EHeller comments on Rationality Quotes June 2014 - Less Wrong

9 Post author: Tyrrell_McAllister 01 June 2014 08:32PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 09 June 2014 09:21:12PM 5 points [-]

Yes, very definitely so. The other thing that makes LW seem... a little bit silly sometimes is the degree of bullet swallowing in the LW canon.

For instance, just today I spent a short while on the internet reading some good old-fashioned "mind porn" in the form of Yves Couder's experiments with hydrodynamics that replicate many aspects of quantum mechanics. This is really developing into quite a nice little subfield, direct physical experiments can be and are done, and it has everything you could want as a reductive explanation of quantum mechanics. Plus, it's actually classical: it yields a full explanation of the real, physical, deterministic phenomena underlying apparently quantum ones.

But if you swallowed your bullet, you'll never discover it yourself. In fact, if you swallow bullets in general, I find it kind of difficult to imagine how you could function as a researcher, given that a large component of research consists of inventing new models to absorb probability mass that currently has nowhere better to go than a known-wrong model.

Comment author: EHeller 10 June 2014 01:05:39AM *  7 points [-]

Yves Couder's experiments are neat, but the underlying 'quantum' interpretation is basically just Bohm's interpretation. The water acts as a pilot wave, and the silicon oil drops act as Bohmian particles. Its very cool that we can find a classical pilot-wave system, but its not pointing in a new interpretational direction.

Personally, I would love Bohm, but for the problem that it generalizes so poorly to quantum field theories. Its a beautiful, real-feeling interpretation.

Edit: Also neat- the best physical analogue to a blackhole that I know of is water emptying down a bathtub drain faster than the speed-of-sound in the fluid. Many years ago, Unruh was doing some neat experiments with some poor grad student, but I don't know if they ever published anything.