Richard:It took me about a year to get through The Moral Animal
What was it you think slowed you down? I got through it fairly quickly & I’m pretty sure I’m not smarter than you.
I’m genuinely curious—I was very slow with books of knowledge (if I finished them at all) till about last summer, the problem (among others) fixed itself, and the question of why (or rather, how) is driving me mad.
Re evolutionary psychology material, I strongly recommend The Moral Animal and Human Evolutionary Psychology to all fellow travelers.
You will have to study [...] and social psychology [...]
Please could you recommend some social psychology material?
I agree with these last few posts, think the points highly valuable, but fear they’ll be grossly misrepresented to paint your entire book as Written In Green Ink. It may be worth placing extra Go stones in advance...
Eliezer,
Manon de Gaillande: I don’t believe most scientists would make such huge mistakes.
This is the main doubt I was expressing in my comment you quoted. I withdraw it.
Physicists are susceptable to irrational thinking too, but I went and stuck a “High Arcane Knowledge” label on QM. So while I didn’t mind understanding things many doctors don’t about mammographies, or things many biologists don’t about evolution, thinking I knew anything fundamental about QM many physicists hadn’t figured out set off a big “Who do you think you are?” alarm.
I hereby acknowledge quantum physicists as human beings with part-lizard-inherited, spaghetti-coded-hacky brains just like me, and will try to be more rational about my sources of doubt in future.
Eliezer: But given that I believe single-worlds is false, I should not expect to encounter unknown strong arguments for it.
Indeed. And in light of your QM explanation, which to me sounds perfectly logical, it seems obvious and normal that many worlds is overwhelmingly likely. It just seems almost too good to be true that I now get what plenty of genius quantum physicists still can’t.
The mental models/neural categories we form strongly influence our beliefs. The ones that now dominate my thinking about QM are learned from one who believes overwhelmingly in MWI. The commenters who already had non-MWI-supporting mental representations that made sense to them seem less convinced by your arguments.
Sure I can explain all that away, and I still think you’re right, I’m just suspicious of myself for believing the first believable explanation I met.
Eliezer, continued compliments on your series. As a wise man once said, it’s remarkable how clear explanations can become when an expert’s trying to persuade you of something, instead of just explaining it. But are you sure you’re giving appropriate attention to rationally stronger alternatives to MWI, rather than academically popular but daft ones?
If you’re covering this later I’ll wait, but I ask now in case my confusion means I’m misunderstanding something.
Why isn’t nearly everything entanged with nearly everything else around it by now? Why is there a significant amount of much quantum independance still around? Or does it just look that way because entanged subconfigurations tend to get split off by decorehence so branches retain a reasonable amount of non-entangledness within their branch? Sorry if this is a daft or daftly phrased question.
when I realized why the area under a curve is the anti-derivative, realized how truly beautiful it was, and realized that this information had not been mentioned anywhere in my goddamned calculus textbook. Why?
Have you seen better since? Please can anyone recommend a high quality, intuitive, get-what-it-actually-means, calculus tutorial or textbook, preferably with exercises, and if so, please could you share the link?
While I’m asking, same question for Statistical hypothesis testing. Thanks.
Ah! Now I get why having distant paired particles doesn’t let you communicate faster than light. This stuff is gold.
“a total amplitude of .965”—wouldn’t it be ‘-.966’? Trivial, but if it’s going in the book...
@Roland: My physics and maths is patchy but I’m still just about following (the posts—some comments are way too advanced) though it is hard work for some bits. Lots of slow re-reading, looking things up and revising old posts, but it’s worth it.
If you’re determined enough, try reading the posts a few at a time (instead of one a day) starting a few posts before where you got stuck, and make sure you “get” each one before you move on, even if it means an hour on another web source studying the thing you don’t understand in Eliezer’s explanation.
Why should everything I can see right now be bigger than a nanometer, giving off electromagnetic radiation between 400-790 terahertz, not immediately fatal to humans and within the walls of this room? …It seems like too much coincidence.
Why should every known behavior in physics be linear in quantum evolution, local in space and time, Charge-Parity-Time symmetrical, and conservative of probability density? …It seems like too much coincidence.
Observation bias? Couldn’t some alternative behaviors be vastly harder to for us conceptualize or detect or exist near, orders of magnitude less likely to be discovered? How can you know which apparently universal laws in physics just describe the low-hanging fruit? A good guide for finding the next discovery, but not true.
That makes sense—thank you :)
Great series, btw. You make QM feel true. I always felt at odds with explanations of it before now. I still feel missing parts of the puzzle pricking at my mind (most probably answered later so I’ll hold off on annoying questions), but the bits that are there actually fit.
Eliezer: If instead we’d started out with a big light-gray square—meaning that both particles had amplitude-factors widely spread—then the second law of thermodynamics would prohibit the combined system from developing into a tight dark-gray diagonal line.
Nick: What would the result look like, then? Amplitude would still flow towards configurations where the thingies are at the same horizontal position.
This is confusing me too. Please can anyone clarify?
“Unfortunately the universe doesn’t agree with me. We’ll see which one of us is still standing when this is over.”
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky
You can blame generalizing from fictional evidence too. One-in-a-million chances come true nine times out of ten. I read it in a book somewhere.
(all else equal :-) )
Even if, in the second case, I announce an experimental method and my intent to actually test it, I have not yet experimented and I have not yet received any observational evidence in favor of the hypothesis.
But at least you’ve thought it through from an experimental method point of view, and not noticed a serious defect in your theory in the process. As long as a false theory is less likely to survive that “test”, it counts as some bayesian evidence in favor.
Robin: Normally yes, and normally it’s in an employee’s contract to follow clear and reasonable instructions from the employer. For a government, I’d interpret an election or referendum result as a clear and reasonable instructions from their employer. But AFAIK it’s not in the US government’s “contract”, nor would they be expected to automatically do whatever the less informed majority would decide on each policy issue. Though it’s often in their interests to approximate that, even if to the detriment of their duties as benefactors.
Chris: If Marxists say the sun is shining, that doesn’t necessarily make it dark out.
@Eliezer: Good post. I was already with you on AI-boxing, this clarified it.
But it also raises the question… how moral or otherwise desirable would the story have been if half a billion years’ of sentient minds had been made to think, act and otherwise be in perfect accordance to what three days of awkward-tentacled, primitive rock fans would wish if they knew more, thought faster, were more the people they wished they were...