= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
hankx7787 comments on Irrationality Game II - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (380)
MWI is unlikely because it is too unparsimonious (not very confident).
Okay? So you weakly think reality should conform your sensibilities? I've got a whole lot of evidence behind a heuristic that is bad news for you... Not voted anything, both out of not really knowing what you mean, and also because the true QMI (explaining among other things Born Probabilities) might be smaller than just the "brute force" decoherence of MWI (such as Mangled Worlds).
Well, I'm sort of hypothesizing that simplicity is not just elegance, but involves a trade-off between elegance and parsimony (vaguely similar to how algorithmic 'efficiency' involves a trade-off between time and space). What heuristic are you referring to which is bad news for this hypothesis? Also, what's QMI? I'm actually very much ignorant when it comes to quantum mechanics.
First of all, I don't care much for some philosophical dictionary's definition of simplicity. You are going to have to specify what you mean by parsimony, and you are going to have to specify it with maths.
Here's my take:
Simplicity is the opposite of Complexity, and Complexity is the Kolmogorov kind. That is the entirety of my definition. And the universe appears to be made on very simple (as specified above) maths.
The Heuristic I am referring to is: "There are many, many, many occasions where people have expected the universe to conform to their sensibilities, and have been dead wrong." It has a lot of evidence backing it, and QM is one very counter-intuitive thing (although the maths are pretty simple), you simply aren't built to think about it.
QMI: Quantum Mechanical Interpretation
Lastly: Have you even read the QM sequence? It gives you a good grasp of what physicists are doing and also explain why everything non-MWI-like is more complex (of the Kolmogorov kind) that any MWI-like.
No, I'm not defining a notion based on anyone's whim/sensibilities; I fully agree that, to be meaningful, any account of 'simplicity' must be fully formalizable (a la K-complexity). However, I expect a full account of simplicity to include both elegance and parsimony based on the following kind of intuition:
a) There is in fact "stuff" out there
b) Everything that actually exists consists of some orderly combination of this stuff, acting in an orderly manner according to the nature of the stuff
c) All other things being equal, a theory is more simple if it posits less 'stuff' to account for the phenomena
d) Some full account of simplicity should include both elegance (a la K-complexity) and this sense of parsimony in a sort of trade-off relationship, such that, for example, if all other things equal, there's a theory A which is 5x more elegant but 1000x less parsimonious, and a theory B which is correspondingly 5x less elegant but 1000x more parsimonious, we should therefore favor theory B
My reasons for expecting there to be some formalization of simplicity which fully accounts for both of these concepts in such a way is, admittedly, somewhat based on whim/sensibility, as I cannot at this time provide such a formalization nor do I have any real evidence such a thing is possible (hence why this discussion is taking place in a thread entitled 'Irrationality game' and not in some more serious venue) - however, whim/sensibility is not inherent to the overall notion per se, i.e. I am not suggesting this notion of an elegance/parsimony trade-off is somehow true-but-not-formalizable or any such thing.