It's perpetually surprising to me that articles like this one can find their way into the Science section of what is by most accounts a Newspaper For Smart People. Even more astounding is that they got David Chalmers to contribute some quotes to it.

You should read the piece for yourself, but the gist of what John Tierney excitedly reports is that Dr. Nick Bostrom, Oxford philosophy professor, has decided that we may all be living in a computer simulation. He reasons that future civilizations will become advanced enough to run simulations of brains, and that they'll make widespread use of this technology for entertainment or to research their past. If they use it enough, the odds of a given mind from any point in history occurring outside of the system become quite low. If you consider the possibility of nested simulations the odds diminish even further.

The whole "ancestor simulation" premise sounds like it suffers from some confusion about the reversibility of deterministic processes. There's also a bit of an issue with thinking that a lack of information can be remedied with probabilistic hand-waving (this Crooked Timber post rails against the technique nicely). Bostrom's ideas, or at least Tierney's writeup, seem to ignore the considerably better-developed and more interesting speculation about the possibility of an Omega Point. And I have some anti-reductionist complaints that I doubt anyone reading this blog will be very receptive to.

But mostly this is bad because it's all so banal. Put a group of freshmen in a room with a copy of Principles of Philosophy, the first Matrix movie and a dime bag and you'll get pretty much the same thing (including the overly-cute World of Warcraft reference).

Amazingly, this is actually only the second-worst science article I've recently read. Check out the BBC's coverage of an amazing new "paper battery" — a carbon-nanotube-based technology from Rensselaer that made Slashdot's frontpage yesterday. The writeup is bold enough to include a "How a paper battery works" graphic without actually demonstrating any evidence that the admittedly paper-based technology could be used as a battery. The article mentions voltage, but nothing about capacity. Neither does the original press release upon which it's based, which ought to be a red flag to anyone who took AP Physics and/or has wondered why we use batteries despite the existence of capacitors.

This looks like an awful lot like a novel capacitor and nothing more. I seriously doubt it can store a fraction as much charge as even the cheapest chemical cell on sale at the nearest drugstore. Carbon nanotube ultracapacitors may become a useful technology someday, but we're nowhere near replacing the lithium batteries in your mobile electronics with them. But you'd never know from the article that this technology's energy-storage applications will likely be limited to digital watches... maybe.

I can only think of two reasons why science coverage is so awful, neither of which is particularly original, but both of which I can't resist repeating. First, there's obviously the question of expertise — journalists need to be generalists. Even when they consult an informed party for a quote, they may not trust that source's judgment about what makes (or fails to make) the story newsworthy — they just see "possible applications include curing cancer and humanity's lack of heat-vision" on the press release and decide to run with it.

Second, and more evident in the Tierney article, I suspect, is the industry's willingness to let science fans like Gregg Easterbrook pursue their hobby on their employer's dime (and newsprint) after proving themselves in some other journalistic area. I can't blame these writers for trying this — I'd do the same thing if I were in their position, and probably embarrass myself just as often. But the expertise problem must frequently stop their editors from exerting enough influence on the result.

UPDATE: Tim Lee also thinks Tierney's article is pretty lame.

UPDATE 2: BoingBoing has posted a letter in which the writer implies that Dr. Bostrom is ripping off a 90s sci-fi author who used a similar premise in one of his stories. That seems extremely unlikely to me, but I do think it's good further evidence of how obvious the idea is.