On average, if you eliminate twice as many hypotheses as I do from the same data, how much more data than you do I need to achieve the same results? Does it depend on how close we are to the theoretical maximum?

@billswift: Emotion might drive every human action (or not). That's beside the point. If an emotion drives you into a dead end, there's something wrong with that emotion.

My point was that if someone tells you the truth and you don't believe them, it's not fair to say they've led you astray. Eliezer said he didn't "emotionally believe" a truth he was told, even though he knew it was true. I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds like a problem with Eliezer, involving his emotions, not a problem with what he was told.

When they taught me about the scientific method in high school, the last step was "go back to the beginning and repeat." There was also a lot about theories replacing other theories and then being replaced later, new technologies leading to new measurements, and new ideas leading to big debates.

I don't remember if they explicitly said, "You can do science right and still get the wrong answer," but it was very strongly (and logically) implied.

I don't know what you were taught, but I expect it was something similar.

All this "emotional understanding" stuff sounds like your personal problem. I don't mean that it isn't important or that I don't have sympathy for any pain you suffered. I just think it's an emotion issue, not a science issue.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but when I score your many-worlds interpretation it fails your own four-part test.

1. Anticipation vs curiosity: We already had the equations, so there's no new anticipation. At first it doesn't seem like a "curiosity stopper" because it leaves everyone curious about the Born probability thing, but that's because it doesn't say anything about that. On the parts where it does say something, it seems like a curiosity stopper.

After your posts on using complex numbers and mirrors, I was wondering, "Why complex numbers? Why do you add them when you add them and multiply them when you multiply them?" That's the question your interpretation answers, and the answer is, "There's stuff called amplitude that flows around in exactly that way."

2. Blankly solid substance: That sounds like your amplitude. The equations are a specific, complex mechanism, but they're not part of your explanation. They're what you want to explain. Your explanation is just that a substance exists that exactly matches the form of the equations.

3. Cherishing ignorance: (This one is about how supporters behave, and I've really only heard from you. My score here might be totally invalid if other supporters of the same thing support it differently.) You definitely don't do what I would call cherishing ignorance, but I think you do both of the things which you list as examples of it.

This recent series of posts is all about how your interpretation defeats ordinary science.

The "mundane phenomena" one is a little ambiguous. If the point of the rule is whether the theory is claimed as a special exception, then you haven't made that claim. In other words, you haven't said, "Things usually happen that way, but in this case they happen this way." But I think at least part of that rule has to do with pride in how shocking and different the explanation is -- a case of, "I've had a revolutionary insight that violates everything you think you know." You've certainly shown that attitude.

4. Still a mystery: Well, there's the Born probabilities that it doesn't say anything about. Then there's the way that the values are assigned and combined to get the final amplitude, in other words the way the amplitude "flows around." Amplitude has its own peculiar way of flowing that was already in the equations and isn't explained by calling it amplitude.

So the score is:

1. Check

2. Check

3. Maybe, with a frowny face even if it's technically OK.

4. Check

Maybe I missed something in your past posts. (I skimmed over a lot attacks on other interpretations that I don't know much about.) Or maybe I misunderstood the four tests. Three of them seemed like pretty much the same thing.

I'm not sure I even agree with the test, but it captured part of what I don't like about your interpretation. It actually kind of reminds me of that "phlogiston" thing you always bring up as a bad example, in the sense that you started with a black box behavioral description and explained it with a substance defined in terms of the known behavior.

Science and Eliezer both agree that evidence is important, so let's collect some evidence on which one is more accurate.

I don't really follow a lot of what you've written on this, so maybe this isn't fair, but I'll put it out there anyway:

I have a hard time seeing much difference between you (Eliezer Yudkowsky) and the people you keep describing as wrong. They don't look beyond the surface, you look beyond it and see something that looks just like the surface (or the surface that's easiest to look at). They layer mysterious things on top of the theory to explain it, you layer mysterious things on top of physics to explain it. Their explanations all have fatal flaws, yours has just one serious problem. Their explanations don't actually explain anything, yours renames things (e.g. probability becomes "subjective expectation") without clearing up the cause of their relationships -- at least, not yet.

Hopefully Anonymous, if you think a point should be addressed, make that point.

I say Eliezer has finally dealt with the zombie issue as it deserves.

It's a silly idea that invites convoluted discussion, which makes it look sophisticated and hard to refute.

I once saw a person from Korea discover, much to her surprise, that pennies are not red. She had been able to speak English for a while and could correctly identify a stop sign or blood as red, and she had seen plenty of pennies before discovering this.

In Korea they put the color of pennies and the color of blood in the same category and give that category a Korean name.

In arguing for the single box, Yudkowsky has made an assumption that I disagree with: at the very end, he changes the stakes and declares that your choice should still be the same.

My way of looking at it is similar to what Hendrik Boom has said. You have a choice between betting on Omega being right and betting on Omega being wrong.

A = Contents of box A

B = What may be in box B (if it isn't empty)

A is yours, in the sense that you can take it and do whatever you want with it. One thing you can do with A is pay it for a chance to win B if Omega is right. Your other option is to pay nothing for a chance to win B if Omega is wrong.

Then just make your bet based on what you know about Omega. As stated, we only know his track record over 100 attempts, so use that. Don't worry about the nature of causality or whether he might be scanning your brain. We don't know those things.

If you do it that way, you'll probably find that your answer depends on A and B as well as Omega's track record.

I'd probably put Omega at around 99%, as Hendrik did. Keeping A at a thousand dollars, I'd one-box if B were a million dollars or if B were something I needed to save my life. But I'd two-box if B were a thousand dollars and one cent.

So I think changing A and B and declaring that your strategy must stay the same is invalid.

"There are some people who will, if you just tell them the Refrigerator Hypothesis, snort and say 'That's an untestable just-so story' and dismiss it out of hand; but if you start by telling them about the gaze-tracking experiment and then explain the evolutionary motivation, they will say, 'Huh, that might be right.'"

But do they actually think it's more likely to be true?

They didn't say it was impossible, they said it wasn't testable. Explain how to test it, and they don't say that. What's the problem?