It's Computer Simulations All the Way Down

A couple CEOs (of an electric car company and a bank) recently announced things like "There's an 80% chance that we're living in a computer simulation." I'm not even going to quote the story correctly or read it because it's nonsense! These are non-scientists making these claims, so it's no surprise that the claims are pseudoscience at best.

The problem with this type of claim is that it's not based on any evidence, but rather on the logically unsound conclusion that if something observed has similarities with something known, then the observed thing must be the same as the known thing. Similarly, atoms can be modelled as spheres around other spheres, just like star systems and galaxies etc. Therefore there is an 80% chance that star systems are the atoms of some larger world, because they're similar. A turtle's back looks a bit similar to the Earth, therefore there's an 80% chance that we live on a giant turtle. One of the only creative things we know of is humankind, therefore it must be that everything we don't understand the origin of has been created by a being that looks like us (ie. that we were created in its image). And: measurements of the universe have some quantum properties, similar to computers (which we understand more), therefore the entire universe must be a computer. The computer simulation hypothesis is not so different from the god delusion or from the plethora of crackpot theories that link any marginally similar phenomena ("my EtherParticles theory explains gravity because gravity restricts movement away from mass, just like trying to move through a dense soup of particles in the ether is predicted by me to restrict movement," etc. etc. etc. etc.)

If the universe is so certainly a computer simulation in some extra-universal world, then what is that world? Why would that world exist "in reality" if ours is so certainly simulated? Wouldn't it mean that it's nearly certain that that world is also a simulation in another world, and so on ad absurdum? And where is the evidence of any of that? There is exactly as much evidence of a turtle that the universe sits upon, as there is of a computer running us.

We must be careful to speak of what the evidence says, and not confuse that with what we imagine it to mean. Extra-universal turtles, universe simulators, alternate realities where the laws of physics are anything we can imagine, are all flights of fantasy. If you have a fantastic idea, and want to speak of it being real, you must find a way to test it. If a test tells you that the universe is similar to a computer simulation, that doesn't mean it is one. You must show that it can't be anything other than a simulation, if you want to be certain that it is. And, "I can't imagine anything else it could be," is not nearly adequate reasoning. In science, unknowns stay as unknowns until there is testable theory to say otherwise. Ruling out everything but what we think we understand, is unscientific and outdated by a few centuries.

What test has been proposed by these CEOs, that could indicate that the universe is a simulation? How do those tests rule out that it could be anything else?