Jailbreaking the Simulation with George Hotz | SXSW 2019

[Lori]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ

[Mort Strudel]

So, I mean

the guy is a fucking nut

The simulation hypothesis is an interesting idea but it's based on a whole lot of assumptions and there's zero evidence of it, as it stands it doesn't survive occam's razor. His belief that we're in a simulation seems entirely based on "you can't prove it's wrong!" which isn't much of an argument at all. Is it possible? Sure, pretty much every conceivable creation myth you can come up with is 'possible', critical thinking is weighing different ideas and judging whether they're more likely than not. His talk about how the big bang doesn't "explain creation" applies just as easily to the simulation hypothesis because just as one might ask "what created the physical laws that allowed the big bang", one asks "what created the guy who made the simulator?". And if it's simulators all the way up, that's a multiverse worth of added complexity stretching on to infinity, so that's about as inelegant a creation myth as you can get. A lot of what he says is also "there are complicated unintuitive things in physics, therefore simulation", which doesn't follow at all. Essentially "if we don't understand it right now, it must be a computer simulation". But that's not a coherent mechanistic explanation, it's not elegant, it's no different from handwaving the diversity of life on earth as "god made it all because god does what he wants, he works in mysterious ways". Fundementally, the simulation hypothesis explains nothing and requires many assumptions, and while that doesn't make it impossible, it makes it a bad hypothesis right now given what we know (and don't know), and devoting your life to the assumption that it is correct is pretty silly.

The idea of trying to break out of the simulation is entertaining as a sci fi question, and reading his talk as a sci fi work is fun, and maybe that's his only objective. Maybe he's playing a character and he doesn't really believe this. But the implications of him of using his money creating a cult over this quackery to hack the simulation is pretty weird. And framing this as "the universe is like this, you're a narcissist if you disagree", and hearing the people in the audience ask questions seemingly from a place of "I am taking you seriously" rather than "let's have fun exploring a sci fi what-if", really makes this seem a tad worrying.

[Paul-Simon]

I think his attempt at statistically justifying his unfalsifiable and unverifiable theory is fallacious.
Basically he's saying that since there are llayers of simulations (i.e. we know we're creating worlds), it's unlikely that we're the top "node", because he assumes there are many more layers.

The same logic can be used to justify a variant of "last thursdayism". There's been only one big bang, but very many thursdays.
So clearly it is more likely that we sprang into existence some thursday. I mean, you can't disprove it, therefore it is likely.

The fallacy lies in that there's an absolutely infinite amount of unfalsifiable and unverifiable origin ideas like this, so any attempt of bringing statistics into it is to ignore the fact that you're dealing with infinity, which makes whatever number you came up with meaningless.