Sniffnoy comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Unnamed 27 May 2010 12:10AM

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Comment author: Sniffnoy 04 July 2010 04:11:19AM 1 point [-]

As I understand it, their theory is that time travel is like postselection. Hence, to determine what would happen in the case of the grandfather paradox, they set up an equivalent postselection experiment. So if their theory is correct, the results of an actual grandfather paradox experiment would match the results of this simulated-via-postselection one.

Comment author: Baughn 04 July 2010 07:25:12AM 0 points [-]

In what sense is post-selection not time-travel? You've still got the state at time T determined by the state at T+1.

Comment author: Sniffnoy 04 July 2010 08:18:11AM 1 point [-]

Because, if I'm reading this right, they literally manually postselected the results. They didn't come up with some way to get the physics to postselect it for you.