I took the survey and answered everything through the political compass.
shirisaya
I took the survey and answered every question. As usual, I found my ability to correctly answer the calibration questions comically bad . . . but hopefully well calibrated.
I took the survey and was annoyed to realize that I didn’t have a strong enough background to have informed answers to several questions.
Without doing the math to check, nothing that you said seems wrong. However, I take a very different lesson from the idea of the Lindy Effect than you do. Specifically, the Lindy Effect tells us that when making predictions about future lifetimes of non-perishable things, we should assume a power law distribution. If you’ve never dealt with predictions under thick-tail assumptions, you might be surprised how little intuition you will have for it. (The 80-20 rule is another example of assuming thick-tails.)
For example, a Pareto distribution (the easiest of the power law distributions) will typically have a mean larger than the median, and the mode (most common single outcome) is essentially instant failure. If the constant of proportionality in the Lindy Effect is greater than one, this implies an infinite variance even with a finite mean. Also, the force of mortality (instantaneous rate of death, aka hazard function) is a decreasing function of time.
The reason that this is typically a good rule of thumb for making future estimates is a consequence of making predictive distributions (i.e. integrating out uncertainty in a fit parameter). As the most familiar example, remember that even if the maker of the Matrix came down and told that a random variable was normally distributed, you will still need to estimate the parameters from observation. This will lead to your mean estimates being distributed as a Student-t, which is a power law.
Sadly, I don’t have the time to properly engage with your arguments. However, I have been finding your recent posts to be of unusually high quality in the direction of truth-seeking and explaining clear thinking. Please keep it up and give Scott Alexander some competition.
Please take this compliment. Despite being old enough to be your parent, I think discussions over beer with you would be a delight.
This is a very good tip and one of Richard Feynman’s better known tricks in physics.
The typical answer is that this is a result of the Poincaré recurrence theorem
This is a very good and perfectly clear post! Great job on cleaning cutting to the heart of the matter in a way that is also a good intuition pump.
You say Eliezer’s posts didn’t do it for you, but how much of it did you read?
I have read every post on overcomingbias and I’m pretty sure I’ve ready every top-level post by Eliezer on less wrong. Although I very much enjoyed Eliezer’s posts on the issue, they were intended for a wide audience and I’m looking for a technical discussion.
OK, if that’s really what it takes I guess I’ll leave it at that. But I don’t see the loss of generality from conservation laws operating on any closed system as a good thing, and I can’t understand how weighting a world (that is claimed to actually exist) by a probability measure (that I’ve seen claimed to be meant as observed frequencies) is actually a reasonable thing to do.
I would actually like to understand this, and I suspect strongly that I’m missing something basic. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to make my ignorance suitable for public consumption, but if anyone would like to help enlighten me privately, I’d be delighted.
On the issue of many-world, I must just be slow because I can’t see how it is “obviously” correct. It certainly seems both self consistent and consistent with observation, but I don’t see how this in particular puts it so far ahead of other ways of understanding QM as to be the default view. If anyone knows of a really good summary for somebody who’s actually studied physics on why MWI is so great (and sadly, Eliezer’s posts here and on overcomingbias don’t do it for me) I would greatly appreciate the pointer.
In particular, two things that I have a hard time wrapping my head around are: -If multiple worlds really are “splitting” from our own how is this accomplished without serious violations of mass and energy conservation. (I’m sure somebody has treated this somewhere since it’s so basic, but I’ve never seen it.) -Even assuming everything else is fine, the actual mechanism for which world diverge has to be spelled out. (Maybe it is somewhere, if so please help me end my ignorance.)
I’ll admit that I haven’t actually spent a great deal of time considering the issue, but I’ve never come across answers to basic questions of this sort.
Sure, I’m certainly not saying that the Copenhagen interpretation is correct, and my understanding is that a decoherence view is both more useful and simpler. MWI (at least as I understand it) is a significantly stronger claim. When we take the probabilities that come from wave state amplitudes as observed frequencies among actually existing “worlds” then we are claiming that there are many different versions of me that actually exist. It’s this last part that I find a bit of a stretch.
Thank you, this is exactly the type of linking that I was looking for. Unfortunately, the FAQ that you so kindly provided isn’t providing the rigor that I’m looking for. In fact, for the energy conservation portion, I think (although I’m by no means certain) that the argument has been simplified to the point that the explanation being offered isn’t true.
I guess what I’d really like is an explanation of MWI that actually ties the math and the explanations together closely. (I think that I’m expressing myself poorly, so I’m sorry if my point seems muddled, but I’d actually like to really understand what Eliezer seems to find so obvious.)
In my understanding, what you have presented is an argument for why MWI is interesting (is has strong aesthetic appeal) and why it’s worth looking into seriously (it doesn’t seem to have spontaneous breaking of symmetry).
What I’m looking for is a compilation of reasons that I should believe that it is true, basically a list of problems with other interpretations and how MWI fixes it along with refutations of common objections to MWI. I should also note that I’m explicitly asking for rigorous arguments (I actually am a physicist and I’d like to see the math) and not just casual arguments that make things seem plausible.
I completed every question on the survey that I could.