Jess Reidel: I enjoy your take on Quantum Mechanics, Eliezer, and I recommend this blog to everyone I know. I agree with you that Copenhagen untenable and the MWI is the current best idea. But you talk about some of your ideas like it’s obvious and accepted by anyone who isn’t an idiot. This does your readers a disservice.
I realize that this is a blog and not a refereed journal, so I can’t expect you to follow all the rules. But I can appeal to your commitment to honesty in asking you to express the uncertainty of your ideas and to defer when necessary to the academic establishment.
I mentioned the fact that there were problems with mangled worlds, but admit that I didn’t mention what they were (e.g., seeming to predict that we should find ourselves in a very high-entropy world). In fact, the probability I assign to mangled worlds is below 50% - I just think it is a beautiful exemplar of what a non-mysterious explanation should look like. I’m sorry if this is not clear; I should make that point in an upcoming post explicitly about the Born probabilities.
The main problem with MWI is the Born probabilities—which I did mention, at length. I am not aware of any serious problems with MWI besides the Born probabilities. I will discuss continuity and choice of basis in upcoming days.
I will attempt to establish in upcoming posts that all remaining quantum theories worthy of being taken seriously are many-worlds theories. Hidden variables are experimentally disproved; quantum collapse is unphysical. The non-many-worlds theories are not just wrong, they are silly. Academic physics has been committing a Type II silliness error, where something is very silly but academia views it as not silly.
This is a strong statement, but it is what I will be attempting to establish. I hope that, from this perspective, it will be clear why I have delayed talking about complex craziness until simple sanity is established as a foundation for discussion thereof.
Yes, I talk about these ideas as if they are obvious. They are. It’s important to remember that while learning quantum mechanics. It’s not difficult unless you make it difficult. Just because certain academics are currently doing so, is no reason for me to do the same. I explicitly said at the outset (in “Quantum Explanations”) that the views I presented would not be a uniform consensus among physicists, but I was going to leave out the controversies until later, so I could teach the version that I think is simple and sane. Bayesianism before frequentism.
I thought I was taking Tegmark’s word on infinite universes and inflation, but I would seem to have misinterpreted that word, as verified by Wikipedia; my apologies to my readers. I’ve edited accordingly. It is not an important point except for people having emotional problems with many-worlds.
Jess Reidel: I enjoy your take on Quantum Mechanics, Eliezer, and I recommend this blog to everyone I know. I agree with you that Copenhagen untenable and the MWI is the current best idea. But you talk about some of your ideas like it’s obvious and accepted by anyone who isn’t an idiot. This does your readers a disservice.
I realize that this is a blog and not a refereed journal, so I can’t expect you to follow all the rules. But I can appeal to your commitment to honesty in asking you to express the uncertainty of your ideas and to defer when necessary to the academic establishment.
I mentioned the fact that there were problems with mangled worlds, but admit that I didn’t mention what they were (e.g., seeming to predict that we should find ourselves in a very high-entropy world). In fact, the probability I assign to mangled worlds is below 50% - I just think it is a beautiful exemplar of what a non-mysterious explanation should look like. I’m sorry if this is not clear; I should make that point in an upcoming post explicitly about the Born probabilities.
The main problem with MWI is the Born probabilities—which I did mention, at length. I am not aware of any serious problems with MWI besides the Born probabilities. I will discuss continuity and choice of basis in upcoming days.
I will attempt to establish in upcoming posts that all remaining quantum theories worthy of being taken seriously are many-worlds theories. Hidden variables are experimentally disproved; quantum collapse is unphysical. The non-many-worlds theories are not just wrong, they are silly. Academic physics has been committing a Type II silliness error, where something is very silly but academia views it as not silly.
This is a strong statement, but it is what I will be attempting to establish. I hope that, from this perspective, it will be clear why I have delayed talking about complex craziness until simple sanity is established as a foundation for discussion thereof.
Yes, I talk about these ideas as if they are obvious. They are. It’s important to remember that while learning quantum mechanics. It’s not difficult unless you make it difficult. Just because certain academics are currently doing so, is no reason for me to do the same. I explicitly said at the outset (in “Quantum Explanations”) that the views I presented would not be a uniform consensus among physicists, but I was going to leave out the controversies until later, so I could teach the version that I think is simple and sane. Bayesianism before frequentism.
I thought I was taking Tegmark’s word on infinite universes and inflation, but I would seem to have misinterpreted that word, as verified by Wikipedia; my apologies to my readers. I’ve edited accordingly. It is not an important point except for people having emotional problems with many-worlds.