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shminux comments on What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion

28 Post author: Punoxysm 16 October 2014 05:58PM

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Comment author: shminux 16 October 2014 09:00:31PM *  7 points [-]

How do you know your new belief is more accurate than your old belief?

Comment author: hydkyll 16 October 2014 10:33:21PM 8 points [-]

Hm, because I spend more time researching the issue than I had before? That should count for something, shouldn't it?

Also, I can actually explain things like decoherence without hand-waving now. Looking back there were some gaps in my understanding that I just brushed over. You could say it was a failure of rationality to give as much credence to the Copenhagen interpretation in the first place.

Comment author: EHeller 19 October 2014 05:46:14AM 5 points [-]

But when you go to many worlds you lose the Born probabilities, doesn't that bother you? The Born probabilities are the actual measurable predictions of the theory.

Many worlds is only simpler as a theory if you don't include a measurement postulate, in which case no one knows how to get Born probabilities.

You can postulate the Born probabilities, but now the theory is exactly as complicated as it was before, so there is no reason to choose many worlds over something like consistent histories.

Comment author: Vladimir 19 March 2016 12:37:22AM 1 point [-]

Nope, MWI is still simpler. The Copenhagen version simply introduces a magical flying spaghetti monster that eats up all the other unobserved configuration spaces faster than light, non-unitarily, etc. That's not really what you would call an "explanation" of the Born probabilities, it's just a magical black box. Many Worlds proponents just say upfront that we don't really know why our experience matches the Born probabilities (and neither does Copenhagen), so it subtracts the FSM from the total complexity. Therefore O(MWI) < O(single-world theories).