You have a spaceship. You believe that it will cease to exist if it passes the cosmological horizon. What empirical test are you failing?

I believe the traditional example is a spacecraft passing over the cosmological horizon. We cannot observe this spacecraft, so the belief "things passing over the cosmological horizon cease to exist" cannot be experimentally proved or disproved. And yet, if there are large numbers of people on such a craft, their continued survival might mater a great deal to us. If we believe they will die, we will choose not to send them - which might impose heavy costs due to i.e. overpopulation.

The analogy to many-worlds seems obvious - if true, it would mean the existence of people we cannot experimentally verify. This could have implications for, say, the value of creating new minds, because they'll already exist somewhere else.

You might value something you can't always see.

In general I agree, and of course Copenhagen is nonsense, but I think you privilege the hypothesis of Many-Worlds over Bohm. You see, Bohm has an explanation for the Born probabilities---they are a stable equilibrium state called, appropriately, "quantum equilibrium". So there are not even any open questions.

And yes, Bohm is non-local, which you could say is a problem... or you could say it explains why quantum mechanics is different from classical mechanics. (Obviously no quantum theory is going to satisfy all our classical intuitions, or it wouldn't be a quantum theory at all!)

It doesn't fit with general relativity, you say? Yes, because none of them do. Quantum gravity doesn't... work, not with our current formalisms. This is the central problem of modern physics (that and dark energy, which most physicists think is related somehow).

He was saying that you should keep trying after most people would give up, not that you should expect everything to magically go your way.

Instead of assuming that people are dumb, ignorant, and making mistakes, assume they are smart, doing their best, and that you lack context.

@slicknet

I understand the point you're raising, because it caught me for a while, but I think I also see the remaining downfall of science. Its not that science leads you to the wrong thing, but that it cannot lead you to the right one. You never know if your experiments actually brought you to the right conclusion - it is entirely possible to be utterly wrong, and complete scientific, for generations and centuries.

Not only this, but you can be obviously wrong. We look at people trusting in spontaneous generation, or a spirit theory of disease, and mock them - rightfully. They took "reasonable" explanations of ideas, tested them as best they could, and ended up with unreasonable confidence in utterly illogical ideas. Science has no step in which you say "and is this idea logically reasonable", and that step is unattainable even if you add it. Science offers two things - gradual improvement, and safety from being wrong with certainty. The first is a weak reward - there is no schedule to science, and by practicing it there's a reasonable chance that you'll go your entire life with major problems with your worldview. The second is hollow - you are defended from taking a wrong idea and saying "this is true" only inasmuch as science deprives you of any certainty. You are offered a qualifier to say, not a change in your ideas.

Under normal social circumstances, I no longer attempt to correct another person's belief by telling them how it is wrong and stating mine. If somebody makes a statement of questionable accuracy, I ask questions to determine how they came to the conclusion. This not only forces the person to consciously justify themselves and perhaps change their mind on their own, but allows for me to collect potential good arguments against my contrary belief. Conversations in general become more interesting and less hostile while following this protocol.

a classic example here is the "extra bedroom for Grandma" - visits from Grandma are easy to imagine, but if she only comes a couple of days a year, spending tens of thousands more dollars for a house with an extra bedroom and bathroom for her is probably pretty stupid. You'd save money - and make her happier - by putting her up in the local five star hotel.

I'm going to buy a house with a room for "grandma", and here's why: While it might cost me less to put guests in luxury hotels, it's going to cost me every time I have a guest over. I might be unusual here, but I know that both the cost and the slightly more difficult choice ("Should I save the money by not inviting them to stay?") is going to make me unhappy every time I get a guest.

From a purely economical view point this line of thinking might be irrational, but I've found that the action or prospect of paying has a real cost in happiness, so I prefer to do pay more once than less split over many instances.