This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.
Ah, okay, that makes more sense. 1a) (that MWI is simpler than competing theories) would be vastly more convincing than 1b) (that collapse is bad, mkay). I'm going to have to reread the relevant subsequence with 1a) in mind.
I really don't think 1a) is addressed by Eliezer; no offense meant to him, but I don't think he knows very much about interpretations besides MWI (maybe I'm wrong and he just doesn't discuss them for some reason?). E.g. AFAICT the transactional interpretation has what people 'round these parts might call an Occamian benefit in that it doesn't require an additional rule that says "ignore advanced wave solutions to Maxwell's equations". In general these Occamian arguments aren't as strong as they're made out to be.