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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Privileging the Hypothesis - Less Wrong
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Comments (126)
Reminiscent of the guy who was asked what were the odds he would win the lottery, and replied, "Fifty-fifty, either I win or I don't." The corresponding heuristic-and-bias is I think known as "packing and unpacking" or something along those lines.
I remember the Daily Show had a funny example of this in action. They were interviewing people about the possibility of the Large Hadron Collider destroying the earth, and they talked to a physicist and a crazy survivalist. The former said it was impossible for the LHC to destroy the earth, while the latter used basically that argument: "There are two possibilities: it can destroy us, or not. So, that's about a 50/50 chance."
Then later the interviewer followed the survivalist to his bunker and asked him: if everyone died but them, don't they have an obligation to mate to repopulate the earth? (They were both men.) The survivalist said, "Um, no, because that doesn't work. It's impossible." And then the interviewer came back with, "well, there's two possibilities: we'll produce a baby, or we won't, so that's 50/50 -- pretty good odds."
I'm sure someone would love to dig up the clip...
Sure! Didn't take more than three years for someone to do that, either!
Though apparently your mind edited out how the interviewee's "there's a 0% chance it [them reproducing] will work" makes a great parallel with how John Ellis, who's otherwise amazing in this video, earlier explains that "there is 0% chance", "zero", of the LHC destroying the world[*]. Sigh.
(The clip is great from start to finish, but IMHO the funniest part is what John Oliver says in answer to "This place is perfectly safe" towards the end of the video. I was going to say that the only people it could be said to make fun of are annoying nitpickers, but on reflection, it's actually feels like a really great dig at people who make terrible arguments and want you to take them seriously, even though they really should realize the flaw themselves.)
[*] Technically, the video only suggests that it is world-destroying that Ellis claims to have "0% chance", and this is the Daily Show, but I think we can safely assume that ths is not selective editing to make him look like a bad Bayesian.
Why you insist on being dogmatic on this is beyond me. In your writings on the subject, you admit you don't understand the math behind quantum mechanics, which is in fact the model. Why be so sure you are right about the interpretation of the model you don't understand?
People look kindly on those who are humble when commenting on things outside of their expertise. People that go around making bold claims about things about which they are not that knowledgeable are labeled cranks, and rightfully so.
1 vs. many is a very natural divide, not at all a good example of the packing and unpacking fallacy.
Once you accept that there exists something isomorphic to a wave function, it's more like:
many worlds vs. many worlds and an orang-utan vs. many worlds and an apple tree vs. many worlds and a television vs. many worlds and a blue castle vs. (...) vs. many worlds and a character-of-natural-law-violating process that constantly kills all the worlds except one.
All cases except the last case contain many worlds, but Phil packed them together. I think that's the intuition Eliezer was getting at.
We shouldn't be afraid here to sound Orwellian. Copenhagen people believe in the many worldeaters interpretation. We believe in the no worldeaters interpretation.
So true - My "8 worlds and an orang-utan" hypothesis never got the respect it deserved.
Props for the perseverance, man. Props ;-)
--Stan Kelly-Bootle
Proper consideration.
That is exactly and perfectly right and I should use this example henceforth.
I think you are demonstrating a dramatic failure to update by saying that a hypothesis held by 99.99+% of humanity, and even by most people who have thought about the issues, is not worth considering.
I'd like to know what the distribution of opinions of quantum physicists and cosmologists is.
There have been polls, with a dramatic range of support. Wikipedia leads me to the most MWI-friendly poll. I think the low-water mark is about 10% of some other group of quantum theorists. I suspect that the variation is due to wording issues and local social pressure (by "local" I mean the conference), but the page suggests different communities:
Antia Lamas saw MWI win a poll for least favorite interpretation. On that page, Michael Nielsen mentions a poll where MWI came 3rd, after Copenhagen and decoherence...but if decoherence is an interpretation, it sure sounds like MWI to me.