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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute - Less Wrong
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That sounds correct to me. A physicist who also possesses probability-theory expertise and who can reason with respect to Solomonoff Induction and formal causal models should realize that single-world variants of MWI are uniformly unworkable (short of this world being a runtime-limited computer simulation); but such is rare (though not unheard-of) among professional physicists; and among the others, you can hardly blame them for trying to keep an open mind.
The Penrose's objective collapse theory saying that the entanglement scale is limited by gravity, which results in the macroscopic objects remaining essentially classical, does not look all that unworkable.
It'd still be the only FTL discontinuous non-differentiable non-CPT-symmetric non-unitary non-local-in-the-configuration-space etc. etc. process in all of physics, to explain a phenomenon (why do we see only one outcome?) that doesn't need explaining.
Well, one advantage of it is that it is testable, and so is not a mere interpretation, which holds a certain amount of appeal to the more old-fashioned of us.
I agree, and I myself was, and am still, sentimentally fond of Penrose for this reason, and I would cheer on any agency that funded a test. However and nonetheless, "testable" is not actually the same as "plausible", scientifically virtuous as it may be.
Not if it doesn't allow FTL communication, unless you want to argue that quantum entanglement is a FTL phenomenon, but that wouldn't be an issue of the particular interpretation.
Not necessarily. Irreversible and stochastic quantum processes can be time-continuous and time-differentiable.
Consider the processes described by the Lindblad equation, for instance.
CPT symmetry is a property of conventional field theories, not all quantum theories necessarily have it, and IIUC, there are ongoing experiments to search for violations. CPT symmetry is just the last of a series of postulated symmetries, the previous ones (C symmetry, P symmetry, T symmetry and CP symmetry) have been experimentally falsified.
Right, and that's the point of objective collapse theories.
I'm not sure what you mean by that, but locality in physics is defined with respect to space and time, not to arbitrary configuration spaces.
AFAIK, there have been attempts to derive the Born rule in Everett's interpretation, but they didn't lead to uncontroversial results.
I have never seen a proposed mechanism of ontological collapse that actually fits this, though.
The inability to send a signal that you want, getting instead a Born-Rule-based pure random signal, doesn't change that this Born-Rule-based pure random signal is, under ontological collapse distributed FTL.
AFAIK, Penrose's interpretation doesn't describe the details of the collapse process, it just says that above about the "one graviton" level of energy separation collapse will occur.
It doesn't commit to collapse being instantaneous: It could be that the state evolution is governed by a non-linear law that approximates very well the linear Schrödinger equation in the "sub-graviton" regime and has a sharp, but still differentiable phase transition when approaching the "super-graviton" regime.
The GRW interpretation assumes instantaneous collapse, IIUC, but it would be a trivial modification to have fast, differentiable collapse.
My point is that non-differentiable collapse is not a requirement of objective collapse interpretations.
But that's an issue of QM, irrespective of the particular interpretation. Indeed the "spooky action at distance" bugged Einstein and many people of his time, but the modern view is that as long as you don't have causal influences (that is, information transmission) propagating FTL, you don't violate special relativity.
No, it isn't. QM is purely causal and relativistic. You can look into the equations and prove that nothing FTL is in there. The closest you get is accounting for the possibility of a vacuum bubble having appeared nearby a particle with exactly its energy, and the antimatter part of it the bubble then cancels with the particle. And that isn't much like FTL.
When you do an EPR experiment, the appearance of FTL communication arises from the assumption that the knowledge you gain about what you'll see if you go check the other branch of the experiment is something happens at the other end of the experiment, instead of locally, with the information propagating to the other end of the experiment as you go to check. The existence of nonlocal states does not imply nonlocal communication.
I'm not sure what we are disagreeing about.
My point is that objective collapse is FTL only in the same sense that QM is. That is, if QM isn't FTL, then collapse isn't.
I'm puzzled. What does Solomonoff Induction have to say about experimentally undistinguishable (as far as we can practically test, at least) interpretations of the same theory?