It’s very hard to evaluate selectivity. It’s not just the raw number of people participating. It seems that large majority of serious ACM ICPC participants (both contestants and their coaches) are practising on Topcoder, and for the ICPC the best college CS students are recruited much the same as best highschool math students for IMO.
I don’t know if Linus Torvalds would necessarily do great on this sort of thing—his talents are primarily within software design, and his persistence as the unifying force behind Linux. (And are you sure you’d recruit a 22 years old Linus Torvalds who just started writing a Unix clone?). It’s also the case that ‘programming contest’ is a bit of misnomer—the winning is primarily about applied mathematics—just as ‘computer science’ is a misnomer.
In any case, its highly dubious that understanding of QM sequence is as selective as any contest. I get it fully that Copenhagen is clunky whereas MWI doesn’t have the collapse, and that collapse fits in very badly. That’s not at all the issue. However badly something fits, you can only throw it away when you figured out how to do without it. Also, commonly, the wavefunction, the collapse, and other internals, are seen as mechanisms of prediction which may, or may not, have anything to do with “how universe does it” (even if the question of “how universe does it” is meaningful, it may still be the case that internals of the theory have nothing to do with that, as the internals are massively based upon our convenience). And worse still, MWI is in many very important ways lacking.
I’ve tried to compare it more accurately.
It’s very hard to evaluate selectivity. It’s not just the raw number of people participating. It seems that large majority of serious ACM ICPC participants (both contestants and their coaches) are practising on Topcoder, and for the ICPC the best college CS students are recruited much the same as best highschool math students for IMO.
I don’t know if Linus Torvalds would necessarily do great on this sort of thing—his talents are primarily within software design, and his persistence as the unifying force behind Linux. (And are you sure you’d recruit a 22 years old Linus Torvalds who just started writing a Unix clone?). It’s also the case that ‘programming contest’ is a bit of misnomer—the winning is primarily about applied mathematics—just as ‘computer science’ is a misnomer.
In any case, its highly dubious that understanding of QM sequence is as selective as any contest. I get it fully that Copenhagen is clunky whereas MWI doesn’t have the collapse, and that collapse fits in very badly. That’s not at all the issue. However badly something fits, you can only throw it away when you figured out how to do without it. Also, commonly, the wavefunction, the collapse, and other internals, are seen as mechanisms of prediction which may, or may not, have anything to do with “how universe does it” (even if the question of “how universe does it” is meaningful, it may still be the case that internals of the theory have nothing to do with that, as the internals are massively based upon our convenience). And worse still, MWI is in many very important ways lacking.