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Wow. It's pretty unbelievable. It there a place where I can read the whole article? The one I found the funniest/crziest is "Bug reports were blown off by sayi

Wow. It's pretty unbelievable. It there a place where I can read the whole article? The one I found the funniest/crziest is "Bug reports were blown off by saying that they didn't matter because the "scientists" just ran their simulation lots of times and took the average", because this is exactly how some scientists I know think. This thinking is not limited to software. My father was by trade involved in building experimental apparatus ("hardware") for scientific experiments. Often they were designed by scientists themselves. He told me about absurd contraptions which never could measure what they were intended to measure, and extreme reluctance/defensiveness/arrogance he often met when trying to report it and give some feedback...

mike_hearn 3y ago
Yeah confusion between simulation and reality can be observed all over the place. Multiple runs can be needed if you're doing measurements of the natural world, but for a simulation that doesn't make sense (you can do Monte Carlo style stuff, but that's still replicable). You could see the lines being blurred in other ways. Outputs of simulations would be referred to as "findings", for example, or referenced in ways that implied empirical observation without it being clear where they came from unless you carefully checked citations. Here are some of the articles I wrote about what happened (under a pseudonym) https://dailysceptic.org/2020/05/06/code-review-of-fergusons-model/ https://dailysceptic.org/2020/05/06/code-review-of-fergusons... https://dailysceptic.org/2020/05/09/second-analysis-of-fergusons-model/ https://dailysceptic.org/2020/05/09/second-analysis-of-fergu... https://dailysceptic.org/2020/06/11/how-replicable-is-the-imperial-college-model/ https://dailysceptic.org/2020/06/11/how-replicable-is-the-im... After that people started sending me non-Imperial models to look at, which had some similar problems: https://dailysceptic.org/2020/08/08/schools-paper/ https://dailysceptic.org/2020/08/08/schools-paper/ I don't write for that website anymore, by the way. Back then it was called Lockdown Sceptics and was basically the only forum that would publish any criticism of COVID science. Nowadays it's evolved to be a more general news site.
- IlliOnato 3y ago
  Thank you! This is very interesting. > Outputs of simulations would be referred to as "findings" Yeah, a recent brouhaha about creating (!) a traversable wormhole in a quantum computer comes to mind...

mike_hearn 3y ago

Yeah confusion between simulation and reality can be observed all over the place. Multiple runs can be needed if you're doing measurements of the natural world, but for a simulation that doesn't make sense (you can do Monte Carlo style stuff, but that's still replicable). You could see the lines being blurred in other ways. Outputs of simulations would be referred to as "findings", for example, or referenced in ways that implied empirical observation without it being clear where they came from unless you carefully checked citations. Here are some of the articles I wrote about what happened (under a pseudonym) https://dailysceptic.org/2020/05/06/code-review-of-fergusons-model/ https://dailysceptic.org/2020/05/06/code-review-of-fergusons... https://dailysceptic.org/2020/05/09/second-analysis-of-fergusons-model/ https://dailysceptic.org/2020/05/09/second-analysis-of-fergu... https://dailysceptic.org/2020/06/11/how-replicable-is-the-imperial-college-model/ https://dailysceptic.org/2020/06/11/how-replicable-is-the-im... After that people started sending me non-Imperial models to look at, which had some similar problems: https://dailysceptic.org/2020/08/08/schools-paper/ https://dailysceptic.org/2020/08/08/schools-paper/ I don't write for that website anymore, by the way. Back then it was called Lockdown Sceptics and was basically the only forum that would publish any criticism of COVID science. Nowadays it's evolved to be a more general news site.

IlliOnato 3y ago
Thank you! This is very interesting. > Outputs of simulations would be referred to as "findings" Yeah, a recent brouhaha about creating (!) a traversable wormhole in a quantum computer comes to mind...