army1987 comments on 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Call For Critiques/Questions - Less Wrong

18 Post author: Yvain 11 October 2014 06:39AM

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Comment author: DanielFilan 11 October 2014 01:43:58PM *  4 points [-]

Formatting issues:

  • The title "Part Eight: Slightly More Complicated Questions" appears twice.

Question requests:

  • Ability to solve the Schrodinger equation for the hydrogen atom.
  • OCEAN personality test results
  • Split "no" option in meetups into "no, because there are no meetups near where I live" and "no, there may be meetups near where I live but I don't want to go to them"

Other comments:

  • I like the multiple calibration questions
Comment author: [deleted] 11 October 2014 05:13:30PM 8 points [-]

Ability to solve the Schrodinger equation for the hydrogen atom.

In case you care about that in order to know which respondents know what they're talking about when answering the MWI question, that's a very poor choice (as I mentioned two years ago IIRC). It basically mostly only checks whether people took QM classes (in many of which interpretational issues are discussed hardly at all) and can remember the tricks to solve second-order differential equations in spherical coordinates. Asking whether people can prove Bell's theorem would be a much better choice. (You should weigh Scott Aaronson's opinion about MWI over mine even though I'm a physicist and he isn't.) Having read How the Hippies Saved Physics, I'd guess that if anything ability to solve the SE for the H atom would anti-correlate with trustworthiness about interpretations of QM when controlling for work status, profession and degree.

OCEAN personality test results

Seconded.

Comment author: DanielFilan 11 October 2014 10:18:29PM 3 points [-]

In case you care about that in order to know which respondents know what they're talking about when answering the MWI question, that's a very poor choice.

Fair enough. In that case, I'll request a question as to whether you can prove Bell's theorem. I guess I was lucky that in my university, interpretational issues were discussed a fair bit in later-year theoretical physics classes.

Comment author: Aleksander 12 October 2014 07:33:32PM 2 points [-]

I think both questions are informative, they just test a different thing.

To give an analogy from copmputer science, the question about hydrogen atom is similar in spirit to, "Would you be able to implement quicksort?", whereas the one about Bell theorem is more like, "Would you be able to reconstruct the halting problem proof?" The latter seems like a much higher bar. I'm curious, do you think there exist many people who can actually reconstruct the proof of Bell's theorem, but who can't solve the Schrodinger equation for the hydrogen atom?

(I'm assuming that by solving the Schrodinger equation for the hydrogen atom, Daniel meant deriving the energy levels of a hydrogen atom from SE, as opposed to say providing the full basis of eigenfunctions including these for E > 0; the latter is much harder and I wouldn't expect most people who took even advanced Quantum Mechanics to be able to do it without looking things up).

Comment author: [deleted] 12 October 2014 07:53:09PM 2 points [-]

I'm assuming that by solving the Schrodinger equation for the hydrogen atom, Daniel meant deriving the energy levels of a hydrogen atom from SE, as opposed to say providing the full basis of eigenfunctions including these for E > 0;

I had assumed something in between -- deriving the energy levels, and the eigenfunctions for the levels with E < 0.

Comment author: [deleted] 14 October 2014 05:53:14PM 1 point [-]

The latter seems like a much higher bar.

Maybe the answers given (either in the Bell theorem case or in the Schrödinger equation case) could be “Yes, right now”, “Not off the top of my head, but I know where to look stuff up” and “Can I prove the what?”