The gradual increase in acceptance of many-worlds in academic physics, suggests that there are physicists who will only accept a new idea given some combination of epistemic justification, and a sufficiently large academic pack in whose company they can be comfortable. As more physicists accept, the pack grows larger, and hence more people go over their individual thresholds for conversion—with the epistemic justification remaining essentially the same.
This is reasonably accurate, to a degree. Given that one can trace the decoherence process almost all the way down to the diagonalization in the preferred basis (preferred by the detector), there is a general vague feeling among many physicists that every eigenstate ought to survive, somehow. However, almost no one outside the MWI crowd is willing to assign any definite ontology to it.
Now put your Bayesian goggles back on. As described in Einstein's Arrogance, there are queries that are not binary—where the answer is not "Yes" or "No", but drawn from a larger space of structures, e.g., the space of equations. In such cases it takes far more Bayesian evidence to promote a hypothesis to your attention than to confirm the hypothesis.
Indeed, Bayes is great for suggesting a promising model. But no matter how promising, if the model ends up not offering any new predictions, it is not better than any other one with the same predictive power, except maybe for didactic purposes. Unfortunately, that's exactly what MWI is.
Indeed, Bayes is great for suggesting a promising model. But no matter how promising, if the model ends up not offering any new predictions, it is not better than any other one with the same predictive power, except maybe for didactic purposes. Unfortunately, that's exactly what MWI is.
Would you recommend MWI for didactic purposes?
Alternatively, would you recommend it in the counterfactual where it had well-written (perhaps over-written) textbooks, like the statistical interpretation and/or (non-straw-)Copenhagen have?
Today's post, Faster Than Science was originally published on 20 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 Changing the Definition of Science, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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