Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 2

OpenThreadGuy

From Costanza's original thread (entire text):

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Meta:

How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.
Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but required to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.

From Costanza's original thread (entire text):

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Meta:

How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.
Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but required to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.

Hmm. I'm also pretty sure that the double-slit experiments are not evidence of MWI vs. waveform collapse.

They are evidence against wave-form collapse, in that they give a lower bound as to when it must occur. Since, if it does exist, it's fairly likely that waveform collapse happens at a really extreme point, there's really only a fairly small amount of evidence you can get against waveform collapse without something that disproves MWI too. The reason MWI is more likely is Occam's razor, not evidence.

2vi21maobk9vp14y

Well, I tried to understand some double-slit corner-cases. If I read some classical Copenhagen-approach quantum physics textbook, it is hard to describe what happens if you install a non-precise particle detector securely protected from experimenter's attempts to ever read it. Of course, in some cases Penrose model and MWI are hard to distinguish, because gravitons are hard to screen off and can cause entanglement over large distances.