Very interesting -- and I broadly agree with the message.
The paper relies heavily on assumptions about how quantum theory should be interpreted, though, and those assumptions do not seem connected to any specific coherent view.
GPT 5.1 (paid version) seems to get this okay:
"Short answer: No, Steven French is not an advocate of QBism.
But he does take QBism seriously and has written about it in a broadly sympathetic and illuminating way.... [and] has sometimes defended QBism against superficial criticisms"
The combination of the NVidia-chips decision and the EO creates the impression that the biggest concern is not China winning the race to AGI/ASI, but not getting to AGI/ASI at all, unless it's done very quickly.
The goal of protecting liberal democracy might be more served by measures that help European economies and increase its military power, e.g. getting rid of aggressive decarbonization targets.
Perhaps we want to keep those for other reasons, but there are definitely unpleasant tradeoffs here.
This suggests that, if you want to understand QM like Einstein wanted as akin to statistical physics, in terms of genuine phase space probability densities, Anti-Wick quantization is a natural place to look.
And the connection with Anti-Wick quantization is simply that a quantum expectation value <F|Â|F> calculated via Segal Bargmann space is a weighted phase space integral of the function A that is promoted to  by Anti-Wick, not Weyl, quantization.
Oh, I'm sure that you could familiarize yourself with Segal-Bargmannspace very quickly. It has a nice Wikipedia entry: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segal%E...
To be really convincing, this approach needs a concise account of underlying microdynamics. Right now, I am working on this. Before that, the next item in the series will be on the Kochen-Specker theorem and non-contextuality.
Anti-Wick quantization has its natural home in Segal-Bargmann space: the Hilbert space of Gaussian-integrable holomorphic functions, where creation and annihilation operators correspond to multiplication and derivative wrt to the complex phase space variable.
This goes together with a view of the Husimi function as a probability density, proposed earlier by Frit Bopp, Drummond and Reid, and myself.
It turns out that, yes, if you assume that self-adjoint operators represent the functions assigned to them via Anti-Wick quantization, you can interpret quantum expectation values as phase space integrals.
Classical mechanics has no measurement problem, quantum mechanics does. Mathematically, the transition goes via quantization: mapping phase space functions to self-adjoint operators.
A natural idea: Can a smart choice of quantization scheme help avoid the measurement problem?
Why philosophers of physics should look more into Anti-Wick quantization -- and quantization in general.
New paper in Physics Letters A: Sharp values for all dynamical variables via Anti-Wick quantization sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
This new peer-reviewed theoretical physics paper, in a good journal, is, according to its author (on X) based on an AI-generated research idea:
arxiv.org/abs/2511.15935
The research is probably not very original. Still, I find it depressing how close we are to being superseded by the machines.
Also, a typical ambiguity that occurs here again:
The economic loss in question would be relative to a counterfactual scenario with no/less climate change, not an absolute decline.
Good question!
It might help if the authors of climate scenarios would not also advocate specific decarbonization pathways and make otherwise highly political recommendations. It might also be good if they acknowledged that decarbonization is hard and very risky when done unilaterally.
Mijn ervaringen: dat collega's migratie altijd als wenselijk zien, dat ze liever onderzoek doen naar hoe migratie negatief "geframed" word dan naar hoe de maatschappij echt met bepaalde aspecten van migratie worstelt.
Algemeen word naar tradeoffs van migratie en cohesie niet zo graag gekeken.
Ja. Mijn ervaring stemt overeen met jouw verhaal (goede speech).
Of: Maatsschappelijke relevantie van onderzoek ook als risico voor bias zien. En in voorstellen schrijven hoe ons onderzoek, indien maatschappelijk relevant, voor zowel meer linkse als meer rechtse projecten interessant zou kunnen zijn.
Het zou misschien goed zijn als wij in onze NWO voorstellen niet alleen een hoofdstuk over "Knowledge utilisation" moesten schrijven maar ook over hoe onze overtuigingen tot bias in onze hypotheses en conclusies kunnen leiden en of we tegendredraadse adviseurs hebben.
Is er in de Nederlandse wetenschap nog ruimte voor tegendraads onderzoek? Ik sprak er vrijdag over bij het symposium Open debat in de wetenschap! aan de @unileiden.bsky.social Lees hier een bewerkte versie van mijn voordracht op Substack: open.substack.com/pub/hofhuis/p/…
Similarly for climate change and other hot button issues such as migration.
I profit from reading these things. But indeed I hardly post because almost no one seems to end up reading it.
Good threads by physicists and mathematicians slightly beyond what I am familiar with.
Info and discussion about how recently released AI models perform on benchmarks.
Respectful and contentful discussion about AI progress between boosters, sceptics, doomers, and sometimes politicians.
No, it does have great downsides, but my honest impression is that I (still) learn much more there than over here. Bluesky would need much more diversity in ideas and expertise to fully catch up.
The issue concerns the inherent plausibility of the theistic designer hypothesis. As such, the Sober point does seem relevant.
Anyway, thanks for highlighting how you see objective value as relevant here.
You may want to tread the fine line between these options. If so, I appreciate the idea.
Or assume an intellectualized external super-creator hypothesis, with a designer characterized only in an abstract metaphysical way and completely unlike humans. Then it is not even clear what it would mean for that being to have intentions.
In my multiverse book I frame this as a dilemma for the proponent of the design argument:
Either embrace an anthropomorphic designer that is "in the world". Then it is perhaps justifiable to attribute all kinds of intentions etc. But that hypothesis is completely discredited by modern science.
And Narveson: "Bodiless minded super-creators are a category that is way, way out of control"
The more our hypotheses of intelligent designers depart from the human case, the more in the dark we are as to what the ground rules are for inferring intelligent design."
