thraway180306

For context, you have a consulting business, and spoke at a conference about AI in administering justice organized under auspices of recently ousted illiberal government of Poland.

Here's an abstract to one of your "papers": "The paper presents selected tools, as described by their developers. The list includes Hello Quantum, Hello Qiskit, Particle in a Box, Psi and Delta, QPlayLearn, Virtual Lab by Quantum Flytrap, Quantum Odyssey..."

Et patati et patata - no way to tell what you're about with your review other than enumeration and platitudes. Yet you criticize authors of a review paper (detail revealed by immediate next sentence, one you curiously decided to omit from quoting) that clearly state their angle first and at least have something to say. It's just not aligned with your opinions, nothing to do with writing.

You by the way demand "results" of a review paper. What were the research results of you playing quantum web games?

Yeah, wow, whitepaper expects their reserve matched by other farmers only after 21 years of Chia mining/plotting.

I see Bram Cohen got the original authors of "proof of space" or whatever this is to author papers with him, and also got inflationary pressure in there, but if that's the extent of research, well, that's still not how the economy works. At least ransomware gangs won't switch from encrypting to deleting stuff altogether for space.

The whole point of Bousquet study was comparability, so it had to be the lowest common denominator, especially in a field that defines SotA differently year to year in each wave of research. Your objection wouldn't embarrass anyone.

You are complaining how the article doesn't mention GANs while replying to a comment about article's treatment of GANs. Revealing you are biased against even reading the biased article, or comprehending the parent comment.

That's a significant goalpost move. From debating particular mechanisms and postulated inevitability of AI, to assuming full blown strong Church-Turing-Deutsch principle and moving from there. Along with moving whole discussion from practical concerns into philosophy and really arguing from the thesis, at which point most people lose interest.

All chemistry is ultimately quantum, same with rocks and everything up to celestial bodies (meaningfully, the moon Hyperion decoheres). For most of calculations though classical models are good enough, vast majority of chemical reactions behave as if molecules were newtonian springs. When people talk of quantum effects in chemistry they really mean it. In case of photosynthesis the basic molecule's efficiency was found hinging on stuff that is very quantum. This was described by Gregory Engel et al. Alan Aspuru-Guzik interprets some of what's happening as a realization of quantum computation running a tree-walking algorithm.

The wider conclusion is that living organisms do evolve around quantum effects (if the molecule existed a priori somehow) or maybe even evolve to the point of reaching and then harnessing them (making the molecule).

Now to what's Penrose about. Seldom anybody actually reads the guy or know the context. He was after the computational theory of mind. Not necessarily looking for a theory, but sneering at one big non-theory. This is in context of the 80's with unhinged stuff coming from the AI community (same as today). He was wondering if brain could really be this reducible and a known model of computation (he hasn't done a good review) from the physical point of view. For him a full logical reductionism necessiated excissing the measurement problem (the basic point goes back to Niels Bohr who thought biology cannot be entirely physics because of this). So he proposed a crude version that fleshes out measurement as a real physical process. His idea has the main upside of removing both quantum and AI mysticism.

This received angry and mostly off-topic response based on caricature summaries like elsewhere in this thread. Of course lending themselves to such caricatures says a lot about writing if not the ideas, but it's an honest try that ain't entirely silly and without upsides. The microtubules guy is someone else who Penrose was just happy to see come and collaborate with later. He'd be happy with any kind of other stuff, such as from the original article. BTW the author is Philip Ball, a long time editor of the Nature journals, and he's got a new book out about interpretations of quantum mechanics that is really superb to anything else on the market by far (that is could be better but isn't worthless).

I find these threats doubtful, I don't see the editorial board wasting their life on sustained activism over the years chasing remnants of something they helped to create and what would be served a deathly blow by their resignation already. The author however has a history of activism I haven't looked into, but that usually involves a spin. There's also the possibility of his correspondents' misguided politeness by throwing him something to chew on to diffuse the blame. Mathematical Intelligencer editor could be seen as doing that in a somewhat more intelligent way blaming the possibility of "international hype".

As for the description of alleged emotional states involved, I'm oblivious and not seeing the relevance. Recounting the events and actions taken sufficed for a horrific story. The author deemed it important however to make it into something even more colourful with threats of some unspecified future actions (how does one harass a journal?).

The managing editor you speak of went on leave and has an interim replacement. I can see that entirely appropriate if only because of how retraction was handled by deletion and overwriting, instead of a proper notice in place. This was extremely unprofessional administration, which is usually a duty of the managing editor solely. The other possibility I described is that it wasn't really published the usual way, which is even more damning.

Sorry, but the ArXiv does have a moderation team and stuff is being removed. Alike, most online journals remove stuff by wholly replacing it with a retraction notice. Journals printed on paper issue retraction letters and leave it at that, but some also do restrict online access afterwards.

What no journal does is to replace erroneously published article with another entirely unrelated one in-place. This is a very poor behaviour on the part of the managing editor here, who is currently on leave and replaced.

Nature is unusual, for example they publish letters complaining about ArXiv's moderation, beside publishing a lot of editorial and opinion stuff.

Sorry, but it is for everybody to decide. Reviewers don't have a sacred sanction and exclusive right to judge. Many a time in cases of plagiarism I worked through I've met with this argument from the accused authors. It boils down to that I have no right to question basic decency because only reviewers are entitled to pass judgement on that and they already did.

Also from the description, which is not impartial being by the author, it is admitted it was snuck into an online journal by one of its editors. We don't know anything about the nature of peer review in this case other than when the wider board of editors got a know of that, majority of them allegedly threatened to resign.

It is however a very bad form by the managing editor to publish another article in the place of the other, even if that one was decided to be published erroneously. NYJM journal page says he's on leave and ceded his duties to an interim replacement.

What the parent charitably didn't stress is that this proof is the totality of mathematical work in this paper.

The rest is a stream of words.

As such it is a work of social science. It might even have been respectable in social science journal. Economists input a lot of assumptions into calculus 101 level equations and call that a "mathematical proof" of an economic theory.

If the author wanted this to be a interdisciplinary discussion, why drag it into a mathematical journal where actual mathematical truths are published?

Author says himself he was unable to formulate actual mathematical idea and recruited help. Why ask Tabachnikov, who is a geometer specializing in classical mechanics, instead of someone with like a clue about statistical modeling? He then compares his experience to one he had fighting in Vietnam... which only makes me wonder if that wasn't the point: to either succeed with a flag-planting diversion or be able to make that comparison and hero of himself anyways.

It captures more of the spatial (metric topological) arrangement in the set. Example they give in the paper is the MINST dataset where distinctly looking digits like 1 and 0 get separated farther apart and similar ones clump together, whereas t-SNE while correctly delimiting individual clusters clumps them all in a blob.