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.

If you're in the mood for a novel that dunks on these nerds, I highly recommend Jason Pargin's If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_This_Book_Exists,_You%27re_in_the_Wrong_Universe

I sneered that in a blog post last year, as it happens.

https://awful.systems/post/2876657

This feels like quackery but I can't find a goal...

But if they both hold up to scrutiny, this is perhaps the first time scientific evidence supporting this theory has been produced – as explored in my recent book.

There it is.

Edit: oh God it's worse than I thought

The web design almost makes me nostalgic for geocities fan pages. The citations that include himself ~10 times and the greatest hits of the last 50 years of physics, biology, and computer science, and Baudrillard of course. The journal of which this author is the lead editor and which includes the phrase "information as the fifth state of matter" in the scope description.

Oh God the deeper I dig the weirder it gets. Trying to confirm whether the Information Physics Institute is legit at all and found their list of members, one of whom listed their relevant expertise as "Writer, Roleplayer, Singer, Actor, Gamer". Another lists "Hyperspace and machine elves". One very honestly simply says "N/A"

I am not making this up.

The Gmail address also lends the whole thing an air of authority. Like, you've already paid for the domain, guys.

General sneer against the SH: I choose to dismiss it entirely for the same reason that I dismiss solipsism or brain-in-a-vat-ism: it’s a non-starter. Either it’s false and we’ve gotta come up with better ideas for all this shit we’re in, or it’s true and nothing is real, so why bother with philosophical or metaphysical inquiry?

Despite the lack of evidence, this idea is gaining traction in scientific circles as well as in the entertainment industry.

lol

How sneerable is the entire "infodynamics" field? Because it seems like it should be pretty sneerable. The first referenced paper on the "second law of infodynamics" seems to indicate that information has some kind of concrete energy which brings to mind that experiment where they tried to weigh someone as they died to identify the mass of the human soul. Also it feels like a gross misunderstanding to describe a physical system as gaining or losing information in the Shannon framework since unless the total size of the possibility space is changing there's not a change in total information. Like, all strings of 100 characters have the same level of information even though only a very few actually mean anything in a given language. I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about the amount of information in a system increasing or decreasing naturally outside of data loss in transmission? IDK I'm way out of my depth here but it smells like BS and the limited pool of citations doesn't build confidence.

I don’t have the time to deep dive this RN but information dynamics or infodynamics looks to be, let’s say, “alternative science” for the purposes of trying to up the credibility of the simulation hypothesis.