What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong?

Punoxysm

What is something you used to believe, preferably something concrete with direct or implied predictions, that you now know was dead wrong. Was your belief rational given what you knew and could know back then, or was it irrational, and why?

Edit: I feel like some of these are getting a bit glib and political. Please try to explain what false assumptions or biases were underlying your beliefs - be introspective - this is LW after all.

Doesn't pilot-wave QM imply literally the exact same calculations happening as for MWI, though?

I sort of got that idea, but if that's true then I'm not sure I see what the difference between them is in the first place. It seems to me that any theory of quantum mechanics which practically differs from MWI must include collapse somewhere.

(Assuming the difference you're looking for is "People don't live in the other branches".)

Doesn't pilot-wave QM imply literally the exact same calculations happening as for MWI, though?

No, it doesn't. Pilot-wave QM postulates an additional fundamental equation (the guiding equation) that doesn't appear in MWI. It describes how the behavior of the wave function affects the positions of particles.

3DanielLC12y

Pilot-wave QM has all the calculations as MWI for describing the pilot waves. Then there are particles bouncing around the waves. And then there's the waveform collapse that happens whenever the particle actually does something. And if you want to explain entanglement, you have to deal with higher-dimensional pilot waves somehow controlling different particles in parallel so the location of one depends on the location of the other. The Copenhagen interpretation is QM with some bizarre useless stuff added on. Pilot-wave QM is the Copenhagen interpretation with some bizarre useless stuff added on.

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What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong?

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What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong?

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