Eliezer recently posted an essay on "the fallacy of privileging the hypothesis". What it's really about is the fallacy of privileging an arbitrary hypothesis. In the fictional example, a detective proposes that the investigation of an unsolved murder should begin by investigating whether a particular, randomly chosen citizen was in fact the murderer. Towards the end, this is likened to the presumption that one particular religion, rather than any of the other existing or even merely possible religions, is especially worth investigating.

However, in between the fictional and the supernatural illustrations of the fallacy, we have something more empirical: quantum mechanics. Eliezer writes, as he has previously, that the many-worlds interpretation is the one - the rationally favored interpretation, the picture of reality which rationally should be adopted given the empirical success of quantum theory. Eliezer has said this before, and I have argued against it before, back when this site was just part of a blog. This site is about rationality, not physics; and the quantum case is not essential to the exposition of this fallacy. But given the regularity with which many-worlds metaphysics shows up in discussion here, perhaps it is worth presenting a case for the opposition.

This article should really be called "Patching the argumentative flaw in the Sequences created by the Quantum Physics Sequence".

There's only one big thing wrong with that Sequence: the central factual claim is wrong. I don't mean the claim that the Many Worlds interpretation is correct; I mean the claim that the Many Worlds interpretation is obviously correct. I don't agree with the ontological claim either, but I especially don't agree with the epistemological claim. It's a strawman which reduces the quantum debate to Everett versus Bohr - well, it's not really Bohr, since Bohr didn't believe wavefunctions were physical entities. Everett versus Collapse, then.

I've complained about this from the beginning, simply because I've also studied the topic and profoundly disagree with Eliezer's assessment. What I would like to see discussed on this occasion is not the physics, but rather how to patch the arguments in the Sequences that depend on this wrong sub-argument. To my eyes, this is a highly visible flaw, but it's not a deep one. It's a detail, a bug. Surely it affects nothing of substance.

However, before I proceed, I'd better back up my criticism. So: consider the existence of single-world retrocausal interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as John Cramer's transactional interpretation, which is descended from Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory. There are no superpositions, only causal chains running forward in time and backward in time. The calculus of complex-valued probability amplitudes is supposed to arise from this.

The existence of the retrocausal tradition already shows that the debate has been represented incorrectly; it should at least be Everett versus Bohr versus Cramer. I would also argue that when you look at the details, many-worlds has no discernible edge over single-world retrocausality:

• Relativity isn't an issue for the transactional interpretation: causality forwards and causality backwards are both local, it's the existence of loops in time which create the appearance of nonlocality.
• Retrocausal interpretations don't have an exact derivation of the Born rule, but neither does many-worlds.
• Many-worlds finds hope of such a derivation in a property of the quantum formalism: the resemblance of density matrix entries to probabilities. But single-world retrocausality finds such hope too: the Born probabilities can be obtained from the product of ψ with ψ*, its complex conjugate, and ψ* is the time reverse of ψ. 
• Loops in time just fundamentally bug some people, but splitting worlds have the same effect on others.

I am not especially an advocate of retrocausal interpretations. They are among the possibilities; they deserve consideration and they get it. Retrocausality may or may not be an element of the real explanation of why quantum mechanics works. Progress towards the discovery of the truth requires exploration on many fronts, that's happening, we'll get there eventually. I have focused on retrocausal interpretations here just because they offer the clearest evidence that the big picture offered by the Sequence is wrong.

It's hopeless to suggest rewriting the Sequence, I don't think that would be a good use of anyone's time. But what I would like to have, is a clear idea of the role that "the winner is ... Many Worlds!" plays in the overall flow of argument, in the great meta-sequence that is Less Wrong's foundational text; and I would also like to have a clear idea of how to patch the argument, so that it routes around this flaw.

In the wiki, it states that "Cleaning up the old confusion about QM is used to introduce basic issues in rationality (such as the technical version of Occam's Razor), epistemology, reductionism, naturalism, and philosophy of science." So there we have it - a synopsis of the function that this Sequence is supposed to perform. Perhaps we need a working group that will identify each of the individual arguments, and come up with a substitute for each one.

The media, most recently The Economist and Scientific American, have been publicizing a surprising statistical finding: in the current economic climate, when more Americans than ever are poor, support for policies that redistribute wealth to the poor are at their lowest levels ever. This new-found antipathy towards aid to the poor concentrates in people who are near but not yet on the lowest rung of the social ladder. The Economist adds some related statistics: those who earn slightly more than the minimum wage are most against raising the minimum wage, and support for welfare in an area decreases as the percentage of welfare recipients in the area rises.

Both articles explain the paradoxical findings by appealing to something called "last place aversion", an observed tendency for people to overvalue not being in last place. For example, in laboratory experiments where everyone gets randomly determined amounts of money, most people are willing to help those with less money than themselves gain cash - except the person with the second to lowest amount of money, who tends to try to thwart the person in last place even if it means enriching those who already have the most.

"Last place aversion" is interesting, and certainly deserves at least a footnote in the catalogue of cognitive biases and heuristics, but I find it an unsatisfying explanation for the observations about US attitudes toward wealth redistribution. For one thing, the entire point of last place aversion is that it only affects those in last place, but in a massive country like the United States, everyone can find someone worse off than themselves (with one exception). For another, redistributive policies usually stop short of making those who need government handouts wealthier than those who do not; subsidizing more homeless shelters doesn't risk giving the homeless a nicer house than your own. Finally, many of the policies people oppose, like taxing the rich, don't directly translate to helping those in last place.

I propose a different mechanism, one based on ... wait for it ... signaling.

In a previous post, I discussed multi-level signaling and counter-signaling, where each level tries to differentiate itself from the level beneath it. For example, the nouveau riche differentiate themselves from the middle class by buying ostentatious bling, and the nobility (who are at no risk of being mistaken for the middle class) differentiate themselves from the nouveau riche by not buying ostentatious bling.

The very poor have one strong incentive to support redistribution of wealth: they need the money. They also have a second, subtler incentive: most redistributive policies come packaged with a philosophy that the poor are not personally responsible for the poverty, but are at least partially the victims of the rest of society. Therefore, these policies inflate both their pocketbook and their ego.

The lower middle class gain what status they have by not being the very poor; effective status signaling for a lower middle class person is that which proves that she is certainly not poor. One effective method is to hold opinions contrary to those of the poor: that redistribution of wealth is evil and that the poor deserve their poverty. This ideology celebrates the superiority of the lower middle class over the poor by emphasizing the biggest difference between the lower middle class and the very poor: self-reliance. By asserting this ideology, a lower middle class person can prove her lower middle class status.

The upper middle class gain what status they have by not being the lower middle class; effective status signaling for an upper middle class person is that which proves that she is certainly not lower middle class. One effective way is to hold opinions contrary to those of the lower middle class: that really the poor and lower middle class are the same sort of people, but some of them got lucky and some of them got unlucky. The only people who can comfortably say "Deep down there's really no difference between myself and a poor person" are people confident that no one will actually mistake them for a poor person after they say this.

As a thought experiment, imagine your reactions to the following figures:

1. A bearded grizzled man in ripped jeans, smelling slightly of alcohol, ranting about how the government needs to give more free benefits to the poor.

2. A bearded grizzled man in ripped jeans, smelling slightly of alcohol, ranting about how the poor are lazy and he worked hard to get where he is today.

3. A well-dressed, stylish man in a business suit, ranting about how the government needs to give more free benefits to the poor.

4. A well-dressed, stylish man in a business suit, ranting about how the poor are lazy and he worked hard to get where he is today.

My gut reactions are (1, lazy guy who wants free money) (2, honorable working class salt-of-the-earth) (3, compassionate guy with good intentions) (4, insensitive guy who doesn't realize his privilege). If these are relatively common reactions, these would suffice to explain the signaling patterns in these demographics.

If this were true, it would explain the unusual trends cited in the first paragraph. An area where welfare became more common would see support for welfare drop, as it became more and more necessary for people to signal that they themselves were not welfare recipients. Support for minimum wage would be lowest among people who earn just slightly more than minimum wage, and who need to signal that they are not minimum wage earners. And since upper middle class people tend to favor redistribution as a status signal and lower middle class people tend to oppose it, a recession that drives more people into the lower middle class would cause a drop in support for redistributive policies.

I'm sure many of you have already seen this performance. Tim Minchin's beat poem "Storm" is about the sceptical, secular understanding of the world, stupidity of quackery and supernatural, weight of dishonesty, and joy in the merely real. Contains strong language.

You folks probably know how some posters around here, specifically Vladimir_M, often make statements to the effect of:

"There's an opinion on such-and-such topic that's so against the memeplex of Western culture, we can't even discuss it in open-minded, pseudonymous forums like Less Wrong as society would instantly slam the lid on it with either moral panic or ridicule and give the speaker a black mark.

Meanwhile the thought patterns instilled in us by our upbringing would lead us to quickly lose all interest in the censored opinion"

Going by their definition, us blissfully ignorant masses can't even know what exactly those opinions might be, as they would look like basic human decency, the underpinnings of our ethics or some other such sacred cow to us. I might have a few guesses, though, all of them as horrible and sickening as my imagination could produce without overshooting and landing in the realm of comic-book evil:

- Dictatorial rule involving active terror and brutal suppression of deviants having great utility for a society in the long term, by providing security against some great risk or whatever.

- A need for every society to "cull the weak" every once in a while, e.g. exterminating the ~0.5% of its members that rank as weakest against some scale.

- Strict hierarchy in everyday life based on facts from the ansectral environment (men dominating women, fathers having the right of life and death over their children, etc) - Mencius argued in favor of such ruthless practices, e.g. selling children into slavery, in his post on "Pronomianism" and "Antinomianism", stating that all contracts between humans should rather be strict than moral or fair, to make the system stable and predictable; he's quite obsessed with stability and conformity.

- Some public good being created when the higher classes wilfully oppress and humiliate the lower ones in a ceremonial manner

- The bloodshed and lawlessness of periodic large-scale war as a vital "pressure valve" for releasing pent-up unacceptable emotional states and instinctive drives

- Plain ol' unfair discrimination of some group in many cruel, life-ruining ways, likewise as a pressure valve

+:  some Luddite crap about dropping to a near-subsistence level in every aspect of civilization and making life a daily struggle for survival

Of course my methodology for coming up with such guesses was flawed and primitive: I simply imagined some of the things that sound the ugliest to me yet have been practiced by unpleasant cultures before in some form. Now, of course, most of us take the absense of these to be utterly crucial to our terminal values. Nevertheless, I hope I have demonstrated to whoever might really have something along these lines (if not necessarily that shocking) on their minds that I'm open to meta-discussion, and very interested how we might engage each other on finding safe yet productive avenues of contact.

Let's do the impossible and think the unthinkable! I must know what those secrets are, no matter how much sleep and comfort I might lose.

P.S. Yeah, Will, I realize that I'm acting roughly in accordance with that one trick you mentioned way back.

P.P.S. Sup Bakkot. U mad? U jelly?

CONCLUSION:

Fuck this Earth, and fuck human biology. I'm not very distressed about anything I saw ITT, but there's still a lot of unpleasant potential things that can only be resolved in one way:

I hereby pledge to get a real goddamn plastic card, not this Visa Electron bullshit the university saddled us with, and donate at least $100 to SIAI until the end of the year. This action will reduce the probability of me and mine having to live with the consequences of most such hidden horrors. Dixi.

Sometimes it's so pleasant to be impulsive.

Amusing observation: even when the comments more or less match my wild suggestions above, I'm still unnerved by them. An awful idea feels harmless if you keep telling yourself that it's just a private delusion, but the moment you know that someone else shares it, matters begin to look much more grave.

(I was really on the fence about posting this. It's just some thoughts tend to go through around this time of year, plus some current new thinking that resulted from being a LW lurker).

Around this time of year, I tend to start thinking about death a lot. My dad died 12 years ago this month, and it’s still one of the most significant events of my life. Death is something that still seems to be solidly in the hands of religious and spiritual types as a discussion topic. I’m hoping that this post (in addition to not being too rambling) can provide some impetus for people to challenge that in daily life.

I don’t mean this to be an angry screed against religions. There was a priest on hand when my dad died. My mom, sister and aunt were gathered around, and it was in the midst of praying that my dad finally passed away (I apologize for the wording; our language can be so spiritually loaded, I just want to avoid saying died over and over). He told a really nice story about my dad being in heaven. It was comforting at the moment, a kind of way for my family to keep those awful, overwhelming feelings of loss at bay.

But it was after I got home and started calling my relatives that the enormity of the situation hit me. My uncle in particular broke down into angry tears when I told him the news. My dad was his older brother, and meant so much to him. There wasn’t any story that was going to make that loss any better. My uncle really thought there was more that could have been done medically. At the time (I don’t know what the state of the art medicine of today could have done), I really don’t believe that was the case. I remember watching my dad have seizures at the rate of about twice a minute. When he died, I was relieved to see that come to an end. He was going through intensive chemotherapy at the time, and died of sepsis. His body was just facing too much, and finally succumbed. There just wasn’t any way around what the eventual outcome was going to be, sadly.

The bright side in the situation, and what I hope to impart, was the strength I got from being around my friends and family; the community of people that came around to take care of us. We were inundated with food baskets, for instance. I was in such a state of shock in trying to process the situation, not having to worry about basic things like meals was a relief. And so many people who knew my dad or our family came by to share their condolences. The conversations were awkward. People didn’t know what to say. And it meant the world to me that they tried. Friends of mine came out of town to be with me specifically. I was so, so grateful that they took time out of their lives to do that.

I can give you all the standard but true things about death; live everyday like it matters, tell people that you love them today, for examples. But, I wanted to share that I think the best rational response to death is for the community to be there for people. I’ve been reading about the various meetups here on LW, and something that stood out for me was the community aspect of bonding. I really and truly believe that the way to make rationality matter is to keep building these rational communities, just as communities. I think it was the New York meetup that has really emerged into a group with strong bonds. I don’t see this as a condolences arms race, necessarily. But over time, these groups will be able to take care of themselves when these hard times come. We give a lot of power to religious groups, because they’re one of the few who step up when these hard times hit families. Often times, they are the only larger community a person is a part of. It’s really important, in my eyes, to offer alternatives to that.

So, I would encourage the meetups up and the like to emulate what I read about in New York. Sure, talk about rationality and related topics. But please do recognize the impact of just bonding in a group. Eventually, being the group of people that supports someone as they grieve is exemplary work, and I believe that is something that will naturally arise out of these communities. If you can step outside of that group and be there for others, so much the better. Rationally speaking, I think humans would be better off if there were ways to grieve openly and fully, without having to factor in religious stories.

I apologize if this post is a bit rambling; it brings up a lot of emotions for me. It meant so much to me that my dad said he was proud of me while he was still coherent, at a time when I wasn’t very proud of myself, for instance. That and so many other things are going through my head. I just wanted to get this out. Thanks for reading.

Paper here. Lay summary here. Some bits from the latter:

The problem is this. The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft were launched towards Jupiter and Saturn in the early 1970s. After their respective flybys, they continued on escape trajectories out of the Solar System, both decelerating under the force of the Sun's gravity. But careful measuremenrs show that the spacecraft are slowing faster than they ought to, as if being pulled by an extra unseen force towards the Sun.

Spacecraft engineers' first thought was that heat emitted by the spacecraft could cause exactly this kind of deceleration. But when they examined the way heat was produced on the craft, by on board plutonium, and how this must have been emitted, they were unable to make the numbers add up.

Now Frederico Francisco at the Instituto de Plasmas e Fusao Nuclear in Lisbon Portugal, and a few pals, say they've worked out where the thermal calculations went wrong.