(Interestingly, in excusing D-Wave’s statements, some commenters explicitly defended standards of intellectual discourse so relaxed that, as far as I could tell, just about anything anyone could possibly say would be OK with them-except of course for what I say on this blog, which is not OK! It reminds me of the central tenet of cultural relativism: that there exist no universal standards by which any culture could ever be judged “good” or “bad,” except that Western culture is irredeemably evil.) In a different context, these sorts of responses would be considered strange, and the need to resort to them revealing. In summary, the real issue isn’t what some clinical trial did or didn’t show it’s you and your hostile attitude.” If you can’t tune out the PR and concentrate on the science, that’s your own damn problem. And as for the startup’s misleading claims to the public? Oh, don’t be so naïve: that’s just PR. Imagine that someone wrote a blog post bringing all of this to public attention.Īnd now imagine that the response to that blogger was the following: “aha, but isn’t it possible that some future clinical trial will show an advantage for the gene therapy-maybe with some other group of patients? Even if not, isn’t it possible that the startup will manage to develop an effective gene therapy sometime in the future? Betcha didn’t consider that, did you? And anyway, at least they’re out there trying to make gene therapy work! So we should all support them, rather than relentlessly criticizing. And imagine that a more relevant clinical trial-mostly unmentioned in the press-had also been done, and discovered that when you compare to the right drugs, the drugs do better. Now imagine that closer examination of the clinical trial revealed that it showed nothing of the kind: it compared against the wrong drugs. Imagine that this claim was widely repeated in the press as an established fact. Here’s an analogy: imagine that a biotech startup claimed that, by using an expensive and controversial new gene therapy, it could cure patients at a higher rate than with the best available conventional drugs-basing its claim on a single clinical trial. It would have been better to sidestep all the other questions-not one of which I really know the answer to, and each of which admits multiple valid perspectives-and just focus relentlessly on the truth of assertion (*). In retrospect, I now think that was a mistake. For example: isn’t it possible that D-Wave’s current device will be found to provide a speedup on some other distribution of instances, besides the one that was tested? Even if not, isn’t it possible that D-Wave will achieve a genuine speedup with some future generation of machines? Did it make business sense for Google to buy a D-Wave machine? What were Google’s likely reasons? What’s D-Wave’s current value as a company? Should Cathy McGeoch have acted differently, in the type of comparison she agreed to do, or in how she communicated about its results? Should I have acted differently, in my interaction with McGeoch?Īnd, I’m afraid to say, I jumped in to the discussion of all of those questions-because, let’s face it, there are very few subjects about which I don’t have an opinion, or at least a list of qualified observations to make. In the comments, many people tried repeatedly to change the subject from (*) to various subsidiary questions. More research is needed to clarify the issue, but in the meantime, it seems worth knowing that this is where things currently stand. It appears that, while the D-Wave machine does outperform certain off-the-shelf solvers, simulated annealing codes have been written that outperform the D-Wave machine on its own native problem when run on a standard laptop. However, the claim is not supported by the evidence currently available. ![]() (*) D-Wave founder Geordie Rose claims that D-Wave has now accomplished its goal of building a quantum computer that, in his words, is “better at something than any other option available.” This claim has been widely and uncritically repeated in the press, so that much of the nerd world now accepts it as fact. Let me try to summarize the main point I’ve been trying to get across this whole time. ![]() Wrap-Up (June 5): This will be my final update on this post (really!!), since the discussion seems to have reached a point where not much progress is being made, and since I’d like to oblige the commenters who’ve asked me to change the subject.
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