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orthonormal comments on Personal research update - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (31)
On what basis do you claim this? I haven't heard of any credentials he has in physics, for one thing. (For the record, I'm not a physicist but I have a PhD in a relevant area of math.)
Could you point me to that discussion, then?
I don't know which official credentials he has, but if you take a look at physicsforums.com and physics.stackexchange and other various blogs, you will quickly realize the vast amount of knowledge he got. He can do work in QM,QFT and String theory, not just read it and understand, but actual work, can you?
Here is the disccussion I was referring to: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/7jw/probablyincomprehensible_decision_theory/4sud
Thanks.
Huh. I'm surprised, and I'll update.
Let's see. He was saying that MWI made no ontological sense. I said something insulting (that's an ugly pattern- I don't do that to very many people on here), then Manfred started explaining MWI pretty well. I jumped back in to explain the Born probabilities as a consequence of it being a Hilbert space.
Then Mitchell correctly identified my explanation with a variant of Barbour's Platonia (I may have missed that on first reading) before launching into something like infinite-set atheism (that countable duplication of a configuration would count as an explanation of the Born probabilities, but that a vector in L^2 with a certain length would not). He also mentions that MWI has issues with relativity and preferred somehow; I admit I'm not qualified to talk about relativistic QM, so I can't counter the objection- but if it wasn't a problem for Feynman, I'm not especially worried.
...I should update again, because he did offer a decent restatement of my view before offering one criticism I understand (and reject as mathematical Ludditism) along with two that I don't have the background for. I think I've probably let my disgust over his philosophical stance on qualia bleed over into my estimation of his physics knowledge. Drat.
What do physics credentials have to do with this? Note MP's quote of Orthonormal's complaint in which he compared MP to Penrose!
I looked at physics stackexchange and quickly failed to change my impression of MP's grasp of physics. It's not terrible, but I don't see evidence that he can "do work." Given your interpretation of that thread you link, I shouldn't have bothered.
His credentials has to do with the fact that one should not dismiss everything out of hand just because you disagree with some positions he hold, if you knew his credentials you might have another look at what he writes and not shrug it off right away.
I'm surprised you feel that way really, he has done quite a lot of work, but he is a bit "all over the place" in terms of finishing projects. I would like to understand what you base your skepticism of his competence on, but maybe you should do that in a PM so we don't hijack MP's post.
regarding my position on MWI, it is in accordance with the current state of physics, the Born Rule issue and preferred basis is still not solved. Dugic et al 2011 also shows a deep problem for ever bein able to solve the preferred basis problem. But again, this should be discussed in it's own thread. Maybe a nonpartial should create "The big MWI debate" post where we could discuss all of these issues. Because I think that frankly over 90% of those who subscribe to MWi on this site has no clue about QM but only read Yudkowsky's sequence. And EY is definitely no physicist
Before this goes any further, I have to say that I appreciate the defense, but let's not overstate my demonstrated competencies. I would like to construct a field theory which applies this to this, and I am studying a well-known model system from string theory with a view to modifying it to match the real world, and I have various other conceptual projects. So I'm able to have ideas, but hardly any of these projects are at the stage where I have calculations to perform, and in that area I'll be leaning on references for a long time to come.