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komponisto comments on Open Thread: November 2009 - Less Wrong
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Okay, so I guess I'll be the first person to ask how you've updated your beliefs after today's news.
Physicists have their act together better than I thought. Not sure how much I should update on other scientific fields dissimilar to physics (e.g. "dietary science") or on the state of academia or humanity as a whole. Probably "some but not much" for dietary science, with larger updates for fields more like physics.
You seem to be conceding that this is in fact the Higgs boson. In fairness I have to point out that, although it is now very certain that there is a particle at 125 GeV, it may not be the predicted Higgs boson. With this in mind, would you like to keep our bet running a while longer while CERN nails down the properties? Or do you prefer to update all at once, and pay me the 25 dollars?
I'd rather pay the $25 now. (Paypal data?) My understanding is that besides the mass, there's also supposed to be other characteristics of the particle data that match the predicted Higgs, otherwise I would've waited before fully updating. If the story is retracted I might counter-update and ask for the money back, but my understanding is that this is not supposed to happen.
What other features (apart from being a particle at 125 GeV) do you consider a necessary part of the specification "Higgs Boson" for the purpose of this bet?
Just curious, given that physicists have their act together better than you thought, then, conditioning on that fact and the fact that physicists don't, as a whole, consider MWI to be slam dunk (though, afaik, many at least consider it a reasonable possibility), does that lead to any update re your view that MWI is all that slam dunk?
That's because physicists, though they clearly enjoy speculating very much, tend to withhold judgment until there is some experimental evidence one way or the other. In that sense they are more instrumentalists than EY. Experimental physicists much more so.
“A physicist answers all questions with ‘I don't know, but I'll find out.’”
-- Nicola Cabibbo (IIRC), as quoted by a professor of mine.
(As for “experimental evidence”, in the past couple of years people have managed to put bigger and bigger systems -- some visible with the naked eye -- into quantum superpositions, which is evidence against objective collapse theories.)
Nope. That's nailed down way more solidly than anything I know about mere matters of culture and society, so any tension between it and another proposition would move the other, less certain one. It would cause me to update in the direction of believing that more physicists probably see MWI as slam-dunk. :)
What exactly is it that you claim to know here? It's not a particular quantitative many-worlds theory that makes predictions, or you wouldn't be asking where the Born probabilities come from. It's not a particular qualitative model of many worlds, or else you wouldn't talk about Robin's mangled worlds in one post, and Barbour's timeless physics in another. What does it boil down to? "I know that quantum mechanics has something to do with parallel worlds"?
I think it comes down to:
(1) The wavefunction is what there is; and
(2) it doesn't collapse.
Well said, this has seemed to be what Eliezer has tried to argue for in his posts. He even went out of his way to avoid putting the "MWI" label on it a lot the time.
Every genius is entitled to some eccentricity, and the MWI is EY's. It might be important to remind the regulars why MWI is not required for rationality, but it is pointless to argue about it with EY.
For all the dilettantes out there who learned about quantum physics from Eliezer's posts and think that they understand it, despite the clear evidence that understanding a serious scientific topic in depth requires years of study, you know where the karma sink is.
EY's level of support for cryonics (to the point of saying that people who don't sign their children up for cryo are lousy parents) sound waaaay more eccentric to me than acceptance of the MWI.
Cryonics is a last-ditch long-shot attempt to cheat death, so I can relate quite easily.
-- Woody Allen
Is that just because it has human-level consequences?
Belief in MWI doesn't tell you what to do.
No, it's because MWI has broad support among physicists as at least being a very plausible candidate interpretation. Support for cryonics among biologists and neuroscientists is much more limited.
Well.... It does not have a broad support among physicists for being a VERY plausible. A tiny fraction consider it very plausible. The vast majority consider it very unlikely and downright wrong due to it's many problems.
No. Jack apparently read my mind.
No, merely by.
Fair enough. (Well, technically both should move at least a little bit , of course, but I know what you mean.)
Hee hee. :)
Speaking as someone with an academic background in physics, I don't think the group as a whole as anti-MWI as you seem to imply. It was taught at my university as part of the standard quantum sequence, and many of my professors were many-worlders... What isn't taught and what should be taught is how MWI is in fact the simpler theory, requiring fewer assumptions, and not just an interesting-to-consider alternative interpretation. But yes, as others have mentioned physicists as a whole are waiting until we have the technology to test which theory is correct. We're a very empirical bunch.
I don't think I was implying physicists to be anti-MWI, but merely not as a whole considering it to be slam dunk already settled.
Interesting. What technology lets you test that?
We have discussed it here. A reading list is here.
I notice that in your prediction you welcomed bets, but you did not offer odds, nor gave a confidence interval. I’m not sure (haven’t actually checked), but I have an impression that you usually do at least give a number.
Since the prediction was in 2009 it might just be that you recently formed the habit. If that’s not the case, not giving odds (even when welcoming offers) might be an indicator that you don’t believe something as much as you think you do. (The last two "you" are meant both as generic people references and to you in particular.) Does that seem plausible on a quick introspection?
I did make a bet and pay it.
Yes, I know. But those were even odds. When someone makes a prediction unprompted, it suggests more confidence than that. (Well, unless they’re just testing what odds other people offer, but I don’t think that was the case here.) That is, it is possible that your inner censor for “don’t predict things that might prove wrong” didn’t trigger (maybe because you’ve trained yourself to ignore embarrassment about people’s opinion of you), but the censor for “don’t bet when you might be wrong” triggered without you noticing it.
In other words, it might be an indication of a difference between what you believe and what you think you believe, or even what you want to appear to believe :-)
(It might also be that you actualy thought the odds were 50:50, and anticipated others to offer much higher odds. How likely did you think it was at the time, anyway?)