In the Sequence, Eliezer made a strong case for the realist interpretation of QM (neo-Everettian many worlds), based on decoherence and Occam's razor.
It's tendentious to call MWI the only realistic interpretation.
EY makes a case against CI, which in most circumstances would be a case against anti-realism. However his version of CI is actually OR, another realistic theory. So he never makes a case for realism against irrealism.
As far as I know, neoEverett is the smallest realist interpretation: Eliezer argued not only against anti-realism, but also in favor of the smallest theory that falls out of the formalism.
But, if we cut to what I believe is the heart of your point, then yes, she absolutely should. Let's scale the problem up for a moment. Say instead of 5 it's 500. Or 5 million. Or the entire rest of humanity aside from the mother and her baby. At what point does sacrificing her child become the right decision? Really, this boils down to the idea of shut up and multiply.
Never, in my opinion. Put every other human being on the tracks (excluding other close family members to keep this from being a Sophie's choice "would you rather..." game). The mother should still act to protect her child. I'm not joking.
You can post-facto rationalize this by valuing the kind of societies where mothers are ready to sacrifice their kids, and indeed encouraged to save another life, vs. the world where mothers simply always protect their kids no matter what.
But I don't think this is necessary -- you don't need to validate it on utilitarian grounds. Rather it is perfectly okay for one person to value some lives more than others. We shouldn't want to change this, IMHO. And I think the OP's question about donating 100% to charity, at the detriment of themselves, is symptomatic of the problems that arise from utilitarian thinking. After all if OP was not having internal conflict between internal morals and supposedly rational utilitarian thinking, he wouldn't have asked the question...
Ah, as it happens, I have none of those conflicts. I asked because I'm preparing an article on utilitarianism, and I happened to bounce on the question I posted as a good proxy of the hard problems in adopting it as a moral theory.
But I can understand that someone who believes this might have a lot of internal struggles.
Full disclosure: I'm a Duster, not a Torturer. But I'm trying to steelman Torture.
Fair enough. I feel like I have a fairly good intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics, but it's still almost entirely intuitive, and so is probably entirely inadequate beyond this point. But I've read speculations like this, and it sounds like things can get interesting: it's just that it's unclear to me how seriously we should take them at this stage, and also some of them take MWI as a starting point, too.
Regarding QBism, my idea of it is mostly based on a very short presentation of it by Rüdiger Schack at a panel, and the thing that confuses me is that if quantum mechanics is entirely about probability, then what do those probabilities tell us about?
it's just that it's unclear to me how seriously we should take them at this stage
Well, categorical quantum mechanics is a program under developement since 2008, and it gives you a quantum framework in any computational theory with enough symmetries (databases, linguistics, etc).
It spawned quantum programming languages and a graphical calculus. So I think it's pretty succesful and has to be taken seriously, albeit it's far from being complete (it lacks a unified treatment of infinite systems, for example).
If it doesn't fundamentally change quantum mechanics as a theory, is the picture likely to turn out fundamentally different from MWI? Roger Penrose, a vocal MWI critic, seems to wholeheartedly agree that QM implies MWI; it's just that he thinks that this means the theory is wrong. David Deutsch, I believe, has said that he's not certain that quantum mechanics is correct; but any modification of the theory, according to him, is unlikely to do away with the parallel universes.
QBism, too, seems to me to essentially accept the MWI picture as the underlying ontology, but then says that we should only care about the worlds that we actually observe (Sean Carroll has presented criticism similar to this, and mentioned that it sounds more like therapy to him), although it could be that I've misunderstood something.
These are difficult question because we are speculating about future mathematics / physics.
First of all, there's the question of how much of the quantum framework will survive the unification with gravity. Up until now, all theories that worked inside it have failed; worse, they have introduced black-hole paradoxes: most notably, thunderbolts and the firewall problem. I'm totally in the dark if a future unification will require a modification of the fundamental mathematical structure of QM. Say, if ER = EPR, and entanglement can be explained with a modified geometry of space-time, does it mean that superposition is also a geometrical phoenomenon that doesn't require multiple worlds? I don't really know.
But more on the point, I think (hope?) that future explorations of the quantum framework will yield an expanded landscape, where interpretations will be seen as the surface phoenomenon of something deeper: for example, something akin to what happens in classical mechanics with the Hamiltonian / Lagrangian formulations.
On a side note, I've read only the Wikipedia article on QBism and my impression was that it had an epistemological leaning, not ontological: if you use only SIC-POVMs, you can explain all quantum quirks with the epistemology of probability distributions. I might be very wrong, though.
Is there any product like an adult pacifier that is socially acceptable to use?
I am struggling with self-control to not interrupt people and am afraid for my job.
EDIT: In the meantime (or long-term if it works) I'll use less caffeine (currentlly 400mg daily) to see if that helps.
How about a lollipop? It's almost the same thing, and since inspector Kojak it's become much more socially acceptable, even cool, if you pull it off well.
If you are a woman, though, you'll likely suffer some sexual objectification (what a news!).
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleene%27s_T_predicate:
The ternary relation T1(e,i,x) takes three natural numbers as arguments. The triples of numbers (e,i,x) that belong to the relation (the ones for which T1(e,i,x) is true) are defined to be exactly the triples in which x encodes a computation history of the computable function with index e when run with input i, and the program halts as the last step of this computation history.
In other words: If someone gives you an encoding of a program, an encoding of its input and a trace of its run, you can check with a primitive recursive function whether you have been lied to.
Oh! This point had evaded me: I thought x encoded the program and the input, not just the entire history.
So U, instead of executing, just locates the last thing written on tape according to x and repeat it.
Well, I'm disappointed... at U and at myself.
Do you think that we're likely to find something in those directions that would give a reason to prefer some other interpretation than MWI?
My idea is more on the line of "in the future we are going to grasp a conceptual frame that would make sense of all interpretations" (or explain them away) rather than pointing to a specific interpretation.
Is there a good rebuttal to why we don't donate 100% of our income to charity? I mean, as an explanation tribality / near - far are ok, but is there a good justification post-hoc?
Link: http://www.vhemt.org/
It's very likely much bigger then 9800. It is also very balanced and laid back in its views and methods. I'd think that contributes.
I looked into some of the most obvious objections. Some have reasonable answers (why not just kill yourself?), some others are based on a (to me) crazy assumption: that the original state of the biosphere pre-humans somehow is more valuable than the collective experience of the human race.
To which I don't just disagree, but think it's a logic error, since values exist only in the mind of those who can compute it, whatever it is.
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Eliezer and E.T. Jaynes strongly urge seeing probabilities as subjective degrees of certainty that follow fixed laws (an extension of logic). If QBism is supposed to be compatible with this view - and yet not a form of MWI - then where do the complex numbers come from? Do they represent the map or the territory?
That's the basic, some say the only, mystery of MWI: why the world operates according to subjective probability?
You'll find this question posed in the Sequence in some places.