Simulation Theory Is Dumb

This article is dedicated to Ethan Mollick, a professor at The Wharton School, who tweeted this on 7/25/2021:

You have probably heard the argument that we might be living in a simulation, but no one asks the next obvious question: if we were, when would someone turn it off? Well, this paper decided that the answer is “soon” — either out of boredom or to save money.

The paper Mollick is talking about is called “Simulation Typology and Termination Risks,” a paper published by the Ivy League Cornell University. I’ve previously insulted academic journals as nothing more than a place where people with the right degrees on their wall circle-jerk each other — and each day I’m proven more and more right. The fact is, this paper had four authors — all four of whom are credited academics. Four professors wrote a paper where this is the conclusion:

Humanity’s location at the beginning of the 21st century could be best explained by the fact that this period is in a scientific Fermi simulation by an alien civilization or future humanity-based AGI simulating variants of its own origin, which could be called a “singularity simulation”.

If this is what academia looks like now, then Harvard should give David Icke a tenured position as a professor. Speaking of David Icke — the well-known conspiracy theorist who popularized the idea that the world is controlled by lizard-people — how many academics go from buying this nonsense to mocking him, or mocking Ancient Aliens, or mocking Erich von Däniken, or mocking Graham Hancock? Those guys are mocked, while simulation theory is believed by Elon Musk and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Tyson has openly mocked Däniken’s idea — popularized in his 1968 book Chariots Of The Gods — that the pyramids of Egypt were built by space aliens, while he at least tacitly endorses the possibility that aliens created all of reality.

Far as I can tell, the idea behind “simulation theory” is credited to a game named Nick Bostrom who wrote a paper in 2003 called “Are You Living In A Computer Simulation?” However, the paper makes it clear at the start that this is not the only possibility, but instead one of three possibilities if you assume certain things occurring:

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human…