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dlthomas comments on Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts - Less Wrong
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Irony.
Xixidu, you should also read the material before trying to defend it.
Correct. Yet I have read some subsequent discussions about that topic (MWI) and also watched this talk:
I also read Decoherence is Simple and Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable.
So far MWI sounds like the most reasonable interpretation to me. And from what I have read I can tell that the sentence - "despite the lack of testable predictions differing from the Copenhagen interpretation" - is not crucial in favoring MWI over other interpretations.
Of course I am not able to judge that MWI is the correct interpretation but, given my current epistemic state, of all interpretations it is the most likely to be correct. For one it sounds reasonable, secondly Yudkowsky's judgement has a considerable weight here. I have no reason to suspect that it would benefit him to favor MWI over other interpretations. Yet there is much evidence that suggests that he is highly intelligent and that he is able to judge what is the correct interpretation given all evidence a non-physicists can take into account.
Edit: "[...] is not correct, or at least not crucial." now reads "[...] is not crucial in favoring MWI over other interpretations."
It is correct, and it is crucial in the sense that most philosophy of science would insist that differing testable predictions is all that would favor one theory over another.
But other concerns (the Bayesian interpretation of Occam's Razor (or any interpretation, probably)) make MWI preferred.
An interpretation of Occam's Razor that placed all emphasis on space complexity would clearly favor the Copenhagen interpretation over the MW interpretation. Of course, it would also favor "you're living in a holodeck" over "there's an actual universe out there", so it's a poor formulation in it's simplest form... but it's not obvious (to me, anyway) that space complexity should count for nothing at all, and if it counts for "enough" (whatever that is, for the particular rival interpretation) MWI loses.
That's would not be Occam's razor...
What particular gold-standard "Occam's razor" are you adhering to, then? It seems to fit well with "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity" and "pluralities must never be posited without necessity".
Note that I'm not saying there is no gold-standard "Occam's razor" to which we should be adhering (in terms of denotation of the term or more generally); I'm just unaware of an interpretaton that clearly lays out how "entities" or "assumptions" are counted, or how the complexity of a hypothesis is otherwise measured, which is clearly "the canonical Occam's razor" as opposed to having some other name. If there is one, by all means please make me aware!
Minimum description length.
The MWI requires fewer rules than Copenhagen, and therefore its description is smaller, and therefore it is the strictly simpler theory.
Is there anything in particular that leads you to claim Minimum Description Length is the only legitimate claimaint to the title "Occam's razor"? It was introduced much later, and the wikipedia article claims it is "a forumlation of Occam's razor".
Certainly, William of Occam wasn't dealing in terms of information compression.
The answer seems circular: because it works. The experience of people using Occam's razor (e.g. scientists) find MDL to be more likely to lead to correct answers than any other formulation.
I don't see that that makes other formulations "not Occam's razor", it just makes them less useful attempts at formalizing Occam's razor. If an alternative formalization was found to work better, it would not be MDL - would MDL cease to be "Occam's razor"? Or would the new, better formalization "not be Occam's razor"? Of the latter, by what metric, since the new one "works better"?
For the record, I certainly agree that "space complexity alone" is a poor metric. I just don't see that it should clearly be excluded entirely. I'm generally happy to exclude it on the grounds of parsimony, but this whole subthread was "How could MWI not be the most reasonable choice...?"