Well, first:  Does any collapse theory have any experimental support?  No.

With that out of the way...

If collapse actually worked the way its adherents say it does, it would be:

1. The only non-linear evolution in all of quantum mechanics.
2. The only non-unitary evolution in all of quantum mechanics.
3. The only non-differentiable (in fact, discontinuous) phenomenon in all of quantum mechanics.
4. The only phenomenon in all of quantum mechanics that is non-local in the configuration space.
5. The only phenomenon in all of physics that violates CPT symmetry.
6. The only phenomenon in all of physics that violates Liouville's Theorem (has a many-to-one mapping from initial conditions to outcomes).
7. The only phenomenon in all of physics that is acausal / non-deterministic / inherently random.
8. The only phenomenon in all of physics that is non-local in spacetime and propagates an influence faster than light.

WHAT DOES THE GOD-DAMNED COLLAPSE POSTULATE HAVE TO DO FOR PHYSICISTS TO REJECT IT?  KILL A GOD-DAMNED PUPPY?

- Eliezer Yudkowsky, Collapse Postulates

In the olden days of physics, circa 1900, many prominent physicists believed in a substance known as aether. The principle was simple: Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism had shown that light was a wave, and light followed many of the same equations as sound waves and water waves. However, every other kind of wave- sound waves, water waves, waves in springs- needs some sort of medium for its transmission. A "wave" is not really a physical object; it is just a disturbance of some other substance. For instance, if you throw a rock into a pond, you cannot pluck the waves out of the pond and take them home with you in your backpack, because the "waves" are just peaks and troughs in the puddle of water (the medium). Hence, there should be some sort of medium for light waves, and the physicists named this medium "aether".

I don’t want to be too dogmatic about this claim, but Godzilla is unrealistic.  I don’t want to be too non-dogmatic about this claim either.  OK then, just how dogmatic should I be?  I have all sorts of reasons for thinking that skyscraper sized lizards or dinosaurs don’t actually exist.  Honestly, the most important of these is probably that none of the people who I imagine would know if they did exist seem to believe in them.  I never hear any mention of them in the news, in history books, etc, and I don’t see their effects in the national death statistics.  No industries seem to exist to deal with their rampages, and no oil or shipping companies lose stock value from lizard attacks.  Casually, at least, Godzilla attacks don’t seem like the sort of basic fact about the world that people could just overlook.  How confident should I be that Godzilla type creatures don't exist? 

I can also fairly easily recognize good biological reasons not to expect there to be giant rampaging lizards.  The square/cube law, in its many manifestations, is the most basic of these, but by itself is not completely decisive.  I can imagine physical workarounds that would allow sequoia giganticus sized reptiles, but not without novel bio-machinery that would take a long time to evolve and would surely be found in many other organisms.  I can even vaguely imagine ways in which biology might prove resistant to conventional military weaponry and ecological niches and lifestyles that might support both such biology and such size, though much of my knowledge of Earth’s ecosystems would have to be re-written.    For all that, if I lived in a world where essentially all authorities did refer to the activities of godzilla giganticus  I would probably accept that they were probably correct regarding its existence.  What should a hypothetical person who lived in a world where the existence of Godzilla type creatures was common knowledge and was regarded as an ordinary non-numinous fact about the world believe?

Godzilla would be considerably more perplexing than thunderstones, and would have to be considerably better documented to be credible.  Even with the strongest documentation I would have substantial unresolved questions, inferring that Godzilla’s native ecosystem must be quite different from any known (possibly inferring that the details are classified), and even wondering whether Godzilla was a biological creature at all as opposed to, for instance, a giant robot left behind by an advanced and forgotten civilization, a line of inquiry that would greatly increase my credence in secret history of all kinds.  For the most part though, I would probably go about life as normal.  Even Natural Selection, the most damaged part of my world-view, would endure as a great intellectual triumph explaining the origins of almost all of Earth’s life forms.  Only peripheral facts, such as distant history and the nature of some exotic ecosystems would be deeply called into question, and such facts are not tightly integrated with the broader edifice of science.  In a conversation with a hypothetical Michael Vassar who believed in Godzilla, the issue would typically not come up.  Science in general would not be called into question in my mind, but should it be? 

The product of Less Wrong is truth. However, there seems to be a reluctance of the personality types here - myself included - to sell that product. Here's my evidence:

Yvain said: But the most important reason to argue with someone is to change his mind. ... I make the anecdotal observation that a lot of smart people are very good at winning arguments in the first sense [(logic)], and very bad at winning arguments in the second sense [(persuasion)]. Does that correspond to your experience?

Eliezer said: I finally note, with regret, that in a world containing Persuaders, it may make sense for a second-order Informer to be deliberately eloquent if the issue has already been obscured by an eloquent Persuader - just exactly as elegant as the previous Persuader, no more, no less.  It's a pity that this wonderful excuse exists, but in the real world, well...

Robin Hanson said: So to promote rationality on interesting important topics, your overwhelming consideration simply must be: on what topics will the world’s systems for deciding who to hear on what listen substantially to you? Your efforts to ponder and make progress will be largely wasted if you focus on topics where none of the world’s “who to hear on what” systems rate you as someone worth hearing. You must not only find something worth saying, but also something that will be heard.

We actually label many highly effective persuasive strategies that can be used to market our true ideas as "dark arts". What's the justification for this negative branding? A necessary evil is not evil. Even if - and this is a huge if - our future utopia is free of dark arts, that's not the world we live in today. Choosing not to use them is analogous to a peacenik wanting to rid the world of violence by suggesting that police not use weapons.

Related to: Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych, Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization.

The main proximate cause of increase in human weight over the last few decades is over-eating - other factors like decreased energy need due to less active lifestyle seem at best secondary if relevant at all. The big question is what misregulates homeostatic system controlling food intake towards higher calorie consumption?

The most common accepted answer is some sort of superstimulus theory - modern food is so tasty people find it irresistible. This seems backwards to me in its basic assumption - almost any "traditional" food seems to taste better than almost any "modern" food.

It is as easy to construct the opposite theory of tastiness set point - tastiness is some estimate of nutritional value of food - more nutritious food should taste better than less nutritious food. So according to the theory - if you eat very tasty food, your appetite thinks it's highly nutritious, and demands less of it; and if you eat bland tasteless food - your appetite underestimates its nutritious content and demands too much of it.

• Eliezer Yudkowsky was once attacked by a Moebius strip. He beat it to death with the other side, non-violently.
• Inside Eliezer Yudkowsky's pineal gland is not an immortal soul, but another brain.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky's favorite food is printouts of Rice's theorem.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky's favorite fighting technique is a roundhouse dustspeck to the face.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky once brought peace to the Middle East from inside a freight container, through a straw.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky once held up a sheet of paper and said, "A blank map does not correspond to a blank territory". It was thus that the universe was created.
• If you dial Chaitin's Omega, you get Eliezer Yudkowsky on the phone.
• Unless otherwise specified, Eliezer Yudkowsky knows everything that he isn't telling you.
• Somewhere deep in the microtubules inside an out-of-the-way neuron somewhere in the basal ganglia of Eliezer Yudkowsky's brain, there is a little XML tag that says awesome.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky is the Muhammad Ali of one-boxing.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky is a 1400 year old avatar of the Aztec god Aixitl.
• The game of "Go" was abbreviated from "Go Home, For You Cannot Defeat Eliezer Yudkowsky".
• When Eliezer Yudkowsky gets bored, he pinches his mouth shut at the 1/3 and 2/3 points and pretends to be a General Systems Vehicle holding a conversation among itselves. On several occasions he has managed to fool bystanders.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky has a swiss army knife that has folded into it a corkscrew, a pair of scissors, an instance of AIXI which Eliezer once beat at tic tac toe, an identical swiss army knife, and Douglas Hofstadter.
• If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is not a fact about the phenomenon; it just means I am not Eliezer Yudkowsky.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky has no need for induction or deduction. He has perfected the undiluted master art of duction.
• There was no ice age. Eliezer Yudkowsky just persuaded the planet to sign up for cryonics.
• There is no spacetime symmetry. Eliezer Yudkowsky just sometimes holds the territory upside down, and he doesn't care.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky has no need for doctors. He has implemented a Universal Curing Machine in a system made out of five marbles, three pieces of plastic, and some of MacGyver's fingernail clippings.
• Before Bruce Schneier goes to sleep, he scans his computer for uploaded copies of Eliezer Yudkowsky.

If you know more Eliezer Yudkowsky facts, post them in the comments.

I'm going to test just how much the people here are committed to paying a Counterfactual Mugger, by playing Omega.

I'm going to roll a die. If it doesn't come up 5 or 6, I'm going to ask Eliezer Yudkowsky to reply to this article with the comment "I am a poopy head." If I roll a 5 or 6, I'm going to donate $20 to SIAI if I predict that Eliezer Yudkowsky will post the above comment.

Because Eliezer has indicated that he would pay up when counterfactually mugged, I do predict that, if I roll a 5 or 6, he'll respond.

::rolls die::

Darn it! It's a 5. Well, I'm a man of my word, so...

::donates::

Um, let's try that again. (At least I've proven my honesty!)

::rolls die::

Okay, this time it's a 1.

So, Eliezer, will you post a comment admitting that you're a poopy head?