The whole point of it (well, one of the whole points) is to show people who wouldn’t previously believe such a thing was plausible, that they ought to disagree with elite physicists with high confidence
Elite physicists are also people. Would you say that, if exposed to your sequence, these physicists would come to see that they were mistaken in their rejection of MWI? If not, it seems that the most credible explanation of the fact that your sequence can persuade ordinary folk that elite physicists are wrong, but can’t persuade elite physicists themselves, is that there is something wrong with your argument, which only elite physicists are competent enough to appreciate.
Unfortunately, in general when someone has given a question lots of thought and come to a conclusion, it will take an absolute steamroller to get them to change their mind. Most elite physicists will have given the question that much thought. So this wouldn’t demonstrate as much as you might like.
Certainly many elite physicists were persuaded by similar arguments before I wrote them up. If MWI is wrong, why can’t you persuade those elite physicists that it’s wrong? Huh? Huh?
Certainly many elite physicists were persuaded by similar arguments before I wrote them up.
Okay, so you are saying that these arguments were available at the time elite physicists made up their minds on which interpretation of QM was correct, and yet only a minority of elite physicists were persuaded. What evidential weight do you assign to this fact? More importantly, what evidential weight should the target audience of your QM sequence assign to it? To conclude that MWI is very likely true after reading your QM sequence, from a prior position of relative agnosticism, seems to me to give excessive weight to my own ability to assess arguments, relative to the ability of people who are smarter than me and have the relevant technical expertise—most of whom, to repeat, were not persuaded by those arguments.
Some kind of community-driven kickstarter to convince a top-level physicist to read the MWI sequence (in return for a grant) and to provide an in-depth answer tailored to it would be awesome. May also be good PR.
Scott Aaronson was already reading along to it as it was published. If we paid David Deutsch to read it, I expect him to just say, “Yeah, that’s all basically correct” which wouldn’t be very in-depth.
From those who already disagree with MWI, I would expect more in the way of awful amateur epistemology delivered with great confidence. Then those who already had their trust in a sane world broken will nod and say “I expected no better.” Others will say, “How can you possibly disregard the word of so great a physicist? Perhaps he knows something you don’t!”—though they will not be able to formalize the awful amateur epistemology—and nod among themselves about how Yudkowsky failed to anticipate that so strong a reply might be made (it should be presumed to be a very strong reply since a great physicist made it, even if they can’t 100% follow themselves why it is a great refutation, or would not have believed the same words so much from a street performer). And so both will emerge strengthened in their prior beliefs, which isn’t much of a test.
The effect of authoritative validation? The difference between professional physicist qua physicist, as opposed to quantum-computing-aware computer scientist, would not be small. Even if Scott Aaronson happens to know quantum mechanics as well as Feynman, it’s difficult to validate that authority.
Job titles aside, I think you had an incorrect model of his intellectual background, and how much he knows about certain subjects (e.g. general relativity) as contrasted with others (e.g. P and NP). Also (therefore) an incorrect model of how others would view your citation of him as an authority.
That said, I think you were right to think of him as an authority here and expect him to notice any important errors in your QM sequence.
As I said in a response to a comment of Nick, I would distinguish between the median theoretical physicist at a top 5 school, and the very best people. Intellectual caliber among high status scientists at distinguished institutions varies by 100x+. Apparently elite scientists can be very unrepresentative of the best scientists. You probably haven’t had extensive exposure to the best scientists. Unless one has it, one isn’t good position to assess their epistemology.
If a great physicist were to exhibit apparently awful amateur epistemology in responding to your sequence, I would assign substantial probability mass (not sure how much) to you being right.
The issue that I take with your position is your degree of confidence. The key thing to my mind is the point that Yvain makes in Confidence levels inside and outside an argument. You have an epistemic framework that assigns a probability of < 1% (and maybe much smaller) to MWI being wrong. But given the prior established by the absence of a consensus among such smart people, 99+% confidence in the epistemic framework that you’re using is really high. I could see 80-90% confidence as being well grounded. But a 99+% confidence level corresponds to an implicit belief that you’d be using a sound epistemic framework at least 99 times if there were 100 instances analogous to the QM/MWI situation. Does this sound right?
Maybe you should just quickly glance at http://lesswrong.com/lw/q7/if_manyworlds_had_come_first/. The mysterious force that eats all of the wavefunction except one part is something I assign similar probability as I assign to God—there is just no reason to believe in it except poorly justified elite opinion, and I don’t believe in elite opinions that I think are poorly justified.
But the main (if not only) argument you make for many worlds in that post and the others is the ridiculousness of collapse postulates. Now I’m not disagreeing with you, collapses would defy a great deal of convention (causality, relativity, CPT-symmetry, etc) but even with 100% confidence in this (as a hypothetical), you still wouldn’t be justified in assigning 99+% confidence in many worlds. There exist single world interpretations without a collapse, against which you haven’t presented any arguments. Bohmian mechanics would seem to be the most plausible of these (given the LW census). Do you still assign <1% likelihood to this interpretation, and if so, why?
Obvious rationalizations of single-world theories have no more evidence in their favor, no more reason to be believed; it’s like Deism vs. Jehovah. Sure, the class ‘Deism’ is more probable but it’s still not credible in an absolute sense (and no, Matrix Lords are not deities, they were born at a particular time, have limited domains and are made of parts). You can’t start with a terrible idea and expect to find >1% rationalizations for it. There’s more than 100 possible terrible ideas. Single-world QM via collapse/Copenhagen/shut-up was originally a terrible idea and you shouldn’t expect terrible ideas to be resurrectable on average. Privileging the hypothesis.
(Specifically: Bohm has similar FTL problems and causality problems and introduces epiphenomenal pointers to a ‘real world’ and if the wavefunction still exists (which it must because it is causally affecting the epiphenomenal pointer, things must be real to be causes of real effects so far as we know) then it should still have sentient observers inside it. Relational quantum mechanics is more awful amateur epistemology from people who’d rather abandon the concept of objective reality, with no good formal replacement, than just give up already. But most of all, why are we even asking that question or considering these theories in the first place? And again, simulated physics wouldn’t count because then the apparent laws are false and the simulations would presumably be of an original universe that would almost certainly be multiplicitous by the same reasoning; also there’d presumably be branches within the sim, so not single-world which is what I specified.)
If you can assign <1% probability to deism (the generalized abstracted class containing Jehovahism) then there should be no problem with assigning <1% probability to all single-world theories.
Given that there’s some serious fundamental physics we don’t understand yet, I find it hard to persuade myself there’s less than a 1% chance that even the framing of single-world versus many-world interpretations is incoherent.
Minor points: the generalized abstracted class containing Jehovaism is general theism, not deism. Deism is the subset of deities which do not interfere with their creation, whereas personal theism is the subset of deities which do interfere.
Also—I myself stopped with this usage but it bears mentioning—there are “gods” which were born as mortals and ascended, apotheosis-like; there are gods that can kill each other, there’s Hermes and legions of minor gods, many of them “with parts”.
It’s not trivial to draw a line that allows for killable gods of ancient times (compare Ragnarök) and thus doesn’t contradict established mythology that has lots of trivial, minor gods, but doesn’t allow for Matrix Lords to be considered gods (if not in the contemporary “triple-O Abrahamic deity” parlance). Ontologically fundamental mental powers ain’t the classifying separator, and I’m sure you’d agree that a label shouldn’t depend simply on whether we understand a phenomenon. Laws of physics with an if-clause for a certain kind of “god”-matter would still be laws of physics, and just having that description (knowing the laws), lifting the curtain, shouldn’t be sufficient to remove a “god” label.
I think the default position isn’t that MWI is wrong, but that we don’t currently have enough evidence to decide with high confidence. And you could persuade lots of physicists of that.
Elite physicists are also people. Would you say that, if exposed to your sequence, these physicists would come to see that they were mistaken in their rejection of MWI? If not, it seems that the most credible explanation of the fact that your sequence can persuade ordinary folk that elite physicists are wrong, but can’t persuade elite physicists themselves, is that there is something wrong with your argument, which only elite physicists are competent enough to appreciate.
Elite physicists are also people. Would you say that, if exposed to your sequence, these physicists would come to see that they were mistaken in their rejection of MWI? If not, it seems that the most credible explanation of the fact that your sequence can persuade ordinary folk that elite physicists are wrong, but can’t persuade elite physicists themselves, is that there is something wrong with your argument, which only elite physicists are competent enough to appreciate.
Unfortunately, in general when someone has given a question lots of thought and come to a conclusion, it will take an absolute steamroller to get them to change their mind. Most elite physicists will have given the question that much thought. So this wouldn’t demonstrate as much as you might like.
Certainly many elite physicists were persuaded by similar arguments before I wrote them up. If MWI is wrong, why can’t you persuade those elite physicists that it’s wrong? Huh? Huh?
Okay, so you are saying that these arguments were available at the time elite physicists made up their minds on which interpretation of QM was correct, and yet only a minority of elite physicists were persuaded. What evidential weight do you assign to this fact? More importantly, what evidential weight should the target audience of your QM sequence assign to it? To conclude that MWI is very likely true after reading your QM sequence, from a prior position of relative agnosticism, seems to me to give excessive weight to my own ability to assess arguments, relative to the ability of people who are smarter than me and have the relevant technical expertise—most of whom, to repeat, were not persuaded by those arguments.
Some kind of community-driven kickstarter to convince a top-level physicist to read the MWI sequence (in return for a grant) and to provide an in-depth answer tailored to it would be awesome. May also be good PR.
Scott Aaronson was already reading along to it as it was published. If we paid David Deutsch to read it, I expect him to just say, “Yeah, that’s all basically correct” which wouldn’t be very in-depth.
From those who already disagree with MWI, I would expect more in the way of awful amateur epistemology delivered with great confidence. Then those who already had their trust in a sane world broken will nod and say “I expected no better.” Others will say, “How can you possibly disregard the word of so great a physicist? Perhaps he knows something you don’t!”—though they will not be able to formalize the awful amateur epistemology—and nod among themselves about how Yudkowsky failed to anticipate that so strong a reply might be made (it should be presumed to be a very strong reply since a great physicist made it, even if they can’t 100% follow themselves why it is a great refutation, or would not have believed the same words so much from a street performer). And so both will emerge strengthened in their prior beliefs, which isn’t much of a test.
Scott Aaronson is not a physicist!
I’d expect him to notice math errors and he specializes in the aspect of QM that I talk about, regardless of job titles.
Still, it diminishes the effect.
Nnnoo it doesn’t, IMO.
The effect of authoritative validation? The difference between professional physicist qua physicist, as opposed to quantum-computing-aware computer scientist, would not be small. Even if Scott Aaronson happens to know quantum mechanics as well as Feynman, it’s difficult to validate that authority.
Job titles aside, I think you had an incorrect model of his intellectual background, and how much he knows about certain subjects (e.g. general relativity) as contrasted with others (e.g. P and NP). Also (therefore) an incorrect model of how others would view your citation of him as an authority.
That said, I think you were right to think of him as an authority here and expect him to notice any important errors in your QM sequence.
As I said in a response to a comment of Nick, I would distinguish between the median theoretical physicist at a top 5 school, and the very best people. Intellectual caliber among high status scientists at distinguished institutions varies by 100x+. Apparently elite scientists can be very unrepresentative of the best scientists. You probably haven’t had extensive exposure to the best scientists. Unless one has it, one isn’t good position to assess their epistemology.
If a great physicist were to exhibit apparently awful amateur epistemology in responding to your sequence, I would assign substantial probability mass (not sure how much) to you being right.
The issue that I take with your position is your degree of confidence. The key thing to my mind is the point that Yvain makes in Confidence levels inside and outside an argument. You have an epistemic framework that assigns a probability of < 1% (and maybe much smaller) to MWI being wrong. But given the prior established by the absence of a consensus among such smart people, 99+% confidence in the epistemic framework that you’re using is really high. I could see 80-90% confidence as being well grounded. But a 99+% confidence level corresponds to an implicit belief that you’d be using a sound epistemic framework at least 99 times if there were 100 instances analogous to the QM/MWI situation. Does this sound right?
Maybe you should just quickly glance at http://lesswrong.com/lw/q7/if_manyworlds_had_come_first/. The mysterious force that eats all of the wavefunction except one part is something I assign similar probability as I assign to God—there is just no reason to believe in it except poorly justified elite opinion, and I don’t believe in elite opinions that I think are poorly justified.
But the main (if not only) argument you make for many worlds in that post and the others is the ridiculousness of collapse postulates. Now I’m not disagreeing with you, collapses would defy a great deal of convention (causality, relativity, CPT-symmetry, etc) but even with 100% confidence in this (as a hypothetical), you still wouldn’t be justified in assigning 99+% confidence in many worlds. There exist single world interpretations without a collapse, against which you haven’t presented any arguments. Bohmian mechanics would seem to be the most plausible of these (given the LW census). Do you still assign <1% likelihood to this interpretation, and if so, why?
Obvious rationalizations of single-world theories have no more evidence in their favor, no more reason to be believed; it’s like Deism vs. Jehovah. Sure, the class ‘Deism’ is more probable but it’s still not credible in an absolute sense (and no, Matrix Lords are not deities, they were born at a particular time, have limited domains and are made of parts). You can’t start with a terrible idea and expect to find >1% rationalizations for it. There’s more than 100 possible terrible ideas. Single-world QM via collapse/Copenhagen/shut-up was originally a terrible idea and you shouldn’t expect terrible ideas to be resurrectable on average. Privileging the hypothesis.
(Specifically: Bohm has similar FTL problems and causality problems and introduces epiphenomenal pointers to a ‘real world’ and if the wavefunction still exists (which it must because it is causally affecting the epiphenomenal pointer, things must be real to be causes of real effects so far as we know) then it should still have sentient observers inside it. Relational quantum mechanics is more awful amateur epistemology from people who’d rather abandon the concept of objective reality, with no good formal replacement, than just give up already. But most of all, why are we even asking that question or considering these theories in the first place? And again, simulated physics wouldn’t count because then the apparent laws are false and the simulations would presumably be of an original universe that would almost certainly be multiplicitous by the same reasoning; also there’d presumably be branches within the sim, so not single-world which is what I specified.)
If you can assign <1% probability to deism (the generalized abstracted class containing Jehovahism) then there should be no problem with assigning <1% probability to all single-world theories.
Given that there’s some serious fundamental physics we don’t understand yet, I find it hard to persuade myself there’s less than a 1% chance that even the framing of single-world versus many-world interpretations is incoherent.
Minor points: the generalized abstracted class containing Jehovaism is general theism, not deism. Deism is the subset of deities which do not interfere with their creation, whereas personal theism is the subset of deities which do interfere.
Also—I myself stopped with this usage but it bears mentioning—there are “gods” which were born as mortals and ascended, apotheosis-like; there are gods that can kill each other, there’s Hermes and legions of minor gods, many of them “with parts”.
It’s not trivial to draw a line that allows for killable gods of ancient times (compare Ragnarök) and thus doesn’t contradict established mythology that has lots of trivial, minor gods, but doesn’t allow for Matrix Lords to be considered gods (if not in the contemporary “triple-O Abrahamic deity” parlance). Ontologically fundamental mental powers ain’t the classifying separator, and I’m sure you’d agree that a label shouldn’t depend simply on whether we understand a phenomenon. Laws of physics with an if-clause for a certain kind of “god”-matter would still be laws of physics, and just having that description (knowing the laws), lifting the curtain, shouldn’t be sufficient to remove a “god” label.
Thanks. I read this some years ago, but will take another look.
I think the default position isn’t that MWI is wrong, but that we don’t currently have enough evidence to decide with high confidence. And you could persuade lots of physicists of that.
Elite physicists are easy to persuade in the abstract. You wait till the high status old people die.