Something feels very wrong about this sentence… I get a nagging feeling that you believe he has a valid argument, but he should have been nice to people who are irrationally clinging to alternative interpretations, via such irrational ways as nitpicking on the unimportant details.
I believe he has a valid argument for a substantially weaker claim of the sort I described earlier.
He “should have been nice to people” (without qualification) by not trying to draw (without a shred of credible evidence) a link between rationality/intelligence/g-factor and (even a justified amount of) MWI-skepticism. It’s hard to imagine a worse way to immediately put your audience on the defensive. It’s all there in the manual.
I believe he has a valid argument for a substantially weaker claim of the sort I described earlier.
Why do you think so? Quantum mechanics is complicated, and questions of what is a ‘better’ theory are very subtle.
On the other hand, figuring out what claim your arguments actually support, is rather simple. You have an argument which: gets wrong elementary facts, gets wrong terminology, gets wrong the very claim. All the easy stuff is wrong. You still believe that it gets right some hard stuff. Why?
It’s all there in the manual.
He should have left a line of retreat for himself.
For the reasons outlined above. Occam’s razor + locality.
On the other hand, figuring out what claim your arguments actually support, is rather simple.
My argument is distinct from Yudkowsky’s in that our claims are radically different. If you disagree that MWI is more probable than straw-Copenhagen, I’d like to know why.
You have an argument which: gets wrong elementary facts, gets wrong terminology, gets wrong the very claim. All the easy stuff is wrong. You still believe that it gets right some hard stuff. Why?
None of the “easy stuff” is pertinent to the argument that MWI is more probable than straw-Copenhagen. For example, the interferometer calculation is neither used as evidence that MWI is local, nor that MWI is less complicated. The calculation is independent of any interpretation, after all.
For the reasons outlined above. Occam’s razor + locality.
if I stand a needle on it’s tip on a glass plate, will needle remain standing indefinitely? No it probably won’t even though by Occam’s razor, zero deviation from vertical is (arguably) more probable than any other specific deviation from vertical. MWI seems to require exact linearity, and QM and QFT don’t do gravity, i.e. are approximate. Linear is a first order approximation to nearly anything.
None of the “easy stuff” is pertinent to the argument that MWI is more probable than straw-Copenhagen.
Intelligence and careful thinking --> getting easy stuff right and maybe (very rarely) getting hard stuff right.
Lack of intelligence and/or careful thinking --> getting easy stuff wrong and getting hard stuff certainly wrong.
What is straw Copenhagen anyway? Objective collapse caused by consciousness? Copenhagen is not objective collapse. It is a theory for predicting and modelling the observations. With the MWI you still need to single out one observer, because something happens in real world that does single out one observer, as anyone can readily attest, and so there’s no actual difference here in any math, it’s only a difference in how you look at this math.
edit: ghahahahaha, wait, you literally think it has higher probability? (i seen another of the Yudkowsky’s comments where he said something about his better understanding of probability theory) Well, here’s the bullet: the probability of our reality being quantum mechanics or quantum field theory, within platonic space, is 0 (basically, vanishingly small, predicated on the experiments confirming general relativity all failing), because gravity exists and works so and so but that’s not part of QFT. 0 times anything is still 0. (That doesn’t mean the probability of alternate realities is 0, if there can be such a thing)
I believe he has a valid argument for a substantially weaker claim of the sort I described earlier.
He “should have been nice to people” (without qualification) by not trying to draw (without a shred of credible evidence) a link between rationality/intelligence/g-factor and (even a justified amount of) MWI-skepticism. It’s hard to imagine a worse way to immediately put your audience on the defensive. It’s all there in the manual.
Why do you think so? Quantum mechanics is complicated, and questions of what is a ‘better’ theory are very subtle.
On the other hand, figuring out what claim your arguments actually support, is rather simple. You have an argument which: gets wrong elementary facts, gets wrong terminology, gets wrong the very claim. All the easy stuff is wrong. You still believe that it gets right some hard stuff. Why?
He should have left a line of retreat for himself.
For the reasons outlined above. Occam’s razor + locality.
My argument is distinct from Yudkowsky’s in that our claims are radically different. If you disagree that MWI is more probable than straw-Copenhagen, I’d like to know why.
None of the “easy stuff” is pertinent to the argument that MWI is more probable than straw-Copenhagen. For example, the interferometer calculation is neither used as evidence that MWI is local, nor that MWI is less complicated. The calculation is independent of any interpretation, after all.
if I stand a needle on it’s tip on a glass plate, will needle remain standing indefinitely? No it probably won’t even though by Occam’s razor, zero deviation from vertical is (arguably) more probable than any other specific deviation from vertical. MWI seems to require exact linearity, and QM and QFT don’t do gravity, i.e. are approximate. Linear is a first order approximation to nearly anything.
Intelligence and careful thinking --> getting easy stuff right and maybe (very rarely) getting hard stuff right.
Lack of intelligence and/or careful thinking --> getting easy stuff wrong and getting hard stuff certainly wrong.
What is straw Copenhagen anyway? Objective collapse caused by consciousness? Copenhagen is not objective collapse. It is a theory for predicting and modelling the observations. With the MWI you still need to single out one observer, because something happens in real world that does single out one observer, as anyone can readily attest, and so there’s no actual difference here in any math, it’s only a difference in how you look at this math.
edit: ghahahahaha, wait, you literally think it has higher probability? (i seen another of the Yudkowsky’s comments where he said something about his better understanding of probability theory) Well, here’s the bullet: the probability of our reality being quantum mechanics or quantum field theory, within platonic space, is 0 (basically, vanishingly small, predicated on the experiments confirming general relativity all failing), because gravity exists and works so and so but that’s not part of QFT. 0 times anything is still 0. (That doesn’t mean the probability of alternate realities is 0, if there can be such a thing)