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Vaniver comments on What I've learned from Less Wrong - Less Wrong
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Comments (232)
I enjoyed the post (enough for a vote up!) but I find myself wishing it had stopped at #5.
6 is mostly correct but has significant edge cases (even if you subscribe to MWI, probabilities pop up when dealing with tiny things). Something like "Probabilities exist in minds" is a much more agreeable statement than "Probabilities don't exist elsewhere," and has the same framing benefits.
7 just flat out bothers me. Many Worlds is just an interpretation, a flavor- it shares the exact same math with all other flavors of quantum mechanics. I agree with Eliezer that it's a far more agreeable flavor than Copenhagen- but those aren't the only two flavors available. And if you are making predictions based on your flavor preferences, something went wrong somewhere. I cannot see how your tastes when it comes to QM should impact whether or not you sign up for cryonics with the currently existing firms offering cryonic services.
I didn't get the impression that MWI mattered to cryonics. The connection from the Quantum physics sequence to cryonics that I got was "This atom is essentially the same as that atom, Replacing all your atoms wouldn't change 'you'. " And related to that, that your atoms could be computer simulated and you'd still be you.
That's a very reasonable interpretation, but it's orthogonal to why I'm bothered.
If the argument is "my objection to cryonics was I wasn't convinced a remade me would be me, but as soon as I realized the configuration was important and not the pieces inside the configuration, that toppled my last objection," then I don't have an issue with that.
What it looked like to me was "I am convinced of Eliezer's viewpoint" instead of "I believe Eliezer's arguments are correct in the domain that they are argued." The linked argument that cryonics is reasonable is an argument that cryonics is possible, not an argument that signing up with Alcor or CI actually increases your likelihood of being awoken in the future. The linked argument is necessary but not sufficient for the action stated.
That came to the forefront of my mind because Eliezer's declaration that MWI is "correct" could mean two things- either MWI is the single truest / best flavor of QM, which I do not think he is qualified to state, or MWI gives the right answers when you ask it relevant questions, just like Copenhagen. Eliezer can rightly say MWI is more satisfactory than Copenhagen, but when you go further and make plans based on multiverses that you would not make if you were just planning for a singular future, that is a giant red flag.