There is a substance XYZ, it’s called “anti-water”, it filling the hole of water in twin-Earth mandates that twin-Earth is made entirely of antimatter, and then the only problem is that the vacuum of space isn’t vacuum enough (e.g., solar wind (I think that’s what it’s called), if nothing else, would make that Earth explode).
More generally, it ought to be possible to come up with a physics where all the fundamental particles have an extra “tag” that carries no role (which in practice, I think, means that it functions just to change the number of microstates when particles with different tags are mixed—I once tried to figure out what sort of measurement would be needed to determine empirically whether a glass of water in fact had only one kind of water, or had multiple kinds of otherwise-identical water, but have not been able to understand chemical potential enough to finish the thought experiment). Maybe furthermore there’s some complicated force acting on the tags that changes them when the density of a particular tag is high enough, so that the tag difference between our Earth and twin-Earth can be maintained. We just have no evidence of such an attribute, hence Occam’s razor presumes it to not exist.
I keep meaning to (re)work out the details on the gyroscope example; I think it should follow basically just from F = ma and the rigid body approximation (or maybe springs, if we skip rigid bodies), which means that denying gyroscopic procession basically breaks all of physics that involves objects in motion.
I think a better steelman in Example 1: Price Gouging, is that the law is meant to prevent rent-seeking, i.e., prevent people extracting money from the system without providing commensurate value. (The only example here that I understand even partially is landlords charging rent just because they own the land, and one fix to this is the land-value tax—see the ACX book review of Progress and Poverty for an excellent explanation. It feels like there should be some analogue here, but I can’t model enough economic nuance in my head to generate it and I’m not familiar enough with economics to tease it out.)
In Example 2: An orphan, or an abortion?, there’s a further interesting note that outlawing abortion increases crime a decade or two later, because the children who would have been aborted are the ones who are most likely to grow up to become criminals. (Source: Freakonomics)
Some extra nuance for your examples:
There is a substance XYZ, it’s called “anti-water”, it filling the hole of water in twin-Earth mandates that twin-Earth is made entirely of antimatter, and then the only problem is that the vacuum of space isn’t vacuum enough (e.g., solar wind (I think that’s what it’s called), if nothing else, would make that Earth explode). More generally, it ought to be possible to come up with a physics where all the fundamental particles have an extra “tag” that carries no role (which in practice, I think, means that it functions just to change the number of microstates when particles with different tags are mixed—I once tried to figure out what sort of measurement would be needed to determine empirically whether a glass of water in fact had only one kind of water, or had multiple kinds of otherwise-identical water, but have not been able to understand chemical potential enough to finish the thought experiment). Maybe furthermore there’s some complicated force acting on the tags that changes them when the density of a particular tag is high enough, so that the tag difference between our Earth and twin-Earth can be maintained. We just have no evidence of such an attribute, hence Occam’s razor presumes it to not exist.
I keep meaning to (re)work out the details on the gyroscope example; I think it should follow basically just from F = ma and the rigid body approximation (or maybe springs, if we skip rigid bodies), which means that denying gyroscopic procession basically breaks all of physics that involves objects in motion.
I think a better steelman in Example 1: Price Gouging, is that the law is meant to prevent rent-seeking, i.e., prevent people extracting money from the system without providing commensurate value. (The only example here that I understand even partially is landlords charging rent just because they own the land, and one fix to this is the land-value tax—see the ACX book review of Progress and Poverty for an excellent explanation. It feels like there should be some analogue here, but I can’t model enough economic nuance in my head to generate it and I’m not familiar enough with economics to tease it out.)
In Example 2: An orphan, or an abortion?, there’s a further interesting note that outlawing abortion increases crime a decade or two later, because the children who would have been aborted are the ones who are most likely to grow up to become criminals. (Source: Freakonomics)