It's too bad that EY completely misunderstands what makes a new physical model a good one. It's not some calculation of Bayesian probabilities and Kolmogorov complexities, it is something you can check experimentally in a lab that your previous model did not predict. If not that, you might adopt a new theory if it provides easier ways of calculating something already observed. You do not rush into adopting something that has identical math, but just feels better, unless you are a philosopher of physics, i.e. someone feeding on crumbs and leftovers of those who do the real thing.
EY started by advocating the MWI, and ended up sliding down toward calling it decoherence, a perfectly good mathematical concept without any interpretational baggage. Does anyone else see the sleight of hand?
What a disappointing conclusion to a misplaced advocacy of a single interpretation. Where did his rationality go?
If you disagree with MWI, then... what dynamical principle describes the destruction of all the non-observed components after a measurement? It's not built in to quantum dynamics as they stand.
Today's post, Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable was originally published on 07 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Decoherence is Simple, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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