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Zachary_Kurtz comments on News: Improbable Coincidence Slows LHC Repairs - Less Wrong
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Comments (27)
False actually. If you do the experiment a number of times and always get "suspicious" hindrances, then all you have is a lot of confirmational biases if you assume that the reason is anthropic.
Confirmation can't provide definitive empirical proof, only "dis-comfirmation" can. This is especially true when your underlying assumption is unobservable, like multiverse theory.
Be honest. Are you zombie Karl Popper?
Seriously, falsificationism isn't going to be popular on a website where people are obsessed with Bayes. Also, it is wrong. To begin with you can't actually disconfirm anything (in the way you mean). Also, nothing has been confirmed (in the way you mean). Yes, falsifiability is neither necessary nor sufficient for something to be provable.
I get what you mean, but I would hardly classify failing to destroy ourselves as "good empirical evidence." For each time you replicate the experiment (and we survive) it does seem more likely that something is preventing us from turning on the LHC. But how many replications is significant (who the hell knows).
And how do you reach the conclusion that we are destroying ourselves in other universes (no evidence of this)?
After all these experiments, all you know is that the LHC isn't turning on. You don't really have evidence of anything going in potential parallel universes.
The whole argument smacks of circular logic. You're starting with the assumption that multiple universes exist (which may be a good assumption, I'm not trying to say otherwise) and use the experiments to prove something funky is happening elsewhere in the multiverse.
Such a story might be internally consistent, but I fail to see the empiricism.
Sure you do - the probability of you making the observation that the LHC persistently fails to turn on is something like 1 if MWI is true and if a functional LHC would destroy the world; it's surely much lower otherwise.
The probability of you making the observation that the LHC persistently fails to turn on is something like 1 if there exists a malevolent God who doesn't want humans to learn more about physics.
I don't see how God (and other bad explanations) can be ruled out given the experimental conditions being described. You've observed that the LHC can't be turned on but the only reason, as far as I can tell, why the MWI is being chosen as the source of the dilemma is because we're already starting with the assumption that the MWI is correct and relevant here.
If this is not actually a 'begging the question' fallacy, please demonstrate, or I'll assume either myself or everyone else is missing something important.
Ok, either MWI is true or it is not true, correct? And either the LHC destroys planets or it doesn't. So we have 4 possibilities.
MWT-LHCD; MWF-LHCD; MWT-LHCND; and MWF-LHCND
If MWT-LHCD: you will observe lots of LHC test failures. The more test failures the higher this probability.
If MWF-LHCD: You will die.
If MWT-LHCND:The LHC will work and not suffer an unreasonable amount of delay.
If MWF-LHCND: The LHC will work and not suffer an unreasonable amount of delay.
It is a little more complicated than that since there are other hypotheses that might better explain test failures, but in general, the more test failures you see the higher you should estimate the probability of option one. Nowhere in this proof did I assume the truth of MWI.
This quote is key. Other hypotheses could produce the same outcome as MWT-LHCD. Therefore MWF-LHCD actually has two possible outcomes. MW is false and we die. or MW is false and something else keeps us from dying.
The only reason we'd ignore the second possibility is if we assume MW is true and other hypotheses are irrelevant.
It may not be a bad assumption, but this is hardly empirical proof.
Right, so with two or three delays the best explanation is poor management and happenstance. But the chances of 30+ delays being produced by anything but MWT-LHCD is a lot lower. With every delay then, the probability of MWT-LHCD increases.
It is like I have given you a natural law, say that objects fall toward the Earth. At first, you're skeptical so you drop an object and sure enough it falls toward the Earth. But then you think, hey wait a minute, maybe it is just this object that falls toward the Earth, so you drop another. And another. How many objects do you have to see fall before you believe in gravity?
We seem to be talking past each other.
My problem is not with Bayesian approach to confirmation. Afterall, evolutionary theory is largely based on this (sorry Popper, its not just metaphysics).
My problem is with the idea that confirmation points exclusively to MWI.
Take your gravity example. Multiple observations show us that gravity exists. Careful study can even lead us to a Newtonian analysis of it. We understand very well how mass is related to gravity, etc. But this doesn't tell us anything about how gravity is created.
There's a lot of conjecture about gravitons and Einstein's ideas about mass bending space-time are quite elegant. But nobody has observed any of these phenomena and the "source" of gravity confounds us still.
Likewise, when you perform your LHC experiments, you've made a proximate observation, but you have not observed the actual cause.
I repeat, If Many Worlds is False, LHC may still be failing through an unknown alternative mechanism. MW has more external support than, say the existence of a diety, but these experiments alone are not sufficient to cite MW as the probable cause.
For one thing, Many Worlds has a lot less empirical support (and no direct observation) compared to something like gravity. And the LHC experiment and your MW anthropic explanation has no specific link about MW being the underlying cause.
I ask again, other than circular reasoning, what is your basis for ignoring the possibility that MW is false and something else is preventing us from destroying the universe?
It is certainly true that many, many failures/delays in the LHC could be caused by something other than an anthropic effect. The probability of all of those events would be increased with the observation of successive failures. What exactly would the other options be? I can think of two: fraud and anti-science conspiracy. Both of these could be independently investigated and we could find good reasons to think that neither had happened. What alternative explanations would we be left with?
I don't know how relevant this part is but:
Explain this distinction.
I think we're starting with the assumption that it's vastly more likely than the other possible explanations.