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Comment Not quite (Score 4, Informative) 11

That's not actually what the announcement says:

When submitting review articles or position papers, authors must include documentation of successful peer review to receive full consideration. Review/survey articles or position papers submitted to arXiv without this documentation will be likely to be rejected and not appear on arXiv.

(my emphasis). They're still accepting preprints of research papers without prior peer review.

Comment Re:Inability to judge short vs long term effects (Score 1) 155

Or take pain medication with opiates as an example.

That's quite a bad example. The long-term effect of not treating chronic pain is that your nerves become so used to transmitting pain signals that they keep doing it even after the actual cause has resolved itself. It's a lose-lose scenario. I've tried both paths (no medication in my 20s when I had a serious carpal tunnel inflammation; opiates in my 30s when I had a damaged disc from a traffic incident) and although the opiates didn't fully remove the pain I would choose to take them again.

Comment Re:Based on the article... (Score 1) 248

it contains a rigorous proof that significant parts of the observable universe are uncomputable

Where? It claims

Thus, Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem asserts the strict containment $Th(F_{QG}) \not\subseteq True(F_{QG})$ [41,42], guaranteeing the existence of well-formed $L_{QG}$-statements that are true but unprovable within the algorithmic machinery of $F_{QG}$. Physically these Gödel sentences correspond to empirically meaningful facts e.g., specific black-hole microstates that elude any finite, rule-based derivation.

but I see zero attempt to justify the claim that the unprovable theorems correspond to meaningful physical states. If we posit for the sake of argument that the Collatz conjecture is true but unprovable, does that mean that it corresponds to a black-hole microstate?

Comment Re:Either I'm confused or the summary is incomplet (Score 1) 248

(Turing seems to have proven this point.. or it's widely accepted to be the truth.. I don't remember)

This is the Church-Turing hypothesis, which argues from the equivalence of lambda calculus, mu-recursive functions and Turing machines that these all capture the notion of effective calculation. Since then many other models of computation have been proven equivalent, but it's probably not possible to prove that no (oracle-free) computational model can be more powerful.

Comment Re:Short sighted (Score 1) 248

Based on this assumption Godel proved that there are things that algorithms cannot compute.

Since this is /. I won't apologise for pedantry. Gödel proved that in any sufficiently complicated axiom scheme there are theorems which cannot be proven. The incompleteness theorem isn't really about algorithms, although the proof technique of diagonalisation was borrowed by Turing for the proof of the halting theorem. Church restricted the term algorithm to what can be computed with a Turing machine, but modern computability theory makes heavy use of oracles, so it's important to be clear about the computational model. The paper under discussion probably rules out simulation in a context without oracles, but if we're speculating about the existence of a superuniverse in which this one is being simulated then "It cannot have an oracle because I can't imagine, based on the physics of this universe, how one could exist" seems to be presupposing the conclusion.

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