Or better yet, a transcript.

Actually I clearly and explicitly went out of my way to say I wasn't asserting that.

Bored of being laughed at out loud now. (Twice in one short thread is enough.) Bye.

It seems perfectly possible to me -- I make no claims about whether it's actually true -- that the following could all be the case. (1) Of the various physical theories in the possession of the human race that are definite enough to be assessed, one of the clear winners is the Standard Model. (2) Of the various ways to understand the quantum mechanics involved in the Standard Model, the clear winner is "many worlds". (3) The known lacunae in our understanding of physics make it clear that further conceptual advances will be needed before we can claim to understand everything. (4) Those conceptual advances could take just about any form, and everything we currently think we know is potentially up for grabs. (5) "Many worlds" is not uniquely under threat from these future conceptual advances -- everything is up for grabs -- and the possibility of future conceptual revolutions doesn't call for any more caution about "many worlds" than it does for caution about, say, the inseparability of space and time.

In other words: The fact that science is hard and not yet finished is indeed reason for epistemic humility -- about everything; but pointing to some particular thing alleged to be a discovery of modern science and saying "no, wait, it could turn out to be wrong" is not justifiable by that fact alone, unless you are happy to do the same for all other alleged discoveries of modern science.

My guess is that you have some other reasons for being skeptical about the many-worlds interpretation, besides the very general fact that quantum mechanics might some day be the subject of a great scientific upheaval. But you haven't said what they are.

My point about your tone is not concerned with the fact that you include references and quotations, and taking offence isn't the failure mode you might need to worry about. The danger, rather, is that you come across as pushing, with an air of smug superiority, a non-standard view of the present state of science, and that this is liable to pattern-match in people's brains to a host of outright cranks. If you prefer not to be dismissed as a crank, you might want to adjust your tone.

(If, on the other hand, you don't care whether you are dismissed as a crank, then the question in some minds will be "Why should I take him seriously when he doesn't seem to do so himself?".)

you must really dislike Lincoln's ultra-short Gettysburg Address!

No, I think it's excellent (though I prefer the PowerPoint version), but it isn't an essay.

let me express the hope that the various references [...] have helped to awaken an appreciation of the [...] mathematical limitations that are inherent in [...] Less Wrong's Quantum Physics Sequence

That sentence appears to me to embody some assumptions you're not in a position to make reliably. Notably: That I think, or thought until John Sidles kindly enlightened me, that Eliezer's QM essays are anything like a complete exposition of QM. As it happens, that wasn't my opinion; for that matter I doubt it is or was even Eliezer's.

In particular, when Eliezer says that QM is "non-mysterious" I don't think he means that everything about it is understood, that there are no further scientific puzzles to solve. He certainly doesn't mean it isn't possible to pick a mathematical framework for talking about QM and then contemplate generalizations. He's arguing against a particular sort of mysterianism one often hears in connection with QM -- the sort that says, roughly, "QM is counterintuitive, which means no one really understands it or can be expected to understand it, so the right attitude towards QM is one of quasi-mystical awe", which is the kind of thing that makes Chopraesque quantum woo get treated with less contempt than it deserves.

Even Newtonian mechanics is mysterious in the sense that there are unsolved problems associated with it. (For instance: What are all the periodic 3-body trajectories? What is the right way to think about the weird measure-zero situations -- involving collisions of more than two particles -- in which the usual rules of Newtonian dynamics constrain what happens next without, prima facie, fully determining it?) But no one talks about Newtonian mechanics in the silly way some people talk about quantum mechanics, and it's that sort of quantum silliness Eliezer is (at least, as I understand it) arguing against.

I think at least one of us has a serious misunderstanding of what's generally meant by the phrase "not even wrong". To me, it means "sufficiently vague or confused that it doesn't even yield the sort of testable predictions that would allow it to be refuted", which doesn't seem to me to be an accurate description of conventional 20th-century quantum mechanics. It might, indeed, turn out that conventional 20th-century QM is a severely incomplete description of reality, and that in some situations it gives badly wrong predictions, and that some such generalization as you favour will do better, much as relativity and QM improved on classical physics in ways that radically revised our picture of what the universe fundamentally is. But classical physics was not "not even wrong". It was an excellent body of ideas. It explained a lot, and it enabled a lot of correct predictions and useful inventions. It was wrong but clear and useful. It was the exact opposite of "not even wrong".

Finally and incidentally: What impression do you think your tone gives to your readers? What impression are you hoping for? I ask because I think the reality may not match your hopes.

Joshua Landsberg has written an essay [...]

The thing you link to is not anything by Joshua Landsberg, but another of your own comments.

That in turn does link to something by Landsberg that has a section headed "Clash of cultures" but it could not by any reasonable stretch be called an essay. It's only a few paragraphs long and about half of it is a quotation from Plato. (It also makes no explicit allusion to Spivak's Hogwarts-Muggles distinction, though I agree it's pointing at much the same divergence.)

I can't find the particular proofs of Noether theorems that your link refers to. Can you help me find them? I see no instances of the word "muggle" in Spivak's paper - in fact no index at all. Is there a different version of it? Please help, as I would greatly appreciate reading this!

Edit: I see now that the comment was referring to a book by Spivak, and that the linked PDF is only on 'elementary mechanics.'

Abominable Conclusion 1: the AIs that first negotiated with humanity, thousands of years ago, to levitate objects on command, had insisted that humans speak the protocol words... Wingardium Leviosa.

1. Both canon and HPMoR have arithmancy. In HPMoR, "Harry and Professor McGonagall had bought his textbooks from Flourish and Blotts just under the deadline. With only a slight explosion when Harry had made a beeline for the keyword 'Arithmancy' and discovered that the seventh-year textbooks invoked nothing more mathematically advanced than trigonometry." And Harry really shouldn't have exploded. Many real world Muggle schools don't get as far as trigonometry by the end of high school, and they don't have to spend any time on charms or transfiguration.

2. Ryvmvre unf fgngrq gung guvf vf abg na NV fgbel.

Conspicuously absent from the canon, and from Methods of Rationality (so far) --- and absent entirely from the Hogwarts curriculum --- are two fundamental elements of rational cognition:

• mathematics, and
• artificial intelligences (AIs)

Therefore

Postulate 1 "Magic" is the name that witches, wizards, and muggles alike give to the practice of manipulating physical reality by negotiation with agents that are (artificial? primordial? evolved? accidentally created?) intelligences.

Postulate 2 "Magical Spells" is the name that witches, wizards, and muggles alike give to an evolving set of protocols for negotiating with an existing community of (mysterious) intelligences. These protocols are designed to minimize the risks and harms associated to the practice of magic, by concealing the physical origins of magic.

Postulate 3 The chief organizing objective of the Hogwarts curriculum is to preserve the social fictions that are associated to Postulates 1 and 2.

Postulate 4 Harry Potter is regarded as dangerous because he seeks to evade the restrictions associated to Postulates 1, 2, and 3, by inquiring into the true nature of magic and its actions.

Literary Remark Harry Potter would do well to reflect upon the words and fate of Captain Ahab:

"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. Ohg abg zl znfgre, zna, vf rira gung snve cynl. Jub'f bire zr? Gehgu ungu ab pbasvarf."

Conclusion Harry Potter's quest to restore Hermione Granger may be leading him and the Hogwarts crew to a similarly disastrous fate as Ahab and the Pequod crew.

The entanglement(s) of hot-noisy-evolved biological cognition with abstract ideals of cognition that Eliezer Yudkowsky vividly describes in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and the quantum entanglement(s) of dynamical flow with the physical processes of cognition that Scott Aaronson vividly describes in Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine, both find further mathematical/social/philosophical echoes in Joshua Landsberg's Tensors: Geometry and Applications (2012), specifically in Landsberg's thought-provoking introductory section Section 0.3: Clash of Cultures (this introduction is available as PDF on-line).

E.g., the above discussions above relating to "map versus object" distinctions can be summarized by:

Aaronson's Law of Ontic Mixing "We can't always draw as sharp a line as we'd like between map and territory".

as contrasted with the opposing assertion

Landsberg's No-Mixing Principle "Don’t use coordinates unless someone holds a pickle to your head"

As Landsberg remarks

"These conversations [are] very stressful to all involved ... there are language and even philosophical barriers to be overcome."

The Yudkowsky/Aaronson philosophical divide is vividly mirrored in the various divides that Landsberg describes between geometers and algebraists, and mathematicians and engineers.

Question Has it happened before, that philosophical conundrums have arisen in the course of STEM investigation, then been largely or even entirely resolved by further STEM progress?

Answer Yes of course (beginning for example with Isaac Newton's obvious-yet-wrong notion that "absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external").

Conclusion It may be that, in coming decades, the philosophical debate(s) between Yudkowsky and Aaronson will be largely or even entirely resolved by mathematical discourse following the roadmap laid down by Landsberg's outstanding text.