action produces the apparent exceptions.
As instances of such discoveries, which are in most cases due to the increasing order of accuracy made possible by improvements in measuring instruments, may be mentioned: first, the departure of actual gases from the simple laws of the so-called perfect gas, one of the practical results being the liquefaction of air and all known gases; second, the discovery of the velocity of light by astronomical means, depending on the accuracy of telescopes and of astronomical clocks; third, the determination of distances of stars and the orbits of double stars, which depend on measurements of the order of accuracy of one-tenth of a second—an angle which may be represented as that which a pin's head subtends at a distance of a mile. But perhaps the most striking of such instances are the discovery of a new planet by observations of the small irregularities noticed by Leverier in the motions of the planet Uranus, and the more recent brilliant discovery by Lord Rayleigh of a new element in the atmosphere through the minute but unexplained anomalies found in weighing a given volume of nitrogen. Many instances might be cited, but these will suffice to justify the statement that "our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." It follows that every means which facilitates accuracy in measurement is a possible factor in a future discovery, and this will, I trust, be a sufficient excuse for bringing to your notice the various methods and results which form the subject matter of these lectures."
Light Waves and Their Uses. By Albert A. Michelson. Published by The University of Chicago Press, 1903, pp 23-25.
Michelson was arguing exactly the opposite of the position you imply. In context, "the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote" is referring to the fact that new physics (e.g. relativity) tends not to invalidate the older physics which approximate it (e.g. newtonian dynamics) in common situations.
I don't believe the blurb changes the context of the quote.
He was arguing that the all the important and fundamental laws of physics had been discovered. And so all that remained was to work out what was causing perturbations at increasingly esoteric degrees of precision. In other words that the future of science rested on refining previous discoveries, instead of the discovery of new revolutionary concepts. In the words of our OP here that, "all the science that is possible to do "at home" [is] already done."
Yet of course he made these comments just before physics would be completely revolutionized, and rapidly lead to revolutions in life as we know it. This was prior to relativity, prior to quantum mechanics, even prior to atomic models. The thing that makes it utterly ironic is making such comments at such a time after being an inadvertent key player in the discoveries to come.
Quantum theory didn't completely overrule how physics works at large length scales. Relativity didn't completely overrule how physics works at slow speeds & sub-planetary length scales. These are the 'apparent exceptions' to the laws of physics Michelson refers to, which lead to 'the discovery of other facts and laws whose action produces the apparent exceptions'. Validating both of those required 'extreme refinement in the science of measurement'. Look, for instance, at the 50 year effort required to validate the Bell Experiment.
Michelson further backs up this point in the next paragraph, where he provides several examples where precise measurements similarly lead to new science. Even more, look at his call to action: "Every means which facilitates accuracy in measurement is a possible factor in a future discovery".
His argument isn't dismissive of new science because it only leads to small differences in measurement. It's supportive of small measurements because it's required for new science.
I sometimes wish that the following words would require a license to be used - and such license could be suspended when the words are being used in a negligent or nefarious manner:
This comment speaks to the soul of my inner gripe. I try to avoid being pedantic, but I can never bring myself to replace this use of ‘all’ with ‘pretty much all’.
It’s just such a clear term. Now that I think of it, it might be one of the least ambiguously defined terms I can think of.
>Curious if there's any renowned independent scientists producing research at home and sharing directly online
closest thing is probably R&D at big companies, hence why so many academics joined Facebook, Google, etc. at least for computer science and AI related stuff
Might go back to this model over time. Guess it is no secret that academia is in strong decline. Lot of excellent people just don't bother anymore to enter that circus. They might do their own independent research after they succeeded financially.
It is possible to do surprising amounts on a shoestring budget. Ive seen cheap (Sub $1k) electron microscopes go up for sale. As well as a ton of other lab equipment.
Sorry, am not really smarter about all of this after reading the blog post. Maybe I just don't know enough quantum physics? Maybe science communication itself has a problem? How can I check this information without investing 10 years of my life?
Yeah, but afterwards he mentions that colleagues of his actually think that something special here might have happened after all, because of quantum, and he admits that therefore he is not QUITE sure himself about it. So in the end, the conclusion is that it probably is just a simulation, but maybe it is more? Does that not counter the entire thrust of the blog post?
I'd be joyed if there was any meaningful fallout. Magical thinking in science only benefits click-deprived blogs (which some people call mainstream news outlets, despite "news" implying journalistic integrity). But where is this fallout? All I see is tempered pushback from the scientific community. It seems to me like the publicity stunt worked for the most part.
>> something went terribly wrong—something that risks damaging trust in the scientific process itself. And I think it’s worth reflecting on what we can do to prevent it from happening again.
IMHO it's waaay too late. This kind of over the top bombastic shit happens at least once a week in mainstream media. The unknowing probably think we will be in some kind Star Trek future in a few years. Then there's me who just shrugs that someone's duping the public yet again.
The solution is to just stop going public.
You know they better prove that quantum computers are actually "better" than classical ones because every Turing machine can be simulated starting from 15 gliders in Life - a recent result that I found fascinating but didn't go mainstream. Why? Because people proving things in Life understand its a niche thing and don't have egos the size of Andromeda.
A simple and effective heuristic: ignore the initial announcement of everything esoteric. Wait a year or five and see if anyone is still talking about it.
We are informed about way too much "promising" half-baked results these days. Nobody urgently needs to know about the quantum wormhole. It's much ado about nothing, it's the grinding and squealing of the capitalist media attention sucking machine.
Potential exceptions are things like ChatGPT that you can understand and even verify yourself.
This is a bad take - in some ways falling victim to exactly the kind of "over the top bombastic" thing it accuses media of.
For one thing, Quanta and Nature are not mainstram media. They generally do a pretty decent job of science communication, which is important. (And it's worse pointing out that Ars Techica explained it properly)
So what went wrong here?
I don't know exactly, but Google's own post was a bad start:
"Making a Traversable Wormhole with a Quantum Computer"[1] sure sounds like they "made a traversable wormhole with a quantum computer".
So lets read the leading paragraph:
Wormholes — wrinkles in the fabric of spacetime that connect two disparate locations — may seem like the stuff of science fiction. But whether or not they exist in reality, studying these hypothetical objects could be the key to making concrete the tantalizing link between information and matter that has bedeviled physicists for decades.
Surprisingly, a quantum computer is an ideal platform to investigate this connection. The trick is to use a correspondence called AdS/CFT, which establishes an equivalence between a theory that describes gravity and spacetime (and wormholes) in a fictional world with a special geometry (AdS) to a quantum theory that does not contain gravity at all (CFT).
In “Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor”, published in Nature today, we report on a collaboration with researchers at Caltech, Harvard, MIT, and Fermilab to simulate the CFT on the Google Sycamore processor. By studying this quantum theory on the processor, we are able to leverage the AdS/CFT correspondence to probe the dynamics of a quantum system equivalent to a wormhole in a model of gravity. The Google Sycamore processor is among the first to have the fidelity needed to carry out this experiment.
No, nothing pointing out this was a simulation there either!
So I think Google and the research team needs to take some responsibility here. Their writing at least invited the miscommunication.
> See for example the New York Times and Quanta and Ars Technica and Nature
And the Quanta[1] (which is usually great) was probably the worst of the lot. The Nature paper had a title that probably caused the whole mess. The NYT (ironically since it is the most mainstream of the lot) did a pretty good job.
Let me quote the Quanta article:
> Physicists have purportedly created the first-ever wormhole, a kind of tunnel theorized in 1935 by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen that leads from one place to another by passing into an extra dimension of space.
> The wormhole emerged like a hologram out of quantum bits of information, or “qubits,” stored in tiny superconducting circuits. By manipulating the qubits, the physicists then sent information through the wormhole, they reported today in the journal Nature.
If specialist science communication sources like Quanta are getting this so badly wrong then I don't think it is at all reasonable to blame mainstream media which acts an an aggregator from specialist sources.
> The unknowing probably think we will be in some kind Star Trek future in a few years.
Who counts as the unknowing? The people who thought we were going to have hit the singularity by now spent a lot of time reading up on this stuff. They just came to some insane conclusions.
Except in their case... They reported excess heat in a cell containing 4 elements. They couldn't explain it chemically and said "must be nuclear". The arrogant physics community said "it can't be physics, it's chemistry" without offering an explanation or reaction with those 4 elements.
And now LENR is still a thing, as is theoretical research on nuclear reactions in a lattice and other related stuff.
I'm still a bit of a believer, largely because of the arrogance displayed by physicists at the time.
Exactly. The “cold fusion” debacle wasn’t their fault it was everyone around them, they were following a simple chain of research, incrementally developing their theories, following in the proud tradition of discovery after going “huh that’s odd” … and because it challenged established orthodoxy they got buried.
We had a partial repeat of this with the whole faster than light neutrinos, with lots of partially informed commentary, but for the most part these researchers were lucky their situation was obviously instrumental error soon enough, had it continued to be a discrepancy much longer, I have no doubt the conversation would have devolved.
We also have the Venus phosphene research work which gets a lot of pushback because it doesn’t fit so it much be a mistake, and it’s taken a lot of hard methodical work just to get the consensus to “this requires more research”.
Then we have the complete debacle around the emdrive … which is simply summed up as, no it didn’t work, but it should not have taken years to prove that. When someone has a theory that doesn’t fit, based on some (albeit weak) experimental evidence, you don’t refute it by simply saying “your wrong because existing physics is correct”… you do it by proving your own theory about why the experiment shows the results, or by performing alternative experiments that eliminate more variables… what we got instead was a tiny community of true believers, an tiny community of open minded scientists trying to do good experimental scientific research and didn’t care if the end result was the device doesn’t work, because it was good scientific work to develop better metrology techniques to measure the effects that were claimed… and then all the other scientists falling for the circular reasoning fallacy. “It can’t work because physics says so”… as if that somehow negates the possibility that we might have found some new physics, by doing an experiment, finding conflicting results, and diligently performing experiments to understand what’s going on… which is deeply ironic to me as one of the favourite headlines in the particle physics world is a variation on “hints at new physics” … the physics community wants new physics… just not this new physics. (Once again, I do know it didn’t work, and never worked, I’m angry about how the physics community reacted to this)
Essentially it seems like how shocking/surprising the new results are, the more push back they get, so publicity stunts or high visibility publication or press releases is correlated with the level of push back from the wider scientific community. Effectively the acceptance of the scientific community is like a non-Newtonian fluid.
The EM Drive debacle I think exactly contradicts your point. It was an extremely weak effect that required extraordinary shielding to measure to any extent at all, there were numerous sources of potential error - and it would have contradicted some of the most basic laws of physics.
The onus should have been 100% on the EM drive team to prove this extraordinary claim with extraordinary evidence, there was absolutely no reason to waste time and resources on investigating their claim until they had produced something akin to a modern Michelson-Morley experiment, especially in terms of care taken to isolate their system.
We build gigantic machines costing millions and billions of dollars and decades of work, like the the large hadron collider, the LIGO and VIRGO gravitational wave observatories… all in search of exactly the kind of “weak effect” you are dismissing … these are things so far below our normal day to day experience of the universe that the results may never be of anything but theoretical or academic value in my entire lifetime. No future car or bike or computer or microwave oven, is likely to benefit from us knowing more about the Higgs boson or from our enhanced understanding of collisions between neutron stars and black holes in the far away cosmos.
This particular minuscule effect, while eventually proven to be measurement error had the potential to deliver significant practical effects on human life today, even if only by way of significant improvements in the cost of maintaining spacecraft orbits, which has knock on effects in the cost of building and operating services that rely on satellite communications and data, from weather forecasts to the new iPhone emergency satellite messaging and networks like Starlink.
Not only that but the effort to nail down the measurements has direct applications to the metrology of powered RF systems where the RF power and system thermal loading are dominant components of the sum of forces, which has potential future impacts on measurement and calibration of tiny sensors and micro-electromechanical systems in general, with potential applications to lab methods regarding macro scale quantum mechanical effect research in future decades …
Because good science is built one brick at a time pilled higher and high on all the previous good science we have collectively done.
My point was actually to highlight that by simply reducing the argument to “this contradicts what we know to be true therefore it cannot work, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar/stupid/misinformed/misguided/etc” they are not doing bad science, but simply not doing science at all in the first place!
Choosing to reject a contrary result is cherry picking the data, rejecting the possibility of such data having worth is doubling down on your cherry picking to squash your error bars.
If the data doesn’t fit past theoretical predictions you are either measuring it wrong because you have more to learn about measurement or you may have just discovered something amazing that will change physics. Anything else isn’t scientific… it’s arguing over economic value allocation of time and money.
Will Says:
Comment #9 December 2nd, 2022 at 7:26 pm
Hi Scott,
I think I must be missing something in your argument.
If “A foofs B” has a dual description “C blebs D”, and we establish that A does indeed foof B, would you agree that it is equally true to say that C blebs D?
If so, wouldn’t it be correct to say that this experiment has created a wormhole? It’s not a wormhole in our regular universe’s spacetime, but perhaps it’s a wormhole in some… where (? not exactly clear on this).
And from this, perhaps it follows why an equally-precise simulation on the classical computer wouldn’t create a wormhole in the same way? (This part seems dubious to me–I want to say that A foofing B is different from a simulation of A foofing B–after all, no matter how well you simulate a hurricane, nobody gets wet. But I’m wondering if this instinct is in conflict with my early claim that “A foofs B” is equally true as “C blebs D”. Hmm.. now that I think about it, maybe this is actually what you meant by “bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.”)
Scott Says:
Comment #21 December 3rd, 2022 at 9:12 am
Will #9:
> Hmm.. now that I think about it, maybe this is actually what you meant by “bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.”
Yup!
So Aaronson's position seems like, even if a system is "real", it doesn't mean its holographic dual is "real". I get that it's in his interest to steer QC as far away from this voodoo AdS/CFT stuff as possible, but his statement feels weird somehow. I agree it always makes sense to shut up and calculate, but as a lay person the holography stuff seems more significant than a classical simulation or a philosophical thought experiment, in that there are certain objects like black holes where the promising way to look at them is from the holographic viewpoint.
>[Scott #111] I would never object to anyone speculating about such fun things! The one part that I do object to, is people passing over the metaphysical enormity of what needs to be presupposed in such a discussion, as if it didn’t even require comment
>[Scott #119] Where I agree with you is this: I think that, for the vast majority of entangled states one cares about in physics, a dual description in terms of wormholes simply isn’t useful, even in those cases where it meaningfully exists (which is far from all of them).
Seems like at a high level this is indeed his position iiuc.
At its start, the quanta magazine was a good read. But, it degraded very quickly after they started to use it mainly to put scientists from under-represented groups into the spot light. Nowadays not worth any attention.
I'm glad to see more people are recognizing that while GOogle built a nice quantum computer, their attempts to sell it in the literature have been extremely overoptimistic about its actual capabilities. In a way that's good because every time they announce an advance over classical systems, some clever folks figure out a way to keep the classical system competitive.
It seems unfair to dismiss this as a publicity stunt or fraud, or to say this is no closer to a real wormhole than a drawing. It's fundamentally impossible to really describe what is happening here to the general public without tons of quantum mechanics background. Any summary of research like this is inherently a subjective description of why scientists feel it's important, rather than a coherent description of what actually occurred.
However, the quantum process they are describing really did physically occur on the quantum processor, which I feel is really different than a simulated quantum experiment on a regular cpu. It is truly a real observation of a real quantum experiment, which demonstrates that the system they setup really exhibits properties of wormhole physics that had previously only been predicted theoretically.
Is it possible that experimental physicists are just insulted by the way this is presented, because it's presented as an experimental milestone, but, because of the use of a quantum processor, they didn't really have to build anything... it's just math and code?
> There are no lessons to be learned about quantum gravity here. There are no lessons to be learned about traversable wormholes or whether they exist within our Universe. There are not even any lessons to be learned about the uniqueness or capabilities of quantum computers, as everything that was done on the quantum computer can be done and had previously (without errors!) been done on a classical computer. The best that one can take away is that the researchers, after performing elaborate calculations of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model through classical means, were able to perform an analogous calculation on a quantum computer that actually returned signal, not simply quantum noise
They simulated a toy space-time model, which had been previously simulated on a classical computer, on a quantum computer. That's really it.
The toy model has wormholes.
That does not inform us as to if the real universe has wormholes.
The novel thing is really how they used ML to boil down the mathematical model into something that could run on a quantum computer.
Yapping about how they "created wormholes in a lab" is 100% a publicity stunt. They could have written instead that they simulated wormholes in a lab, which would have been more honest and they should have pointed out that anyone can simulate a wormhole on their desktop computer as well.
And not even. A toy model in a space-time that is wildly different from our real space. Their space is AdS, i.e. negative curvature, vs. our dS space with positive curvature. Their toy space has a toy model of gravity, that is way different from our real gravity. And their space is 1-dimensional.
And they didn't even simulate that. They used the AdS/CFT conjecture to tell them, that they don't need to simulate the toy model in the toy space, but they can simulate a lower-dimensional holographic image of the toy space. A 0-d hologram of a 1-d space. Whatever that is.
It's even less than that. The duality between SYK_4 (SYK with four-fermion interactions) and AdS_2 (2D AdS spacetime) is only (conjectured to be) true at infinite N (where N is the number of fermions) and at the conformal limit (ie. the limit where temperature goes to zero). What they did is a N=7 simulation of a (sparse SYK) Hamiltonian "learned" (a much better word would have been "fitted") from a N=10 dense SYK at various (finite) temperatures. Neither 7 nor 10 is large enough to test this limit.
Now the actual quantum simulation they performed is that they constructed a thermal field double (and this allows them to make the connection with a "wormhole" because the two side of the TFD are basically the left and right quadrant of the Penrose diagram) and evolved it with the "learned" sparse SYK plus some shockwave operator $e^{i\mu V}$. The actual construction of the quantum gates is due to that Jafferis-Gao wormhole teleportaion paper. The supplementary material has some useful information (I find the actual Nature paper to be quite thin on technical details). It is indeed an interesting quantum simulation, in the sense that it demonstrated that the Google quantum computer behaves the way one expects a QC to behave.
Now does this experiment actually tell us anything about quantum gravity? No, and in this sense it is a publicity stunt. My reading of the Nature paper is that the actual paper is about 20% science (mostly due to Google's hardware) and about 80% salesmanship, which is really what you need in order to survive in academia.
> our dS space
To clarify this, our universe is asymptotically a dS spacetime in the distant future where matter and radiation density become zero and the universe becomes dominated by vacuum energy (and this is necessarily a conjecture based on current theory and cosmological observations, because nobody can live this long to see that day). It's not literally a dS spacetime right now.
> the quantum process they are describing really did physically occur on the quantum processor
Yes. But...
> It is truly a real observation of a real quantum experiment, which demonstrates that the system they setup really exhibits properties of wormhole physics that had previously only been predicted theoretically.
No, it demonstrates that the system they set up has properties that some people have hypothesized are related to wormhole physics. Those hypotheses are still pure speculation. This experiment does not provide any evidence for them.
There is nothing fundamentally different between running a classical simulation on a classical computer and running a quantum simulation on a quantum computer - both are just a simulation.
So claiming that this quantum simulation of a SYK model of a wormhole is in some way actually related to a wormhole is exactly like claiming that the circuits of a supercomputer used for simulating rainfall patterns are getting wet.
Not to mention, the model being used is a toy model of a type of space-time that is not at all like our own spacetime - it's not even a simulation of a physical model, it's just a mathematical model that we already know doesn't describe the physical world.
Not anti-science. Anti-bullshit. The announcement is a gross misrepresentation of the work actually produced. At least when companies cheat on benchmarks they're actually running the benchmark and not bypassing it. Usually.
P.S. congratulations on being one of today's ten thousand
We deal with similar fallout here every time climate change comes up for discussion and someone trots out the claim that scientists in the 70s were worried about global cooling. A few interesting papers got wildly over-covered and, well, here we are 50 years later.
Ultimately I think this is not a solvable problem because people want to believe. If a story seems to confirm or support a belief that is exciting or emotionally charged, it can stick in the heads of some people and really affect them.
Information we take in is not just stored for later retrieval, it is interlinked with what we already think. If you have lots of other physics in your head, a weird physics story has a chance to get linked with that and kept in its proper context.
If you don’t have much physics, a weird physics story might get linked elsewhere: to religious views, political ideology, science fiction stories, etc.
Weren't we in a cooling period in the decades up to the 80s (?) ?
Aren't we overdue for the end of this interglacial (give or take a few thousand years) ?
Now the issue seems to be that while the end of this interglacial would be unpleasant, with Canada / Great Britain / Scandinavia / Siberia becoming uninhabitable because covered in glaciers, at least we would be in "known" territory, since Homo roughly dates back to the beginning of our Ice Age, and has already lived through half a hundred glacials/interglacials (and several of them for Sapiens),
we're at the risk of "overshooting" towards the end of our Ice Age, which would be a much more normal climate for the Earth, but also barely even known by Austrolapithecus (~first "human"), where we risk to only have the poles left habitable (for land mammals in general?), which would also be particularly unpleasant due to their months-long days and nights ?
Does it? They seem completely different. AI art theft seems to follow straightforwardly from existing intellectual property law and precedent. There's literal artist signatures being spat out by these generative models. They're obviously learning to mimic copyrighted works.
So sad -- this mindset seems to me like "Q-Anon for smart people". As if Q was a meme (mind virus) that originally only infected people with a low IQ, but then mutated to become a high-IQ variant...
"If you had two entangled quantum computers, one on Earth and the other in the Andromeda galaxy, and if they were both simulating [the wormhole], and if Alice on Earth and Bob in Andromeda both uploaded their own brains into their respective quantum simulations, then it seems possible that the simulated Alice and Bob could have the experience of jumping into a wormhole and meeting each other in the middle. ... if true, I suppose some would treat it as grounds for regarding a quantum simulation of SYK as “more real” or “more wormholey” than a classical simulation."
I think you may have missed the point. Aaronson is being ironic here. Uploading your brain into a quantum simulation is ridiculously far beyond the realm of plausibility. He's not suggesting this as an actual scenario, he's saying "This wormhole claim requires so much suspension of disbelief that you have to be profoundly ignorant of how quantum computers actually work in order to lend it any credence at all."
Here is the summary from AI for people short on time
The article is discussing the recent announcement of a holographic wormhole on a microchip and the author's response to it. The author explains that they initially assumed that no one actually believed the announcement, but after hearing a talk by a medieval historian about the historic significance of the achievement, the author realized that some people do believe it. The author goes on to discuss the potential damage that can be done to trust in the scientific process when news about scientific experiments is misrepresented in the media. The author also discusses a recent preprint that refutes the claim that Google's Sycamore quantum processor achieved quantum supremacy.
And Ars: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/12/no-physicists-didnt-...