Although there is no direct effect on the state of the evidence, I guess you’re right that there can be an indirect effect. For example, ‘collapse’ could look better than ‘no-collapse’ given wavefunction non-realism, but ‘no-collapse’ could look better than ‘collapse’ given wavefunction realism. In this case, changing our position on wavefunction realism would change the opinion on collapse vs. no-collapse.
But this effect only occurs to the extent that people already believe in the things disproved (or called into question). People who took this “statistical sort-of-nonrealism” model seriously, rather than as merely an interesting idea, are pretty rare even in the physics world*. And here on LW? Fuggedaboutit.
* I’ve never run into one, and they never came up when I talked to someone who’s working on this kind of stuff—mostly focused on the neo-Copenhagenists, to use Leifer’s term, and testing some specific sorts of collapse.
Although there is no direct effect on the state of the evidence, I guess you’re right that there can be an indirect effect. For example, ‘collapse’ could look better than ‘no-collapse’ given wavefunction non-realism, but ‘no-collapse’ could look better than ‘collapse’ given wavefunction realism. In this case, changing our position on wavefunction realism would change the opinion on collapse vs. no-collapse.
But this effect only occurs to the extent that people already believe in the things disproved (or called into question). People who took this “statistical sort-of-nonrealism” model seriously, rather than as merely an interesting idea, are pretty rare even in the physics world*. And here on LW? Fuggedaboutit.
* I’ve never run into one, and they never came up when I talked to someone who’s working on this kind of stuff—mostly focused on the neo-Copenhagenists, to use Leifer’s term, and testing some specific sorts of collapse.