Elizer. I’ve been a Believer for 20 years now, so I’m with you. But it seems like you’re losing people a little bit on Bayes v Science. You’ve probably already thought of this, but it might make sense to take smaller pedagogical steps here to cover the inferential distance.
One candidate step I thought of was to first describe where Bayes can supplement Science. You’ve already identified choosing which hypotheses to test. But it might help to list them all out. Off the top of my head, there’s also obviously what to do in the face of conflicting experimental evidence, what to do when the experimental evidence is partially but not exactly on point, what to do when faced with weird (i.e., highly unexpected) experimental evidence, and how to allocate funds to different experiments (e.g., was funding the LHC rational?). I’m certain that you have even more in mind.
Then you can perhaps spiral out from these areas of supplementation to convince people of your larger point. Just a thought.
I just had a thought, probably not a good one, about Many Worlds. It seems like there’s a parallel here to the discovery of Natural Selection and understanding of Evolution.
Darwin had the key insight about how selection pressure could lead to changes in organisms over time. But it’s taken us over 100 years to get a good handle on speciation and figure out the detailed mechanisms of selecting for genetic fitness. One could argue that we still have a long way to go.
Similarly, it seems like we’ve had this insight that QM leads to Many Worlds due to decoherence. But it could take quite a while for us to get a good handle on what happens to worlds and figure that detailed mechanisms of how they progress.
But it was pretty clear that Darwin was right long before we had worked the details. So I guess it doesn’t bother me that we haven’t worked out the details of what happens to the Many Worlds.