I’ve read through the whole Quantum Physics Sequence once or twice, and whenever Eliezer talks about actual science, it is popularized, but not wrong. Some parts are explained really nicely, too. Unfortunately, those are the parts that are also irrelevant to learning rationality, the whole impetus for Eliezer writing the sequence. And the moment he goes into MWI apologia, for lack of a better word, it all goes off the rails, there is no more science, just persuasion. To be fair, he is not alone in that. Sean Carroll, an excellent physicist from whose lecture notes I had learned General Relativity, has published a whole book pushing the MWI onto the unsuspecting public.
One area where the Quantum Physics sequence is useful for rationality is exposing how weird and counter-intuitive the world is, and feeling humbled about one’s own stated and unstated wrong assumptions and conclusions, something we humans are really bad at. Points like “All electrons are the same. This one here and that one there” “Actually, there are no electrons, just fields that sometimes look like electrons”.
Where the sequence fails utterly in my view is the pseudo-scientific discussions about “world thickness” and the fictional narratives about it.
I’ve read through the whole Quantum Physics Sequence once or twice, and whenever Eliezer talks about actual science, it is popularized, but not wrong. Some parts are explained really nicely, too. Unfortunately, those are the parts that are also irrelevant to learning rationality, the whole impetus for Eliezer writing the sequence. And the moment he goes into MWI apologia, for lack of a better word, it all goes off the rails, there is no more science, just persuasion. To be fair, he is not alone in that. Sean Carroll, an excellent physicist from whose lecture notes I had learned General Relativity, has published a whole book pushing the MWI onto the unsuspecting public.
One area where the Quantum Physics sequence is useful for rationality is exposing how weird and counter-intuitive the world is, and feeling humbled about one’s own stated and unstated wrong assumptions and conclusions, something we humans are really bad at. Points like “All electrons are the same. This one here and that one there” “Actually, there are no electrons, just fields that sometimes look like electrons”.
Where the sequence fails utterly in my view is the pseudo-scientific discussions about “world thickness” and the fictional narratives about it.