Ok, fair. Does the lesswrong dialect of Markdown support strikeouts? ---------------------------------------- edit: Hidden variable intuitions are fairly interesting. It must have seemed strange to Einstein, but these days it's not so strange that you could have descriptions of objects that behave as a "latent variable model" of sorts without there being any hidden variables in its description. You don't even need to go to quantum theory to find such objects. Here's a simple graphical model (we call them "MAGs"): A -> B <-> C <- D The way people usually interpret this model is that there is some DAG in the background like this: A -> B <- U -> C <- D and we then do not get to observe U. But you can think of another description of this model, which is that it is all probability distributions where the following independences hold: (1) A _||_ C,D (2) D _||_ A,B Nothing in this description mentions U. We can even parameterize this model (say variables are binary) by a set of parameters that look like this: q(a), q(d), q(b|a), q(c|d), q(b,c|a,d). Again, nothing in these parameters mentions U. And yet the model resembles a hidden variable DAG with a U in the pattern of constraints it imposes. And we know there is no U in the model, because if there was, there would be a Bell inequality, which there isn't as the only constraints are (1) and (2).