I’ve recently been working my way through a long set of 2008 blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky. It starts with an attempt to make quantum mechanics seem “normal,” and then branches out into some interesting essays on philosophy and science. I’m nowhere near as smart as Yudkowsky, so I can’t offer any opinion on the science he discusses, but when the posts touched on epistemological issues his views hit home.
and
I used to have a prejudice against math/physics geniuses. I thought when they were brilliant at high level math and theory; they were likely to have loony opinions on complex social science issues. Conspiracy theories. Or policy views that the government should wave a magic wand and just ban everything bad. Now that I’ve read Robin Hanson, Eliezer Yudkowsky and David Deutsch, I realize that I’ve got it wrong. A substantial number of these geniuses have thought much more deeply about epistemological issues than the average economist.
So when Hanson says we put far too little effort into existential risks, or even lesser but still massive threats like solar flares, and Yudkowsky says cryonics is under-appreciated, or when they say AI (or brain ems) is coming faster than we think and will have far more profound effects than we realize, I’m inclined to take them very seriously.
Reading the comments… one commenter objects to WMI in a way which I would summarize as: “MWI provides identical experimental predictions to CI, which makes it useless, and also MWI provides wrong experimental predictions (unlike CI), which makes it wrong”.
The author immediately detects the contradiction:
You know more about it than me. But if it’s just equations and you can’t empirically test which interpretation is true, then why does the Casimir force make MWI less likely?
Another commenter says that MWI has a greater complexity of thought, and while it is more useful to explore algorithmic possibilities on quantum computers abstractly, CI wins because it is about the real world.
Then the former commenter says (in reaction to the author) that MWI didn’t provide useful predictions, and that Casimir force can only be explained by quantum equations and not by classical physics.
(Why exactly is that supposed to be an argument against MWI? No idea. Also, if MWI doesn’t provide useful predictions, how can it be useful for studying quantum computers? Does it mean that quantum computers are never going to work in, you know, the real life?)
Finally, yet another commenter explains things from MWI point of view, saying that “observers” must follow the same fundamental physics as rocks.
Economist Scott Sumner at Econlog praised heavily Yudkowsky and the quantum physics sequence, and applies lessons from it to economics. Excerpts:
and
Reading the comments… one commenter objects to WMI in a way which I would summarize as: “MWI provides identical experimental predictions to CI, which makes it useless, and also MWI provides wrong experimental predictions (unlike CI), which makes it wrong”.
The author immediately detects the contradiction:
Another commenter says that MWI has a greater complexity of thought, and while it is more useful to explore algorithmic possibilities on quantum computers abstractly, CI wins because it is about the real world.
Then the former commenter says (in reaction to the author) that MWI didn’t provide useful predictions, and that Casimir force can only be explained by quantum equations and not by classical physics.
(Why exactly is that supposed to be an argument against MWI? No idea. Also, if MWI doesn’t provide useful predictions, how can it be useful for studying quantum computers? Does it mean that quantum computers are never going to work in, you know, the real life?)
Finally, yet another commenter explains things from MWI point of view, saying that “observers” must follow the same fundamental physics as rocks.