As far as I can tell, this is wrong. Over the years many people with a graduate background in quantum physics have fact-checked the sequence, and as far as I can tell there are no significant factual errors in it. Of course there are philosophical disagreements about how to evaluate the evidence about things like MWI, but in terms of basic facts that can meaningfully be checked, the sequence seems to hold up quite well, and I would take a bet that you can’t find a simple error in it that hasn’t been addressed.
It appears we didn’t read the same comments? I’ve just gone through the whole quantum sequence, chronologically, and read the comments too. Every single post where Eliezer says something not in line with current physics thought (or takes cheap shots at academia), there’s someone in the comments with a graduate degree in physics telling him it’s nonsense. Like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rrW7yf42vQYDf8AcH/timeless-physics for example, which presents Barbour’s pseudoscience as fact despite multiple comments pointing out that his theory is nonsense, not worked out in detail, cannot be worked out in detail because it ignores asymmetrical relationships between space and time in the underlying physical equations, and is soundly rejected by peer review. Yet this forms the basis of his entire philosophy of physics and reality, his whole reason for writing the sequence in the first place!
There is a reason that scientific articles are not written in the strong first-person persuasive style that Eliezer prefers. It engages the wrong parts of our social-status and political brains making us ignore the content and evaluate arguments based on rhetorical competence, which rationalists shouldn’t do. Strip the quantum sequence of this persuasive style and the naked content is left wanting. It’s basically a reasonable explanation of standard quantum mechanics (which is fine), followed by baseless rants against a caricature of the academic world of physics and graduate studies (which only demonstrate he has no academic experience), then promotion of pseudo-science as if it were fact, and drawing even more tenuous philosophical conclusions from that pseudoscience. Eliezer is clearly talking outside of his depth, yet he does so with confidence like he is certain of the truth of what he is saying, and attacking the intelligence of naysayers. Not his best moment by a long shot.
I have an undergraduate degree and some graduate coursework in physics. My adviser’s specialty was quantum computation, a field which I’ve kept tabs on since it intersects with my own work on cryptography. His understanding of physics is amateurish, and his attacks on the academic environment of physics research falls way off the mark.
Eliezer wonders why the academic world doesn’t take his theories (e.g. timeless/functional decision theory) seriously. It’s because he comes off like a crank. And perhaps it is because in this sequence, he reveals himself to *be* a crank.
I came back to read these early sequences again because I recently found a good use case for functional decision theory and I thought I’d see if there’s any other good insights to draw from Eliezer’s writings. However I’m coming away from this thinking he was more of a one-trick pony than a possessor of rationalist superpowers.
Wait, the comments there are mostly pointing out that the parts of Barbour that Eliezer is referring to are obvious and nothing novel. Not that what he is saying is wrong!
His first idea, that time is simply another coordinate parameterizing a mathematical object (like a manifold in GR) and that it’s specialness is an illusion, is ancient. His second idea, that any theory more fundamental than QM or GR will necessarily feature time only in a relational sense (in contrast to the commonly accepted, and beautiful, gauge freedom of all time and space coordinates) is interesting and possibly true, but it is most likely not profound. I can’t read all of his papers, so perhaps he has some worthwhile work.
As far as I can tell, Eliezer is referring to the much more “trivial” aspects of Barbour’s work as described here.
To be clear, I am not a huge fan of the post in question here, but it is important to separate saying wrong things from saying confusing things.
I also want to separate making wrong claims from attacking academic institutions. I think it’s fine to say whatever you want about Eliezer’s tone, but your original comment said:
Most of the entire quantum sequence has been wrong
Which is primarily a claim about factual correctness, which I think is quite misplaced. Though I am not super confident, so if you do have a comment that points out a concrete error in one of his posts, then that would definitely convince me (though still leave me skeptical about the claim of “most”, since a lot of the sequence is just really introductory quantum mechanics that I myself can easily verify as correct).
I’ve read through the whole Quantum Physics Sequence once or twice, and whenever Eliezer talks about actual science, it is popularized, but not wrong. Some parts are explained really nicely, too. Unfortunately, those are the parts that are also irrelevant to learning rationality, the whole impetus for Eliezer writing the sequence. And the moment he goes into MWI apologia, for lack of a better word, it all goes off the rails, there is no more science, just persuasion. To be fair, he is not alone in that. Sean Carroll, an excellent physicist from whose lecture notes I had learned General Relativity, has published a whole book pushing the MWI onto the unsuspecting public.
One area where the Quantum Physics sequence is useful for rationality is exposing how weird and counter-intuitive the world is, and feeling humbled about one’s own stated and unstated wrong assumptions and conclusions, something we humans are really bad at. Points like “All electrons are the same. This one here and that one there” “Actually, there are no electrons, just fields that sometimes look like electrons”.
Where the sequence fails utterly in my view is the pseudo-scientific discussions about “world thickness” and the fictional narratives about it.
The wave function evolves differently through time than space. This is expressed in the equation itself which has a first derivative for one and a second derivative in the other. This prevents Barbour from actually achieving his unification and is what makes work quackery. The first post which introduces Barbour’s timeless formulation has a comment response from a physicist pointing this out. Just like the first post introducing the Born probabilities has a comment pointing out that the probabilities fall out of the Taylor expansion on state evolution and are not in fact mysterious at all. (Alternatively you can show this from the decision theory formulation.)
I stand by my statement that aside from a few introductory posts, the quantum physics sequence is factually wrong.
Just like the first post introducing the Born probabilities has a comment pointing out that the probabilities fall out of the Taylor expansion on state evolution and are not in fact mysterious at all. (Alternatively you can show this from the decision theory formulation.)
Can you link to this please? And explain the decision theory thing if that’s not part of the comment you’re referring to?
Apparently LessWrong comments are not indexed by google, so I don’t have a non-time-intensive way of tracking down that comment. I remember reading it in one of the earlier posts in the quantum sequence.
Here’s a paper by David Wallace on Deutsch’s decision theory formulation of the Born probabilities:
Apparently LessWrong comments are not indexed by google, so I don’t have a non-time-intensive way of tracking down that comment.
Comments should be indexed by Google (I’ve seen comments show up in my search results before), but maybe not completely? Can you send a note to the LW team (telling them why you think comments are not being indexed) to see if there’s anything they can do about this? In the meantime, have you tried LW’s own search feature (the magnifying glass icon at the top)?
Here’s a paper by David Wallace on Deutsch’s decision theory formulation of the Born probabilities
I actually wrote a comment about that back in 2009 but haven’t revisited it since. Have you read the response/counterargument I linked to, and still find Wallace’s paper compelling?
Comments should be indexed by Google. I just went to 5 very old posts with hundreds of comments and randomly searched text-strings from them on Google, and all of them returned a result:
If anyone can find any comments that are not indexed, please let me know, and I will try to fix it, but it seems (to me) that all comments are indexed for now.
As far as I can tell, this is wrong. Over the years many people with a graduate background in quantum physics have fact-checked the sequence, and as far as I can tell there are no significant factual errors in it. Of course there are philosophical disagreements about how to evaluate the evidence about things like MWI, but in terms of basic facts that can meaningfully be checked, the sequence seems to hold up quite well, and I would take a bet that you can’t find a simple error in it that hasn’t been addressed.
It appears we didn’t read the same comments? I’ve just gone through the whole quantum sequence, chronologically, and read the comments too. Every single post where Eliezer says something not in line with current physics thought (or takes cheap shots at academia), there’s someone in the comments with a graduate degree in physics telling him it’s nonsense. Like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rrW7yf42vQYDf8AcH/timeless-physics for example, which presents Barbour’s pseudoscience as fact despite multiple comments pointing out that his theory is nonsense, not worked out in detail, cannot be worked out in detail because it ignores asymmetrical relationships between space and time in the underlying physical equations, and is soundly rejected by peer review. Yet this forms the basis of his entire philosophy of physics and reality, his whole reason for writing the sequence in the first place!
There is a reason that scientific articles are not written in the strong first-person persuasive style that Eliezer prefers. It engages the wrong parts of our social-status and political brains making us ignore the content and evaluate arguments based on rhetorical competence, which rationalists shouldn’t do. Strip the quantum sequence of this persuasive style and the naked content is left wanting. It’s basically a reasonable explanation of standard quantum mechanics (which is fine), followed by baseless rants against a caricature of the academic world of physics and graduate studies (which only demonstrate he has no academic experience), then promotion of pseudo-science as if it were fact, and drawing even more tenuous philosophical conclusions from that pseudoscience. Eliezer is clearly talking outside of his depth, yet he does so with confidence like he is certain of the truth of what he is saying, and attacking the intelligence of naysayers. Not his best moment by a long shot.
I have an undergraduate degree and some graduate coursework in physics. My adviser’s specialty was quantum computation, a field which I’ve kept tabs on since it intersects with my own work on cryptography. His understanding of physics is amateurish, and his attacks on the academic environment of physics research falls way off the mark.
Eliezer wonders why the academic world doesn’t take his theories (e.g. timeless/functional decision theory) seriously. It’s because he comes off like a crank. And perhaps it is because in this sequence, he reveals himself to *be* a crank.
I came back to read these early sequences again because I recently found a good use case for functional decision theory and I thought I’d see if there’s any other good insights to draw from Eliezer’s writings. However I’m coming away from this thinking he was more of a one-trick pony than a possessor of rationalist superpowers.
Wait, the comments there are mostly pointing out that the parts of Barbour that Eliezer is referring to are obvious and nothing novel. Not that what he is saying is wrong!
As far as I can tell, Eliezer is referring to the much more “trivial” aspects of Barbour’s work as described here.
To be clear, I am not a huge fan of the post in question here, but it is important to separate saying wrong things from saying confusing things.
I also want to separate making wrong claims from attacking academic institutions. I think it’s fine to say whatever you want about Eliezer’s tone, but your original comment said:
Which is primarily a claim about factual correctness, which I think is quite misplaced. Though I am not super confident, so if you do have a comment that points out a concrete error in one of his posts, then that would definitely convince me (though still leave me skeptical about the claim of “most”, since a lot of the sequence is just really introductory quantum mechanics that I myself can easily verify as correct).
I’ve read through the whole Quantum Physics Sequence once or twice, and whenever Eliezer talks about actual science, it is popularized, but not wrong. Some parts are explained really nicely, too. Unfortunately, those are the parts that are also irrelevant to learning rationality, the whole impetus for Eliezer writing the sequence. And the moment he goes into MWI apologia, for lack of a better word, it all goes off the rails, there is no more science, just persuasion. To be fair, he is not alone in that. Sean Carroll, an excellent physicist from whose lecture notes I had learned General Relativity, has published a whole book pushing the MWI onto the unsuspecting public.
One area where the Quantum Physics sequence is useful for rationality is exposing how weird and counter-intuitive the world is, and feeling humbled about one’s own stated and unstated wrong assumptions and conclusions, something we humans are really bad at. Points like “All electrons are the same. This one here and that one there” “Actually, there are no electrons, just fields that sometimes look like electrons”.
Where the sequence fails utterly in my view is the pseudo-scientific discussions about “world thickness” and the fictional narratives about it.
The wave function evolves differently through time than space. This is expressed in the equation itself which has a first derivative for one and a second derivative in the other. This prevents Barbour from actually achieving his unification and is what makes work quackery. The first post which introduces Barbour’s timeless formulation has a comment response from a physicist pointing this out. Just like the first post introducing the Born probabilities has a comment pointing out that the probabilities fall out of the Taylor expansion on state evolution and are not in fact mysterious at all. (Alternatively you can show this from the decision theory formulation.)
I stand by my statement that aside from a few introductory posts, the quantum physics sequence is factually wrong.
I’m not happy with the Barbour post either, but the rest of the sequence seems better. There was a post on this topic.
Can you link to this please? And explain the decision theory thing if that’s not part of the comment you’re referring to?
Apparently LessWrong comments are not indexed by google, so I don’t have a non-time-intensive way of tracking down that comment. I remember reading it in one of the earlier posts in the quantum sequence.
Here’s a paper by David Wallace on Deutsch’s decision theory formulation of the Born probabilities:
https://arxiv.org/abs/0906.2718
Comments should be indexed by Google (I’ve seen comments show up in my search results before), but maybe not completely? Can you send a note to the LW team (telling them why you think comments are not being indexed) to see if there’s anything they can do about this? In the meantime, have you tried LW’s own search feature (the magnifying glass icon at the top)?
I actually wrote a comment about that back in 2009 but haven’t revisited it since. Have you read the response/counterargument I linked to, and still find Wallace’s paper compelling?
Comments should be indexed by Google. I just went to 5 very old posts with hundreds of comments and randomly searched text-strings from them on Google, and all of them returned a result:
Example
Example
More recent example
If anyone can find any comments that are not indexed, please let me know, and I will try to fix it, but it seems (to me) that all comments are indexed for now.