If you’re here, you’ve got time.
whowhowho
You ought to, however, agree that QM is special: no other physical model has several dozens of interpretations, seriously discussed by physicists and philosophers alike. This is an undisputed experimental fact (about humans, not about QM).
Perhaps you mean the sheer quantity is so great. But there have been, an are, disputes about classical pysyics and relativity. Some of them have been resolved by just beiieving the theory and abandoning contrary intuitions. At one time, atoms were dismissed as a “mere calculational device”. Sound familiar?
Landmines in a topic make it really hard to discuss ideas or do work in these fields, because chances are, someone is going to step on one, and then there will be a big noisy mess that interferes with the rather delicate business of thinking carefully about confusing ideas.
Have mainstream philosophers come up with a solution to that? Can LessWronigans learn from them? Do LessWrongians need to teach them?
Here’s a heuristic: There are no slam-dunks in philosophy.
Here’s another: Most ideas come in strong, contentious flavours and watered-down, easy-to-defend flavours.
But water things down enough and they are no longer philosophy.
The predictable consequence of this sort of statement is that someone starts going off about hospitals and terrorists and organs and moral philosophy and consent and rights and so on. This may be controversial, but I would say that causing this tangent constitutes a failure to communicate the point. Instead of prompting someone to think, you invoked some irrelevant philosophical cruft. The discussion is now about Consequentialism, the Capitalized Moral Theory, instead of the simple idea of thinking through consequences as an everyday heuristic.
But the Capitalized Moral Theory is what “consequentialism” means. You have invented a severely watered down version “the everyday heuristic”. How could anyone guess that’s what you mean? I wouldn’t have.
For example: is it racist/sexist to point out the differences in average IQ between the people of different races/genders?
It depends on what relevance it has, and on what is being left out. Someone once told me that GW Bush must be smarter than Obama because he is white. That’s an intellectual fallacy even if it isn’t boo-word racism.
In my experience these words, especially when spoken by the offended, frequently mean “you are making an argument/stating a potential truth that I don’t like”.
In my experience, references to “human biodiversity” are frequently presented as if they are value neutral, but frequently aren’t because of the factors mentioned above.
- 10 Mar 2013 16:07 UTC; 5 points) 's comment on Don’t Get Offended by (
More-developed societies develop technology; less-developed societies use them without paying the huge costs of development.
If you patent something, you can charge what you like for the license. Were you suggesting that some countries ignore patent law; or that extenalities (such as failed R&D projects and education costs) don’t get recompensed? Or something else?
But not always. Japan has for decades been cashing in on American developments in cars, automation, steelmaking, ICs, and other areas.
That’s probably unfair. Japan files a lot of patents—more than the US by some measures.
The subject was discussed at Overcoming Bias recently.
It would have been helpful to answer the question as stated. Not all societies have affirmative action and my polity doesn’t. Depending on ones background assumptions, affirmative action could be seen as restoring equality, or creating inequality. You seem to have assumed a take on that without arguing it. It would have been helpful to argue it, and not to treat “society” as synonymous with “US society”.
OTOH, you don’t get let off moral responsibility just because it isn’t your job.
Or it might be better to use two different words. In fact, (courtesy of Popper IRC), we have “propensity” for objective probabilitty.
Except that poor white neighborhoods are much safer then poor black neighborhoods
...in the US.
Um, now that you mention it, this is not a bad description of the politics of a number of African nations.
It’s not at all good. A few rich people exploiting a lot of poor ones is not the same as a few poor people robbing a few wealthier ones. And,it is not as if the politics of most African countries now is so very different from the politics of most European ones up until a few centuries ago; There’s no gene for fair government either.
If history and practice led to blacks being treated as if the mean IQ was 20 points lower, and the actual difference is 5 points, then the proper public policy is to act as if the difference is 5 points, not zero points to remedy the history and practice.
Why isn’t the proper public policy to treat people as individuals?
You didn’t answer my question about treating other things as equal. If genetics based discrimination leads to $X million lost in strikes and rioting, shoulnd’t that be taken into account?
*
I think you are misattributing to stubborness that which is better explained by miscommunication. For instance, I have been around LW long enough to realise that the local definition of (super) intelligence is something like “(high0 efficienty in realising ones values, however narrow or bizarre they are”. DP seems to be running on a definition where idiot-savant style narrow focus would not count as intelligence. That is not unreasonable in itself.
The real problem comes in when employers decide that they need exceptional people but can’t actually identify these exceptional people.
When does that occur? What happened to resume″s, qualifications and tests?
Who guards the guardians? Who watches the watchers?
What guards institutions is other institutions, eg a free press. You are tacitly assuming there is just a Government and the People and that is that. But healthy systems have multiple institutions, and even split the government, eg into executive and legislature.
“shut up and calculate” works just fine
It doesn’t work “fine”, or at all, as an interpretation. It’s silent as to what it means.
There is no agreement among the experts about the ontology of QM (b
There are slowly emerging themes, such as the uselessness of trying to recover classical physics at the fundamental level, and the importance of decoherence.
Simply “trusting the SE” gives you nothing useful, as far as the measurement is concerned.
I don’t see what you mean by that. An interpretation that says “trust the SE” (I suppose you mean “reify the evolution of the WF according to the SE”) won’t give you anything results-wise, because its an interpretation
So there is no need to use the term “real” except maybe as a shorthand for the territory in the map-territory model (which is an oft useful model, but only a model).
FYI, “territory” means “territory”, not map.
. On the other hand, you can probably agree that removing objective reality from one’s ontology would make MWI an unnecessary addition to a perfectly good model called relational quantum mechanics.
Model of what? If you subtract the ontology from an interpretation, what are you left with knowledge of?
To prevent the other worlds from being real enough to have people inside them,
In RQM, there are no other worlds in the MWI sense. MWI allows observers to make contradictory measurements, such as |up> and |down> and then tries to remove the contradiction by indexing each measurement to its own world. rQM does not allow observers to make contradictory measurements, so there is no need to wish away worlds, because there was never a need to introduce them.
“However, the comparison does not lead to contradiction because the comparison is itself a physical process that must be understood in the context of quantum mechanics. Indeed, O′ can physically interact with the electron and then with the l.e.d. (or, equivalently, the other way around). If, for instance, he finds the spin of the electron up, quantum mechanics predicts that he will then consistently find the l.e.d. on (because in the first measurement the state of the composite system collapses on its [spin up/l.e.d. on] component). That is, the multiplicity of accounts leads to no contradiction precisely because the comparison between different accounts can only be a physical quantum interaction. This internal self-consistency of the quantum formalism is general, and it is perhaps its most remarkable aspect. This self consistency is taken in relational quantum mechanics as a strong indication of the relational nature of the world.”—SEP
we need to insist very loudly that this whole diagram of what is ‘real relative to’ other things, is not itself real. I
rQM has an ontology. It’s an ontology of relations. rQM denies state—non-relational infmoration. rQM does not need to say anything is real relativee to anything else—only that some information is not available to some systems.
Also, since only individual points in configuration space allow one particle to say that another particle is in an exact position and have this be ‘real’, if you take a blob of amplitude large enough to contain a person’s causal process, you will find that elements of a person disagree about what is real relative to them...
I have no idea what that means.
Only they are not, because you are not forced to do a job just because you have invested in the training—however strange that may seem to Homo Economicus.
It isn’t at all clear why all that would add up to something simpler than a single world theory
Some concrete examples would be most helpful