It was a tool to teach you rationality. Personally, I think it failed at that, and instead created a local lore guided by the teacher’s password, “MWI is obviously right”.
This could well be the case, I have no particular opinion on it.
And yes, I think he said nearly as much on multiple occasions.
(To clarify, I take it “as much” here means “MWI is obviously right”, not “the sequence failed at teaching rationality”.)
So the distinction I’ve been making in my head is between a specific interpretation called MWI, and multi-world interpretations in general. That is, I’ve been thinking there are other interpretations that we don’t call MWI, but which share the property of, something like, “if it looks to you like your observations are collapsing quantum superposition, that’s just what happens when you yourself enter superposition”.
My (again, vague) understanding is that Eliezer thinks “some interpretation with that property” is obviously correct, but not necessarily the specific interpretation we might call MWI. But if I’m wrong about what MWI means, and it just refers to all interpretations with that property (or there is/can be only one such interpretation), then Eliezer certainly thinks “this is obviously by far the best hypothesis we have” and I agree that it sounds like he also thinks “this is obviously correct”. And it seems like Scott is using it in the latter sense in that blog post, at least.
(And, yeah, I find Eliezer pretty convincing here, though I’m not currently capable of evaluating most of the technical arguments. My read is that Scott’s weaker position seems to be something like, “okay but we haven’t looked everywhere, there are possibilities we have no particular reason to expect to happen but that we can’t experimentally rule out yet”.)
This could well be the case, I have no particular opinion on it.
(To clarify, I take it “as much” here means “MWI is obviously right”, not “the sequence failed at teaching rationality”.)
So the distinction I’ve been making in my head is between a specific interpretation called MWI, and multi-world interpretations in general. That is, I’ve been thinking there are other interpretations that we don’t call MWI, but which share the property of, something like, “if it looks to you like your observations are collapsing quantum superposition, that’s just what happens when you yourself enter superposition”.
My (again, vague) understanding is that Eliezer thinks “some interpretation with that property” is obviously correct, but not necessarily the specific interpretation we might call MWI. But if I’m wrong about what MWI means, and it just refers to all interpretations with that property (or there is/can be only one such interpretation), then Eliezer certainly thinks “this is obviously by far the best hypothesis we have” and I agree that it sounds like he also thinks “this is obviously correct”. And it seems like Scott is using it in the latter sense in that blog post, at least.
(And, yeah, I find Eliezer pretty convincing here, though I’m not currently capable of evaluating most of the technical arguments. My read is that Scott’s weaker position seems to be something like, “okay but we haven’t looked everywhere, there are possibilities we have no particular reason to expect to happen but that we can’t experimentally rule out yet”.)