Hopefully_Anonymous comments on On Being Decoherent - Less Wrong

14 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 April 2008 04:59AM

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Comment author: Hopefully_Anonymous 28 April 2008 02:52:12AM 2 points [-]

"Yes, I talk about these ideas as if they are obvious. They are. It's important to remember that while learning quantum mechanics. It's not difficult unless you make it difficult. Just because certain academics are currently doing so, is no reason for me to do the same. I explicitly said at the outset (in "Quantum Explanations") that the views I presented would not be a uniform consensus among physicists, but I was going to leave out the controversies until later, so I could teach the version that I think is simple and sane. Bayesianism before frequentism."

That self-flattering interpretation of the first 4 sentences of this quote is pretty clearly not what Jess Reidel meant. He meant that you promote some of your ideas like there is no significant probability that they're wrong ("obvious" in that sense), when expert consensus differs from that assessment. As for the last two sentences, perhaps he'd be satisfied with a more prominent and obvious disclaimer. For example, at the moment of presentation of the simple and sane version of each explanation, clearly noting that reasonable controversies exist.

Elsewhere in his post he was pretty clear that your attempts to