Tom: Yes, for as long as QM has been around people have tried to hitch doofus ideas about “mind influencing reality” to it—and for those of us who spend a significant part of our lives fighting such idiocy, it’ll be great to see Eliezer bring his considerable didactic skills to the fight.
I was talking about something completely different: namely, the philosophical debate about whether we should regard a quantum state as what’s really out there (like a coin), or as our description of what’s out there (like a probability distribution over coin flips). Neither view implies any ability to change the world just by wishing it, any more than you can bias a coin flip by just changing your probability estimate. But (unless I misread him) Eliezer was promising come down hard in favor of the former view, and I was pointing to mixed states as the battlefield where the two views really meet in an interesting way.
Tom: Yes, for as long as QM has been around people have tried to hitch doofus ideas about “mind influencing reality” to it—and for those of us who spend a significant part of our lives fighting such idiocy, it’ll be great to see Eliezer bring his considerable didactic skills to the fight.
I was talking about something completely different: namely, the philosophical debate about whether we should regard a quantum state as what’s really out there (like a coin), or as our description of what’s out there (like a probability distribution over coin flips). Neither view implies any ability to change the world just by wishing it, any more than you can bias a coin flip by just changing your probability estimate. But (unless I misread him) Eliezer was promising come down hard in favor of the former view, and I was pointing to mixed states as the battlefield where the two views really meet in an interesting way.