shminux comments on Post Request Thread - Less Wrong

20 Post author: Qiaochu_Yuan 11 April 2013 01:28AM

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Comment author: shminux 11 April 2013 05:26:34PM 1 point [-]

I have no idea why you linked this.

Comment author: Thomas 12 April 2013 06:03:40AM 0 points [-]

You want to talk about QM? On this link, there is an interesting view.

Comment author: gjm 12 April 2013 10:32:07AM 4 points [-]

But shminux didn't say "I want to talk about QM" or anything close to it. He was asking for something much more specific: a short summary of the bits of Eliezer's QM posts that are actually necessary to read the other things he's written that refer back to them.

That video fails to achieve this, on several counts.

  1. It is something like an hour long. Watching it might take longer than reading all Eliezer's QM posts.

  2. The view of QM it puts forward differs somewhat from Eliezer's. This makes it distinctly un-useful as a summary of Eliezer's position to help people understand his other writing.

  3. It picks different topics from the ones Eliezer describes; for a random example, one of the things in Eliezer's QM sequence that he makes use of elsewhere is the idea that the idea of "one particle as distinct from another identical one" badly fails to match up with how the world actually works; the linked video has nothing to say about this because it's focusing on different things.

  4. Its purpose is quite different from, and narrower than, Eliezer's. Eliezer is trying to teach some of the basics of QM to an audience that might not already know it. Garret is trying to tell people who've read a bunch of popular writing on QM that the popular writing gives a misleading picture, and to show a bit of the mathematics required to paint a better picture. (That's also one of Eliezer's purposes. But it's not the only one.)

I should add that I didn't find Garret's explanation particularly clear or insightful; but opinions on that might vary.