I think LW is skewed toward believing in MWI because they’ve all read Yudkowsky. It really doesn’t seem likely Yudkowsky just gleaned MWI was already popular and wrote about it to pander to the tribe. In any case I don’t really see why MWI would be a salient point for group identity.
That’s not what I am saying. People didn’t write the Nicene Creed to pander to Christians. (Sorry about the affect side effects of that comparison, that wasn’t my intention, just the first example that came to mind).
MWI is perfect for group identity—it’s safely beyond falsification, and QM interpretations are a sufficiently obscure topic where folks typically haven’t thought a lot about it. So you don’t get a lot of noise in the marker.
But I am not trying to make MWI into more than it is. I don’t think MWI is a centrally important idea, it’s mostly an illustration of what I think is going on (also with some other ideas).
I think LW is skewed toward believing in MWI because they’ve all read Yudkowsky. It really doesn’t seem likely Yudkowsky just gleaned MWI was already popular and wrote about it to pander to the tribe. In any case I don’t really see why MWI would be a salient point for group identity.
That’s not what I am saying. People didn’t write the Nicene Creed to pander to Christians. (Sorry about the affect side effects of that comparison, that wasn’t my intention, just the first example that came to mind).
MWI is perfect for group identity—it’s safely beyond falsification, and QM interpretations are a sufficiently obscure topic where folks typically haven’t thought a lot about it. So you don’t get a lot of noise in the marker.
But I am not trying to make MWI into more than it is. I don’t think MWI is a centrally important idea, it’s mostly an illustration of what I think is going on (also with some other ideas).