The orthodox formulation of QM (given in Griffiths and most other modern QM texts)...
Here's Griffiths on what he calls the "orthodox position" on quantum indeterminacy. This is from pages 3-5 of his text:
It was the act of measurement that forced the particle to "take a stand"... Jordan said it most starkly: "Observations not only disturb what is to be measured, they produce it... We compel [the particle] to assume a definite position."... Among physicists it has always been the most widely accepted position. Note, however, that if it is correct there is something very peculiar about the act of measurement...
We say that the wave function collapses upon measurement, to a spike... There are, then, two entirely distinct kinds of physical processes: "ordinary" ones, in which the wave function evolves in a leisurely fashion under the Schrodinger equation, and "measurements", in which [it] suddenly and discontinuously collapses.
Going by Griffiths' own account (and I picked Griffiths because he's the authority you cited), what Eliezer says about the orthodox interpretation is not a strawman. In fact, Griffiths explicitly discusses the view you call the "orthodox formulation", except he doesn't call it "orthodox". He describes it as an alternative to the orthodox position, and labels it the "agnostic position".
I think your flavor of instrumentalism is a respectable position in the foundational debate, but to describe it as the standard position is incorrect. I think there was a time when physicists in general had a more operationalist bent, but things have changed.
Hmm, I suppose my personal classification is slightly different. Thanks for pointing that out.
The agnostic position is "shut up and calculate", which is basically resigning to one's inability to model the Born rule with anything better.
The instrumentalist position is to admit that doing research related to the Born rule origins is essential for progress in understanding the fundamentals of QM, but to also acknowledge that interpretations are not interesting physical models and at best have only an inspirational value.
The realist position (hidden...
In response to falenas108's "Ask an X" thread. I have a PhD in experimental particle physics; I'm currently working as a postdoc at the University of Cincinnati. Ask me anything, as the saying goes.
This is an experiment. There's nothing I like better than talking about what I do; but I usually find that even quite well-informed people don't know enough to ask questions sufficiently specific that I can answer any better than the next guy. What goes through most people's heads when they hear "particle physics" is, judging by experience, string theory. Well, I dunno nuffin' about string theory - at least not any more than the average layman who has read Brian Greene's book. (Admittedly, neither do string theorists.) I'm equally ignorant about quantum gravity, dark energy, quantum computing, and the Higgs boson - in other words, the big theory stuff that shows up in popular-science articles. For that sort of thing you want a theorist, and not just any theorist at that, but one who works specifically on that problem. On the other hand I'm reasonably well informed about production, decay, and mixing of the charm quark and charmed mesons, but who has heard of that? (Well, now you have.) I know a little about CP violation, a bit about detectors, something about reconstructing and simulating events, a fair amount about how we extract signal from background, and quite a lot about fitting distributions in multiple dimensions.