Note that Aaronson’s position is much weaker, more like “if you were to extrapolate micro to macro assuming nothing new happens...”, see, for example https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1103
we do more-or-less know what could be discovered that would make it reasonable to privilege “our” world over the other MWI branches. Namely, any kind of “dynamical collapse” process, any source of fundamentally-irreversible decoherence between the microscopic realm and that of experience, any physical account of the origin of the Born rule, would do the trick.
and
Admittedly, like most quantum folks, I used to dismiss the notion of “dynamical collapse” as so contrived and ugly as not to be worth bothering with. But while I remain unimpressed by the specific models on the table (like the GRW theory), I’m now agnostic about the possibility itself. Yes, the linearity of quantum mechanics does indeed seem incredibly hard to tinker with. But as Roger Penrose never tires of pointing out, there’s at least one phenomenon—gravity—that we understand how to combine with quantum-mechanical linearity only in various special cases (like 2+1 dimensions, or supersymmetric anti-deSitter space), and whose reconciliation with quantum mechanics seems to raise fundamental problems (i.e., what does it even mean to have a superposition over different causal structures, with different Hilbert spaces potentially associated to them?).
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”.)
I agree that the point was not to teach you physics. 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”. And yes, I think he said nearly as much on multiple occasions. This post https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8njamAu4vgJYxbJzN/bloggingheads-yudkowsky-and-aaronson-talk-about-ai-and-many links a video of him saying as much: https://bloggingheads.tv/videos/2220?in=29:28
Note that Aaronson’s position is much weaker, more like “if you were to extrapolate micro to macro assuming nothing new happens...”, see, for example https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1103
and
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”.)