aaronsw comments on Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute - Less Wrong
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BTW, it's important to note that by some polls an actual majority of theoretical physicists now believe in MWI, and this was true well before I wrote anything. My only contributions are in explaining the state of the issue to nonphysicists (I am a good explainer), formalizing the gross probability-theoretic errors of some critiques of MWI (I am a domain expert at that part), and stripping off a lot of soft understatement that many physicists have to do for fear of offending sillier colleagues (i.e., they know how incredibly stupid the Copenhagen interpretation appears nowadays, but will incur professional costs from saying it out loud with corresponding force, because there are many senior physicists who grew up believing it).
The idea that Eliezer Yudkowsky made up the MWI as his personal crackpot interpretation isn't just a straw version of LW, it's disrespectful to Everett, DeWitt, and the other inventors of MWI. It does seem to be a common straw version of LW for all that, presumably because it's spontaneously reinvented any time somebody hears that MWI is popular on LW and they have no idea that MWI is also believed by a plurality and possibly a majority of theoretical physicists and that the Quantum Physics Sequence is just trying to explain why to nonphysicists / formalize the arguments in probability-theoretic terms to show their nonambiguity.
Has anyone seriously suggested you invented MWI? That possibility never even occurred to me.
It's been suggested that I'm the one who invented the idea that it's obviously true rather than just one more random interpretation; or even that I'm fighting a private war for some science-fiction concept, rather than being one infantry soldier in a long and distinguished battle of physicists. Certainly your remark to the extent that "he should try presenting his argument to some skeptical physicists" sounds like this. Any physicist paying serious attention to this issue (most people aren't paying attention to most things most of the time) will have already heard many of the arguments, and not from me. It sounds like we have very different concepts of the state of play.
Can't help but compare this to the Swiftian battle of big-endians and little-endians, only the interpretational war makes even less sense.