Vladimir_M comments on The Irrationality Game - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (910)
prase:
Actually, that's the distinction I missed! The notion of "collapse" specifically refers to a non-deterministic process, not to a deterministic process that would at some point reveal the previously existing hidden variables.
That would basically be the "ensemble interpretation," right? The theory tells you the probability distribution of outcomes, which you'll see if you repeat the experiment prepared the same way a bunch of times (frequentism!), and that's all there is to it. I do have a lot of sympathy for that view, as you might guess from the recent discussion of subjective probabilities, though I cannot say that my superficial understanding of QM gives me much confidence in any views I might hold about it.
Well, the quantum probabilities are certainly frequentist. However, I don't suppose strict Bayesians deny that there are probabilities with frequentist interpretation. I am also not sure about the label ensemble interpretation. It seems that its proponents somehow deny the validity of QM for small, non-ensemblish systems, which is a position I don't subscribe to. After all, both collapse and many-world interpretations are no more Bayesian and no less frequentist than the ensemble one. The hidden parameters are deterministic, but have their own well known problems.
As for the frequentist-Bayes controversy, although I am probably more than you sympathetic to the Bayesian position, I have some sympathy for frequentism. I think both interpretation can coexist, with different sensible meanings of "probability".