However there is a way to convince a lot of people in a few Everett branches: You make a one-time big announcement in the Internet, TV etc. and say that there is a well tested quantum coin-flipper, examined by a community consisting of the most honest and trusted members of the society. You take some random 20 bit number and say that you will flip the equipment 20 times and if the outcome is the same as the predetermined number, then you will take it as a one to million evidence that the Multiple World theory works as expected. Of course, only people in the right branch will be convinced. Nevertheless, they could be convinced enough to make serious thoughts about the viability of quantum Russian roulette type games.
I vaguely remember this being discussed here before, and people deciding it wouldn’t work. Before the coin-flipper is run, you have a 1/2^20 chance of seeing your number come up, whether many worlds is true or false. That means that seeing the number come up doesn’t tell you anything about whether MW is true or not. It just tells you you’re extremely lucky: either lucky enough that the coin-flipper got a very specific number, or lucky enough to have ended up in the very specific universe where the flipper got that number.
I don’t really buy that argument. It would apply to any measurement scenario. You could say in the two-mirror experiment: “These dots on the screen don’t mean a thing, we just got extremely lucky.” Which is of course always a theoretical possibility.
Of course you can derive that you were extremely lucky, but also that “someone got extremely lucky” [SGEL]. If you start with some arbitrary estimates e.g. P(SWI)=0.5 and P(MWI)=0.5 and try to update P(MWI) by using Bayesian inference, you get:
I vaguely remember this being discussed here before, and people deciding it wouldn’t work. Before the coin-flipper is run, you have a 1/2^20 chance of seeing your number come up, whether many worlds is true or false. That means that seeing the number come up doesn’t tell you anything about whether MW is true or not. It just tells you you’re extremely lucky: either lucky enough that the coin-flipper got a very specific number, or lucky enough to have ended up in the very specific universe where the flipper got that number.
I don’t really buy that argument. It would apply to any measurement scenario. You could say in the two-mirror experiment: “These dots on the screen don’t mean a thing, we just got extremely lucky.” Which is of course always a theoretical possibility.
Of course you can derive that you were extremely lucky, but also that “someone got extremely lucky” [SGEL]. If you start with some arbitrary estimates e.g. P(SWI)=0.5 and P(MWI)=0.5 and try to update P(MWI) by using Bayesian inference, you get:
By P(SGEL|SWI)=1/2^20
P(SGEL|MWI)=1
You get:
P(MWI|SGEL)=P(SGEL|MWI)P(MWI)/(P(SGEL|SWI)P(SWI)+P(SGEL|MWI)P(MWI))=
0.5/((1/2^20)0.5 + 0.5)=1/(1+1.2^20) ~ 1-1/2^20
Well, yes, but we can’t peek into other Everett branches to check them for lucky people.
I don’t see why you wanted to. You could only increase P(MWI) by finding there any.