I was actually going off the idea that the vast majority − 100% minus pr(survive all suicides) - of worlds would have the subject dead at some point, so all those worlds would not be convinced. Sure, people in your branch might believe you, but in (100 − 9.3x10^-302) percent of the branches, you aren’t there to prove that quantum suicide works. This means, I think, that the chance of you existing to prove that quantum suicide proves MWI to the rest of the world, the chance is equal to the chance of you surviving in a nonMWI universe.
I was going to say well, if you had a test with a 1% chance of confirming X and a 99% chance of disconfirming X, and you ran it a thousand times and made sure you presented only the confirmations, you would be laughed at to suggest that X is confirmed—but it is MWI that predicts every quantum event comes out every result, so only under MWI could you run the test a thousand times—so that would indeed be pretty convincing evidence that MWI is true.
Also: I only have a passing familiarity with Robin’s mangled worlds, but at the power of negative three hundred, it feels like a small enough ‘world’ to get absorbed into the mass of worlds where it works a few times and then they actually do die.
The problem I have with that is that from my perspective as an external observer it looks no different than someone flipping a coin (appropriately weighted) a thousand times and getting thousand heads. It’s quite improbable, but the fact that someone’s life depends on the coin shouldn’t make any difference for me—the universe doesn’t care.
Of course it also doesn’t convince me that the coin will fall heads for the 1001-st time.
(That’s only if I consider MWI and Copenhagen here. In reality after 1000 coin flips/suicides I would start to strongly suspect some alternative hypotheses. But even then it shouldn’t change my confidence of MWI relative to my confidence of Copenhagen).
I was actually going off the idea that the vast majority − 100% minus pr(survive all suicides) - of worlds would have the subject dead at some point, so all those worlds would not be convinced. Sure, people in your branch might believe you, but in (100 − 9.3x10^-302) percent of the branches, you aren’t there to prove that quantum suicide works. This means, I think, that the chance of you existing to prove that quantum suicide proves MWI to the rest of the world, the chance is equal to the chance of you surviving in a nonMWI universe.
I was going to say well, if you had a test with a 1% chance of confirming X and a 99% chance of disconfirming X, and you ran it a thousand times and made sure you presented only the confirmations, you would be laughed at to suggest that X is confirmed—but it is MWI that predicts every quantum event comes out every result, so only under MWI could you run the test a thousand times—so that would indeed be pretty convincing evidence that MWI is true.
Also: I only have a passing familiarity with Robin’s mangled worlds, but at the power of negative three hundred, it feels like a small enough ‘world’ to get absorbed into the mass of worlds where it works a few times and then they actually do die.
The problem I have with that is that from my perspective as an external observer it looks no different than someone flipping a coin (appropriately weighted) a thousand times and getting thousand heads. It’s quite improbable, but the fact that someone’s life depends on the coin shouldn’t make any difference for me—the universe doesn’t care.
Of course it also doesn’t convince me that the coin will fall heads for the 1001-st time.
(That’s only if I consider MWI and Copenhagen here. In reality after 1000 coin flips/suicides I would start to strongly suspect some alternative hypotheses. But even then it shouldn’t change my confidence of MWI relative to my confidence of Copenhagen).