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RobbBB comments on Privileging the Hypothesis - Less Wrong
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Two questions. First, is that true as a matter of how you define 'interpretation', or is it true as a matter of subsequent fact? Second, do you mean to say that interpretations haven't yet passed or failed an experimental test?; or do you mean to say that interpretations can never pass or fail an experimental test?
The 'haven't yet' criterion is weakly true of 'interpretations' in the relevant QM context, though all the interpretations of interest here have been verified relative to empirically false models; they just haven't been verified relative to one another. But the 'can never' criterion is clearly false of some of the 'interpretations' we're talking about, and only contingently and ambiguously true of any of them. Whether these models will ever be empirically testable is itself an empirical question.
What are you building into 'right'/'wrong' here? That is, why does your assertion have more semantic content than if you'd skipped the 'right'/'wrong' assertion and just said 'The Bohm interpretation hasn't passed an experimental test yet. Bye now!'? Certainly if you mean to suggest that scientific models cannot have merits or dismerits aside from experimental verification/falsification, then this is wrong. Scientific models can be overly vague, or ambiguous, or internally inconsistent, or overly complex or inelegant, or unexplanatory, or gerrymandered, or ad-hoc, or unverifiable, or unfalsifiable, or historically (as opposed to experimentally) false. All of those are faults in their own right -- and, often, they are Bayesianly relevant faults, faults that should impact our credence in the model.
Interpretations are designed to give the same predictions as can be inferred from a no-interpretation math, otherwise they would be called theories.
Experimentally testable new predictions. No more, no less.
This isn't necessarily true. Consider that the GRW interpretation has been pretty much falsified by Van Harlingen's work at UIUC (macroscopic current superposition in SQUIDs). Most of the interpretations rely on different postulates than traditional Copenhagen quantum so there can be (and generally are) differences. However, to date, most of those differences aren't measurable.
Similarly, we call many-worlds an "interpretation" even though no one has figured out how to actually make predictions with it. The difference between "interpretation" and "theory" is a bit loose.
This is empirically false, as a statement about how scientific discourse works. Compare string theory, which is frequently labeled a 'theory' (or family of theories) even though it has far more difficult-to-observe posits (one-dimensional strings!) than most (perhaps all) of the mainstream QM 'interpretations'. See also falsified QM interpretations.
Perhaps a more model-theoretic approach would be appropriate here; clearly QM interpretations can vary quite a bit in their verifiability/falsifiability, so what distinguishes them from other theories may be that they specify the meanings of the terms in the QM formalism. On this view, 'interpretations' may add real content and predictions to a set of statements, provided that in the process they also fix the semantics of a large portion of the statements. After all, the problem with QM is not merely that we aren't clear on the invisible metaphysics secretly underwriting and accounting for our experiences; we aren't even clear on the phenomenology (appearances) or ontology (observable posits) of the theory, treated as mere formalism.