shminux comments on Open Thread: November 2009 - Less Wrong

3 [deleted] 02 November 2009 01:18AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (539)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Psy-Kosh 06 July 2012 01:18:38AM 6 points [-]

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?

Comment author: shminux 07 July 2012 04:55:14AM 4 points [-]

physicists don't, as a whole, consider MWI to be 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.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 July 2012 10:25:49PM *  4 points [-]

“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.)