Articles like these are the reason women in the sciences are not taken seriously.
Carmen and Leonie have PhDs in computer science. Divya is a student of geology on other planets. They’re probably brilliant people in their fields but when they write stuff like this, they remind everyone of the shirt incident, which reinforces the reason nobody wants women in the sciences.
There is a silver lining. I can’t wait for President Trump to issue an Executive Order directing all federal agencies to stop using the Supremacy Clause as Constitutional justification for federal laws over-riding state laws. Power to the People, baby!
Joe Doakes
From the article:
We take issue with the use of ‘supremacy’ when referring to quantum computers that can out-calculate even the fastest supercomputers (F. Arute et al. Nature 574, 505–510; 2019). We consider it irresponsible to override the historical context of this descriptor, which risks sustaining divisions in race, gender and class. We call for the community to use ‘quantum advantage’ instead.
The community claims that quantum supremacy is a technical term with a specified meaning. However, any technical justification for this descriptor could get swamped as it enters the public arena after the intense media coverage of the past few months.
Read: A tsunami of stupid, driven by an ignorant, incurious media, might cause idiots – invariably idiots on the left – to think “quantum supremacy” is a racist dog whistle.
In our view, ‘supremacy’ has overtones of violence, neocolonialism and racism through its association with ‘white supremacy’. Inherently violent language has crept into other branches of science as well — in human and robotic spaceflight, for example, terms such as ‘conquest’, ‘colonization’ and ‘settlement’ evoke the terra nullius arguments of settler colonialism and must be contextualized against ongoing issues of neocolonialism.
Let’s be honest – it’s not just women who publish this twaddle. Bowderiing science like this, if it jumps the banks of Moron Creek, will harm everyone, matter their pigment or genitalia.
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