Science leaves it up to experiment to socially declare who was right, but if there weren't some people who could get it right in the absence of overwhelming experimental proof, science would be stuck.
Given that there are also many people who get it wrong, this seems like a case of hindsight bias on EY's part.
I'd point you to the next post, "Einstein's Speed", specifically the section at the end beginning with the phrase "But a word of caution here".
The gradual increase in acceptance of many-worlds in academic physics, suggests that there are physicists who will only accept a new idea given some combination of epistemic justification, and a sufficiently large academic pack in whose company they can be comfortable. As more physicists accept, the pack grows larger, and hence more people go over their individual thresholds for conversion—with the epistemic justification remaining essentially the same.
This is reasonably accurate, to a degree. Given that one can trace the decoherence process almost all the way down to the diagonalization in the preferred basis (preferred by the detector), there is a general vague feeling among many physicists that every eigenstate ought to survive, somehow. However, almost no one outside the MWI crowd is willing to assign any definite ontology to it.
Now put your Bayesian goggles back on. As described in Einstein's Arrogance, there are queries that are not binary—where the answer is not "Yes" or "No", but drawn from a larger space of structures, e.g., the space of equations. In such cases it takes far more Bayesian evidence to promote a hypothesis to your attention than to confirm the hypothesis.
Indeed, Bayes is great for suggesting a promising model. But no matter how promising, if the model ends up not offering any new predictions, it is not better than any other one with the same predictive power, except maybe for didactic purposes. Unfortunately, that's exactly what MWI is.
Indeed, Bayes is great for suggesting a promising model. But no matter how promising, if the model ends up not offering any new predictions, it is not better than any other one with the same predictive power, except maybe for didactic purposes. Unfortunately, that's exactly what MWI is.
Would you recommend MWI for didactic purposes?
Alternatively, would you recommend it in the counterfactual where it had well-written (perhaps over-written) textbooks, like the statistical interpretation and/or (non-straw-)Copenhagen have?
Would you recommend MWI for didactic purposes?
Probably not. Collapse, as is currently taught, makes the miracle step clear and leaves one wanting to know more. MWI is a mysterious answer that gives a false feeling of a dissolved question.
The problem with wanting to know more in this case is that it wastes everyone's time trying to fill a gap that doesn't exist.
You get very serious articles - in the popular press at SciAm's level, at least - talking about how Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity are totally incompatible, which is farcical. You get serious physicists devising new and ever stupider interpretations of quantum mechanics because the orthodoxy is so obviously wrong.
This search is one we could do without.
And if it doesn't dissolve all questions, it certainly does dissolve some. If all the components continue to exist, then we've got the dynamics nailed down. We're not losing any interesting questions - QM is certainly worth continuing to validate every which way, just like all the other well-accepted theories we keep obsessively checking. We don't need to intentionally confuse ourselves as to what it means to keep doing that.
We're not losing any interesting questions
The projection step is still a mystery. Even if we can trace the density matrix down to the diagonal state (not sure if it has been done experimentally or numerically), it's not clear when the real or perceived eigenstate selection/world splitting happens. Seems like an "interesting question" to me.
Umm, in what sense does the theory decoherence not address this, aside from the issue of subjective experience? There's a gradual decoupling of the components as they lose mutual information.
Umm, in what sense does the theory decoherence not address this, aside from the issue of subjective experience?
Why do you call experimental testing "subjective experience" instead of "the ultimate way to tell if a model is worth anything"?
Today's post, Faster Than Science was originally published on 20 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Changing the Definition of Science, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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