(This summary book on Popper is only 115 pages. The easiest to read book option.)
Open-mindedness and curiosity are one thing. Raw native intelligence is something different. I might be above average on the first two, but I expect I have less of the second that the average LWer. For example, I would love to understand the math of quantum mechanics, but it’s hard for me and really learning it, if I decided to, would likely be a multi-year endevour. Same with computer programming...I would love to actually be able to do it, but it doesn’t come super easily.
I think you’re mistaking subject specific skills for raw native intelligence. Being good at math and programming isn’t what intelligence is about. They are specific skills.
BTW I believe most educational material is quite bad and makes stuff far harder and more confusing than necessary. And for quantum physics in particular the situation is pretty terrible (if you want to learn it in depth; there’s OK popular science books for a lower level of detail). The situation with programming is better: there’s way more self taught programmers and more non-academic efforts to try to create material to help people learn programming, which I think are often more successful than the stuff schools put out.
I would equate intelligence with basically how good one is at learning in general, without giving priority to some fields. I think open mindedness and curiosity are crucial traits for that. A lot of people aren’t much good at learning in general, but have a specific field or two where they do OK. They can be impressive because in the area where they are rational they gain a lot of expertise and detailed knowledge. But I don’t regard them as more intelligent than more broad people.
You find math hard to learn. But most mathematicians find various things hard to learn too, such as (commonly) social skills. Most people are more impressed by math knowledge than social knowledge because it’s more common. Most people learn social skills, it’s nothing special. Yet that doesn’t really imply math is harder. More people try hard to learn social skills. And more people are alienated from learning math, at a young age, by their teachers (especially females).
Whatever topics one is bad at learning, I don’t think it’s normally caused by intelligence itself. I think raw native intelligence is itself a misconception and that the hardware capabilities of people’s brains don’t vary a lot and the variance doesn’t have much practical consequence. Rather, I think what people call “intelligence” is actually a matter of their philosophical theories and rationality, especially either general purpose ideas (which allow one to be good at many things) or ideas in specific fields people are impressed by (e.g. math).
What I think causes people to have trouble with math, or social skills, or other things, besides the inherent difficulty of the subjects, is irrationalities, caused largely by external pressure and cruelty. Those people who have trouble learning social skills were teased as children, or had trouble finding friends, or something. They did not try to learn to interact with others in an environment where everyone was nice to them, and they could fail a bunch of times with no harm coming to them, and keep trying new things until they got it. With math, people are forced to do things they don’t want to like unpleasant math homework and math tests. They don’t get to learn at their own pace for their own intrinsic motivations. This commonly alienates people from the subject. Causes like these are cultural.
Rather, I think what people call “intelligence” is actually a matter of their philosophical theories and rationality, especially either general purpose ideas (which allow one to be good at many things) or ideas in specific fields people are impressed by (e.g. math).
Have you looked at the evidence that this is false? Or is your belief not falsifiable? :)
It is primarily a philosophical belief. It can be falsified by criticism. It could in theory be falsified using scientific tests about how brains work, but technology isn’t there yet. It could also in theory be falsified if, say, people were dramatically different than they are. But I’m not relying on any special evidence in that regard, just basic facts of the world around us we’re all aware of. (For example, people commonly hold conversations with each other and partially understand each other. And then learn new languages. And children learn a first language. And so on. These things contradict some views of the mind, but they also allow for many including mine.)
BTW Popper never said all ideas should be (empirically) falsifiable. That’s a myth (which you didn’t say, but perhaps hinted at, so worth mentioning). He said that if they can’t be then they aren’t science, but he did not intend that as an insult, and he himself engaged in a lot of non-science.
In some special cases, saying something is non-science is a good criticism. Those cases are when something claimed to be science as part of its argument for why its right, and part of its way of presenting itself. If it claims to be science, but isn’t, that’s a problem. Popper’s favorite examples of this were ideas of Marx, Freud and Adler, which made specious claims to scientific status.
You’re right—I was only teasing, except that I think there is plenty of suggestive evidence for a meaningful innate G (even though it’s a sum of various types of health, and not only genetic, much less the sum of just a few SNPs). I was thinking of falsifiability because it seems to me that you’d say in response to any study that seems to segregate people by G and measure their outcomes later, you’d just say “they were already on the path toward having a sane+rational set of beliefs+practices”.
I’ve held a tentative version of your view (that nearly anyone could in principle learn to be smart) in the past. I’ve moved away from it as I’ve read more, but I still think there’s a great deal of difference in ability to observe or judge truth, at equal native mental talent, between someone with a workable set of beliefs and skills, and someone who’s tied to enough screwed-up beliefs and practices. (probably everyone sees this)
Your unusual behavior at first made me underestimate your competence. My heuristics usually save me a great deal of time, so I won’t apologize for them, but it was diverting having them tested.
I’ve read a single book of Popper’s (something like Open Society + its Enemies) and took away from it that he was smart and disliked Plato. So I don’t think I understand what it is you like about him, or why it would be useful for me to know more of what he wrote.
I would also say that measuring outcomes is a hard issue—e.g. you have to decide what is a good outcome. And all sorts of stuff interferes. Some people are too smart—in a sense—which can lead to boredom and alienation because they are different from their peers. There may be a sweet spot a little above average but not too far. Sometimes really exceptional people have exceptional outcomes, but sometimes not. I wouldn’t predict in advance that the smartest people will have the most successful outcomes, by many normal measures of good outcomes.
There’s a saying: The B students work for the C students. The A students teach.
The first thing I’d want to know about any potential study is basically: what are you going to do and why will it work? They need philosophical sophistication to avoid all kinds of mistakes. Which is just what the Conjunction Fallacy papers lack, as well as, e.g., many heritability papers.
I’ve read a single book of Popper’s (something like Open Society + its Enemies) and took away from it that he was smart and disliked Plato.
That must have been volume 1 only. Volume 2 criticizes Marx and Hegel.
Popper’s biggest strength is his epistemology. He solved the problem of induction, identified and criticized the justificationist tradition (which most people have been unconsciously taking for granted since Aristotle), and presented a fallibilist and objective epistemology, which is neither authoritarian nor skeptical, and which works both in theory and practice. His epistemology also integrates well with other fields—there are interesting connections to physics, evolution, and computation (as discussed in Deutsch’s book The Fabric of Reality), and also to politics, education, human relationships (in the broadest sense; ways people interact, cooperate, communicate, etc) and morality.
A good place to start reading Popper is his book Conjectures and Refutations. It is a collection of essays, the first of which of which is long and covers a lot of epistemology.
Another good place to start is Bryan Magee’s short book on Popper. And another is David Deutsch’s books which explain epistemology and many other things.
My heuristics usually save me a great deal of time, so I won’t apologize for them
Yes I know what you mean. I’m sure I dismiss some people who are worthwhile (though I use rather different heuristics than you, and I also tend to give people a lot of chances. One result of giving lots of chances is I can silently judge people but then see if my judgment was wrong on the second or third chance). I think the important things are that you have some ability to recognize when they may not be working well, and that after they fail in some respect you look for a way to change them so they don’t make the same mistake again. Changing them not to repeat a mistake, while still saving lots of time, can be hard, but it’s also important.
One thing about G is that it’s extremely difficult to disentangle parenting factors. When you intelligence test people at age 8, or 12, or 20, they’ve already had years and years of exposure to parenting, and often some school too. That stuff changes people, for better or worse. So how are you to know what was innate, and what wasn’t? This is a hard problem. I don’t think any experimental social scientists have solved it. I do think philosophy can address a lot of it, but not every detail.
One thing about G is that it’s extremely difficult to disentangle parenting factors
Right. Thus the obsession with twin studies.
As for your complaint about lack of (philosophical) rigor on the part of psychologists and other scientists, I’m often shocked at the conclusions drawn (by motivated paper authors and hurried readers) from the data. In theory I can just update slightly on the actual evidence while not grasping the associated unproven stories, but in practice I’m not sure I’ve built a faithful voting body of facts in my brain.
But they do not solve the problem. The only seem to at low precision, without much rigor. They are simplistic.
For example, they basically just gloss over and ignore the entire issue of gene-meme interactions, even though, in a technical and very literal sense, most stuff falls under that heading.
What basically happens—my view—is genes code for simple traits and parents in our culture react to those different traits. The children react to those reactions. The parents react to that new behavior. The children react to that. The parents react to that. And so on. Genetic traits—and also trivial and, for all intents and purposes, random details—set these things off. And culture does the rest. And twin studies do not rule this out, yet reach other conclusions. They don’t rule out my view with evidence, nor argument, yet somehow conclude something else. It’s silly.
Sometimes one gets the impression they’ve decided that if proper science is too hard, they are justified in doing improper science. They have a right to do research in the field! Or something.
Disagree? Try explaining how they work, and how you think they rule out the various possibilities other than genetic control over traits straight through to adulthood and independent of culture.
I would equate intelligence with basically how good one is at learning in general, without giving priority to some fields. I think open mindedness and curiosity are crucial traits for that.
Maybe I was above average in, say, my high school graduating class, but I doubt that is true of the Less Wrong community. People wouldn’t be here if they lacked that degree of open-mindedness and curiosity.
They don’t get to learn at their own pace for their own intrinsic motivations. This commonly alienates people from the subject. Causes like these are cultural.
Would you like to comment on how non-Western cultures view math differently? Or offer a suggestion as to why I was the only white girl in my high school calculus and vectors class? (I like math a lot...it’s just that most people who like math like it because they’re good at it, so the only people who want to talk to me about math and how awesome/fascinating it is are usually massively better at it than I am, which may be why I perceive myself as not being good at it.)
I do have stubbornness, which can be an advantage to learning new things (I spent 8 years teaching myself to sing, and went from complete tone-deafness to composing my own piano and vocal pieces and performing moderately difficult solos.) I am also stubbornly loyal to prior commitments, which basically means that once I start doing something I never stop...after awhile this limits my ability to start new things. (I can’t teach myself quantum mechanics while I’m working 2 jobs, singing in a church choir, and going to school full-time.)
And for quantum physics in particular the situation is pretty terrible (if you want to learn it in depth; there’s OK popular science books for a lower level of detail).
Agreed! I ran into exactly this problem; I’ve read enough pop science books that I no longer learn anything new from them, but when I took a textbook out of the university library, I took one look at the first page and was lost. Eliezer’s intro to quantum mechanics would probably help, if I made the commitment to go through it entirely and practice all the math, but again, not something I can do very easily on my breaks at work.
People wouldn’t be here if they lacked that degree of open-mindedness and curiosity.
Some might. Joining might make them feel good about themselves, and help them feel open minded.
Would you like to comment on how non-Western cultures view math differently?
I don’t know a lot. Asian cultures value school highly, and value math and science highly, and pressure children a lot. Well, actually I only know much about Japan, South Korea and China. The school pressure on children in Japan itself is much worse than the well known pressure on asian children in the US, btw.
Or offer a suggestion as to why I was the only white girl in my high school calculus and vectors class?
Culture. Beyond that, I don’t know exactly.
it’s just that most people who like math like it because they’re good at it
I think cause and effect goes the other way. Initially, some people are more interested in math (sometimes due to parental encouragement or pressure). Consequently, they learn more of it and get a lead on their peers. This can snowball: they do well at it relative to their peers, so they like it more. And the teacher aims the material at the 20th percentile student, or something (not 50th percentile because then it’s too hard for too many people). Result: math class is pretty hard for people in percentiles 5-90, who might not be very far apart in skill. And they don’t like it. A few fail and hate it. And the ones with the early lead never have the experience, at least until college, of math being hard.
I do have stubbornness, which can be an advantage to learning new things (I spent 8 years teaching myself to sing, and went from complete tone-deafness to composing my own piano and vocal pieces and performing moderately difficult solos.)
Perhaps this persistence and patience is a way in which you are smarter than many Less Wrongers.
I am also stubbornly loyal to prior commitments
Be careful with this. I’m not entirely sure what you mean by a commitment, but for example I think it’s important to be willing to stop reading a book in the middle if you don’t like it. If it’s not working, and there’s no particular reason you need to know the contents of this book, just move on! Some people have trouble with that. There’s also the sunk cost fallacy that some people have trouble with.
I’ve read enough pop science books that I no longer learn anything new from them
David Deutsch says there is no very good way to learn quantum mechanics, currently. Also that it’s one of the simpler and more important areas of physics, when presented correctly.
I believe the best serious physics books are Feynman’s lectures (that’s physics in general. I think there’s quantum stuff towards the end which I haven’t read yet.). But they are hard and will require supplementary material. If one finds them too hard then they’re probably not best for that person.
For pop science books, you might take a look at Deutsch’s books because I believe they offer some unique ideas about physics not found in other popular science books. By focussing on the Many Worlds Interpretation, he’s already different than many books, and then he goes further by offering his unique perspective on it, including concepts like fungibility. And he relates the ideas to philosophy in very interesting ways, as well as explaining Popperian philosophy too (he is the best living Popperian).
I like Feynman’s pop science books a lot too, and he does go into quantum physics in some. I don’t know how unique those are, though.
I glanced at Eliezer’s physics posts. Looks strongly pro-Many Worlds Interpretation which is a good sign.
I tried reading the Uncertainty Principle essay. It looks confusing and not very helpful to me. Which is a bad sign since I already know stuff about that topic in advance, so it should be easier for me to follow. It appears to be going into a bunch of details when there’s a simpler way to both explain and prove it. Maybe he’s following in the (bad) tradition of some physics book he read about it.
It’s hard to tell because it kind of meanders around a bunch, and certainly some specific statements are correct, but I don’t think Eliezer understands the uncertainty principle very well. e.g. he wants to rename it:
Heisenberg Certainty Principle
But that doesn’t make sense to me. It’s a logical deduction from the laws of physics about how when some observables are sharp, others must not be sharp (math proves this). Sharp means “the same in all universes”.
Here’s a quote from The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, terminology section:
Uncertainty principle: The (badly misnamed) implication of quantum theory that for any fungible collection of instances of a physical object, some of their attributes must be diverse.
This is hard to understand out of context, but it basically means if you consider all the versions of something in different universes, say a cup of coffee, and you consider the observable attributes of them (like temperature of the coffee), some observables are different in different universes. They can’t all be the same in all universes.
How you get from there to a certainty principle I don’t know.
Eliezer uses difficult language like “Amplitude distributions in configuration space evolve over time” which I don’t think is necessary. For one thing, in my understanding, the wave function is a function over configuration space and that’s the Schrödinger picture. But it’s easier to understand quantum physics using the Heisenberg Picture instead which focusses on observables.
In that case I’d suggest starting with:
http://fallibleideas.com/
(try it and see if the style/approach appeals to you, if not no worries) or
http://www.amazon.com/Popper-Modern-masters-Bryan-Magee/dp/0670019674
(This summary book on Popper is only 115 pages. The easiest to read book option.)
I think you’re mistaking subject specific skills for raw native intelligence. Being good at math and programming isn’t what intelligence is about. They are specific skills.
BTW I believe most educational material is quite bad and makes stuff far harder and more confusing than necessary. And for quantum physics in particular the situation is pretty terrible (if you want to learn it in depth; there’s OK popular science books for a lower level of detail). The situation with programming is better: there’s way more self taught programmers and more non-academic efforts to try to create material to help people learn programming, which I think are often more successful than the stuff schools put out.
I would equate intelligence with basically how good one is at learning in general, without giving priority to some fields. I think open mindedness and curiosity are crucial traits for that. A lot of people aren’t much good at learning in general, but have a specific field or two where they do OK. They can be impressive because in the area where they are rational they gain a lot of expertise and detailed knowledge. But I don’t regard them as more intelligent than more broad people.
You find math hard to learn. But most mathematicians find various things hard to learn too, such as (commonly) social skills. Most people are more impressed by math knowledge than social knowledge because it’s more common. Most people learn social skills, it’s nothing special. Yet that doesn’t really imply math is harder. More people try hard to learn social skills. And more people are alienated from learning math, at a young age, by their teachers (especially females).
Whatever topics one is bad at learning, I don’t think it’s normally caused by intelligence itself. I think raw native intelligence is itself a misconception and that the hardware capabilities of people’s brains don’t vary a lot and the variance doesn’t have much practical consequence. Rather, I think what people call “intelligence” is actually a matter of their philosophical theories and rationality, especially either general purpose ideas (which allow one to be good at many things) or ideas in specific fields people are impressed by (e.g. math).
What I think causes people to have trouble with math, or social skills, or other things, besides the inherent difficulty of the subjects, is irrationalities, caused largely by external pressure and cruelty. Those people who have trouble learning social skills were teased as children, or had trouble finding friends, or something. They did not try to learn to interact with others in an environment where everyone was nice to them, and they could fail a bunch of times with no harm coming to them, and keep trying new things until they got it. With math, people are forced to do things they don’t want to like unpleasant math homework and math tests. They don’t get to learn at their own pace for their own intrinsic motivations. This commonly alienates people from the subject. Causes like these are cultural.
Have you looked at the evidence that this is false? Or is your belief not falsifiable? :)
It is primarily a philosophical belief. It can be falsified by criticism. It could in theory be falsified using scientific tests about how brains work, but technology isn’t there yet. It could also in theory be falsified if, say, people were dramatically different than they are. But I’m not relying on any special evidence in that regard, just basic facts of the world around us we’re all aware of. (For example, people commonly hold conversations with each other and partially understand each other. And then learn new languages. And children learn a first language. And so on. These things contradict some views of the mind, but they also allow for many including mine.)
BTW Popper never said all ideas should be (empirically) falsifiable. That’s a myth (which you didn’t say, but perhaps hinted at, so worth mentioning). He said that if they can’t be then they aren’t science, but he did not intend that as an insult, and he himself engaged in a lot of non-science.
In some special cases, saying something is non-science is a good criticism. Those cases are when something claimed to be science as part of its argument for why its right, and part of its way of presenting itself. If it claims to be science, but isn’t, that’s a problem. Popper’s favorite examples of this were ideas of Marx, Freud and Adler, which made specious claims to scientific status.
You’re right—I was only teasing, except that I think there is plenty of suggestive evidence for a meaningful innate G (even though it’s a sum of various types of health, and not only genetic, much less the sum of just a few SNPs). I was thinking of falsifiability because it seems to me that you’d say in response to any study that seems to segregate people by G and measure their outcomes later, you’d just say “they were already on the path toward having a sane+rational set of beliefs+practices”.
I’ve held a tentative version of your view (that nearly anyone could in principle learn to be smart) in the past. I’ve moved away from it as I’ve read more, but I still think there’s a great deal of difference in ability to observe or judge truth, at equal native mental talent, between someone with a workable set of beliefs and skills, and someone who’s tied to enough screwed-up beliefs and practices. (probably everyone sees this)
Your unusual behavior at first made me underestimate your competence. My heuristics usually save me a great deal of time, so I won’t apologize for them, but it was diverting having them tested.
I’ve read a single book of Popper’s (something like Open Society + its Enemies) and took away from it that he was smart and disliked Plato. So I don’t think I understand what it is you like about him, or why it would be useful for me to know more of what he wrote.
I would also say that measuring outcomes is a hard issue—e.g. you have to decide what is a good outcome. And all sorts of stuff interferes. Some people are too smart—in a sense—which can lead to boredom and alienation because they are different from their peers. There may be a sweet spot a little above average but not too far. Sometimes really exceptional people have exceptional outcomes, but sometimes not. I wouldn’t predict in advance that the smartest people will have the most successful outcomes, by many normal measures of good outcomes.
There’s a saying: The B students work for the C students. The A students teach.
The first thing I’d want to know about any potential study is basically: what are you going to do and why will it work? They need philosophical sophistication to avoid all kinds of mistakes. Which is just what the Conjunction Fallacy papers lack, as well as, e.g., many heritability papers.
That must have been volume 1 only. Volume 2 criticizes Marx and Hegel.
Popper’s biggest strength is his epistemology. He solved the problem of induction, identified and criticized the justificationist tradition (which most people have been unconsciously taking for granted since Aristotle), and presented a fallibilist and objective epistemology, which is neither authoritarian nor skeptical, and which works both in theory and practice. His epistemology also integrates well with other fields—there are interesting connections to physics, evolution, and computation (as discussed in Deutsch’s book The Fabric of Reality), and also to politics, education, human relationships (in the broadest sense; ways people interact, cooperate, communicate, etc) and morality.
A good place to start reading Popper is his book Conjectures and Refutations. It is a collection of essays, the first of which of which is long and covers a lot of epistemology.
Another good place to start is Bryan Magee’s short book on Popper. And another is David Deutsch’s books which explain epistemology and many other things.
Yes I know what you mean. I’m sure I dismiss some people who are worthwhile (though I use rather different heuristics than you, and I also tend to give people a lot of chances. One result of giving lots of chances is I can silently judge people but then see if my judgment was wrong on the second or third chance). I think the important things are that you have some ability to recognize when they may not be working well, and that after they fail in some respect you look for a way to change them so they don’t make the same mistake again. Changing them not to repeat a mistake, while still saving lots of time, can be hard, but it’s also important.
One thing about G is that it’s extremely difficult to disentangle parenting factors. When you intelligence test people at age 8, or 12, or 20, they’ve already had years and years of exposure to parenting, and often some school too. That stuff changes people, for better or worse. So how are you to know what was innate, and what wasn’t? This is a hard problem. I don’t think any experimental social scientists have solved it. I do think philosophy can address a lot of it, but not every detail.
Right. Thus the obsession with twin studies.
As for your complaint about lack of (philosophical) rigor on the part of psychologists and other scientists, I’m often shocked at the conclusions drawn (by motivated paper authors and hurried readers) from the data. In theory I can just update slightly on the actual evidence while not grasping the associated unproven stories, but in practice I’m not sure I’ve built a faithful voting body of facts in my brain.
Thanks for the Popper+Deutsch recommendations.
But they do not solve the problem. The only seem to at low precision, without much rigor. They are simplistic.
For example, they basically just gloss over and ignore the entire issue of gene-meme interactions, even though, in a technical and very literal sense, most stuff falls under that heading.
What basically happens—my view—is genes code for simple traits and parents in our culture react to those different traits. The children react to those reactions. The parents react to that new behavior. The children react to that. The parents react to that. And so on. Genetic traits—and also trivial and, for all intents and purposes, random details—set these things off. And culture does the rest. And twin studies do not rule this out, yet reach other conclusions. They don’t rule out my view with evidence, nor argument, yet somehow conclude something else. It’s silly.
Sometimes one gets the impression they’ve decided that if proper science is too hard, they are justified in doing improper science. They have a right to do research in the field! Or something.
Disagree? Try explaining how they work, and how you think they rule out the various possibilities other than genetic control over traits straight through to adulthood and independent of culture.
There’s other severe methodological errors too. You can read some here: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html
Maybe I was above average in, say, my high school graduating class, but I doubt that is true of the Less Wrong community. People wouldn’t be here if they lacked that degree of open-mindedness and curiosity.
Would you like to comment on how non-Western cultures view math differently? Or offer a suggestion as to why I was the only white girl in my high school calculus and vectors class? (I like math a lot...it’s just that most people who like math like it because they’re good at it, so the only people who want to talk to me about math and how awesome/fascinating it is are usually massively better at it than I am, which may be why I perceive myself as not being good at it.)
I do have stubbornness, which can be an advantage to learning new things (I spent 8 years teaching myself to sing, and went from complete tone-deafness to composing my own piano and vocal pieces and performing moderately difficult solos.) I am also stubbornly loyal to prior commitments, which basically means that once I start doing something I never stop...after awhile this limits my ability to start new things. (I can’t teach myself quantum mechanics while I’m working 2 jobs, singing in a church choir, and going to school full-time.)
Agreed! I ran into exactly this problem; I’ve read enough pop science books that I no longer learn anything new from them, but when I took a textbook out of the university library, I took one look at the first page and was lost. Eliezer’s intro to quantum mechanics would probably help, if I made the commitment to go through it entirely and practice all the math, but again, not something I can do very easily on my breaks at work.
Some might. Joining might make them feel good about themselves, and help them feel open minded.
I don’t know a lot. Asian cultures value school highly, and value math and science highly, and pressure children a lot. Well, actually I only know much about Japan, South Korea and China. The school pressure on children in Japan itself is much worse than the well known pressure on asian children in the US, btw.
Culture. Beyond that, I don’t know exactly.
I think cause and effect goes the other way. Initially, some people are more interested in math (sometimes due to parental encouragement or pressure). Consequently, they learn more of it and get a lead on their peers. This can snowball: they do well at it relative to their peers, so they like it more. And the teacher aims the material at the 20th percentile student, or something (not 50th percentile because then it’s too hard for too many people). Result: math class is pretty hard for people in percentiles 5-90, who might not be very far apart in skill. And they don’t like it. A few fail and hate it. And the ones with the early lead never have the experience, at least until college, of math being hard.
Perhaps this persistence and patience is a way in which you are smarter than many Less Wrongers.
Be careful with this. I’m not entirely sure what you mean by a commitment, but for example I think it’s important to be willing to stop reading a book in the middle if you don’t like it. If it’s not working, and there’s no particular reason you need to know the contents of this book, just move on! Some people have trouble with that. There’s also the sunk cost fallacy that some people have trouble with.
David Deutsch says there is no very good way to learn quantum mechanics, currently. Also that it’s one of the simpler and more important areas of physics, when presented correctly.
I believe the best serious physics books are Feynman’s lectures (that’s physics in general. I think there’s quantum stuff towards the end which I haven’t read yet.). But they are hard and will require supplementary material. If one finds them too hard then they’re probably not best for that person.
For pop science books, you might take a look at Deutsch’s books because I believe they offer some unique ideas about physics not found in other popular science books. By focussing on the Many Worlds Interpretation, he’s already different than many books, and then he goes further by offering his unique perspective on it, including concepts like fungibility. And he relates the ideas to philosophy in very interesting ways, as well as explaining Popperian philosophy too (he is the best living Popperian).
I like Feynman’s pop science books a lot too, and he does go into quantum physics in some. I don’t know how unique those are, though.
I glanced at Eliezer’s physics posts. Looks strongly pro-Many Worlds Interpretation which is a good sign.
I tried reading the Uncertainty Principle essay. It looks confusing and not very helpful to me. Which is a bad sign since I already know stuff about that topic in advance, so it should be easier for me to follow. It appears to be going into a bunch of details when there’s a simpler way to both explain and prove it. Maybe he’s following in the (bad) tradition of some physics book he read about it.
It’s hard to tell because it kind of meanders around a bunch, and certainly some specific statements are correct, but I don’t think Eliezer understands the uncertainty principle very well. e.g. he wants to rename it:
But that doesn’t make sense to me. It’s a logical deduction from the laws of physics about how when some observables are sharp, others must not be sharp (math proves this). Sharp means “the same in all universes”.
Here’s a quote from The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, terminology section:
This is hard to understand out of context, but it basically means if you consider all the versions of something in different universes, say a cup of coffee, and you consider the observable attributes of them (like temperature of the coffee), some observables are different in different universes. They can’t all be the same in all universes.
How you get from there to a certainty principle I don’t know.
Eliezer uses difficult language like “Amplitude distributions in configuration space evolve over time” which I don’t think is necessary. For one thing, in my understanding, the wave function is a function over configuration space and that’s the Schrödinger picture. But it’s easier to understand quantum physics using the Heisenberg Picture instead which focusses on observables.