Post by Corbet the editor. "We get it: people wish that we had not highlighted work by this particular author. Had we known more about the person in question, we might have shied away from the topic. But the article is out now, it describes a bit of interesting technology, people have had their say, please let's leave it at that."

So you updated the article to reflect this right? padme.jpg

Watts has always been a bit of a weird vector. While he doesn't seem a far righter himself, he accidentally uses a lot of weird far right dogwhistles. (prob some cross contamination as some of these things are just scientific concepts (esp the r/K selection thing stood out very much to me in the rifters series, of course he has a phd in zoology, and the books predate the online hardcore racists discovering the idea by more than a decade, but still odd to me)).

To be very clear, I don't blame Watts for this, he is just a science fiction writer, a particularly gloomy one. The guy himself seems to be pretty ok (not a fan of trump for example).

Hold it right there criminal scum!

But things being real doesn't stop the cranks. See quantum.

Apologies for focusing on just one sentence of this article, but I feel like it's crucial to the overall argument:

... if [shrimp] suffer only 3% as intensely as we do ...

Does this proposition make sense? It's not obvious to me that we can assign percentage values to suffering, or compare it to human suffering, or treat the values in a linear fashion.

It reminds me of that vaguely absurd thought experiment where you compare one person undergoing a lifetime of intense torture vs billions upon billions of humans getting a fleck of dust in their eyes. I just cannot square choosing the former with my conscience. Maybe I'm too unimaginative to comprehend so many billions of bits of dust.

lol hahah.

Sadly it seems the next one is gonna be Quantum.

Not only is the universe a simulation, the Catholics just had it right, isnt that neat.

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.

Still a bit sad we are not doing nano anymore.

But this quickly runs into the 'don't create your own unbreakable crypto system' 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 'nah, that is dumb' sadly I'm 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 'ancestor simulation' theory however)).

Finally computer science is a real field, there are cranks! Suck it physics and mathematics, we are a real boy now!

Yes, he even gets mentioned by xkcd in the same breath as Stallman or Linus. (That it turns out the latter is the least worse of the three (he actually realized that being an asshole was bad) is quite the surprise).