I have commented there, and I will quote my comment here. To clarify, I am not anti-MWI, I am pro- experimental evidence.

It seems to me that you strawman a bit the main objection. Indeed, as you say

MWI certainly does predict the existence of a huge number of unobservable worlds. But it doesn’t postulate them. It derives them, from what it does postulate.

However, this does not answer the objection that

MWI is not a good theory because it’s not testable

if you phrase it the way the MWI opponents usually mean it:

MWI is no more testable than shut-up-and-calculate-only-probabilities-are-real

or than any other interpretation favored by a particular MWI opponent, as long as that interpretation makes exact same predictions as the orthodox QM.

You are certainly right, MWI does not need an extra collapse postulate, it comes out in many possible ways from using the L^2 norm for probability in conjunction with, say, unitarity, or some other equivalent experimentally justified assumption.

Unfortunately your “rightness” is rather hollow, because you still have no definitive experiment that would convince your opponent. And so the argument becomes philosophical rather than physical, as it cannot be resolved by the scientific method.

Needless to say, a QM formulation which would lead to a testable prediction beyond those derivable from the orthodox approach, would be an exceedingly big deal. But one can hope.

Thanks. Interesting. I think one issue is maintaining the will to live indefinitely, not getting tired of life, of cumulative stress, basically anti-depresison. I think it would be more useful to focus on fixing that, and when everybody totally wants to live on and on and on, then that generates motivation to throw more resources on anti-aging. Without that, there is a lesser motivation, as people who are not very happy, like myself, will not support it vigorously. Senescence is an acceptable, honorable, non-shameful way of slow suicide, suitable if you are only lightly depressed. You can get old and die without ever having to admit you are depressed or you want to die. If life is extended, you basically either have to endure it longer, or have to own up to, admit defeat, admit you fail at life, and choose suicide. Neither are very attractive options. This is why I recommend fixing the will to live i.e. light depression first.

Fixing the will to live is not going to be easy because it goes against the logic of evolution (which does not care if you are depressed or dead after you have reproduced) and much of human biology. You essentially want to keep people in a constant "expecting rewards" mindset, biologically speaking. In a look forward to tomorrow because something cool with happen mindset. However, it is likely that would lead to some kind of burnout, like, dopamine receptors becoming desensitized from over-use or something like that. Fixing this would be a major brain rewiring.

I am new to this community. Is the anti-aging stuff popular here? To me it comes accross as a bit weird. There is a scale of depression/hedonia from being almost catatonic to being ecstatically happy. Very depressed people often want to kill themselves right now. Supposedly, ecstatically happy people would like to live forever. If you are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, you supposedly want live another few decades, not more. If you are not hating your life but not loving it very much either, then the idea of dying in a few decades IMHO sounds logical and good. By that time you can expect to be tired about life anyway, you will have less and less of the good stuff (childhood friends, experiences to discover etc.) and more and more of the bad stuff (cumulative stress, aches etc.) and it will sound like a good deal to end it without shame i.e. naturally.

I think this largely depends on one thing really. If you have a purpose for your life, you supposed want to work on it forever. If you are like most people or like me, just going through life and trying to fish out pleasurable experiences from it, nice holidays in interesting places and big laughs with friends drunk, you probably don't want to do that forever.

I recently found out that Feynmann only had an IQ of 125.

This is very surprising to me. How should I/you update?

Perhaps the IQ test was administered poorly.

I think that high g/IQ is still really important to success in various fields. (Stephen Hsu points out that more physicists have IQs of 150 than 140, etc. In other words, that marginal IQ matters even past 140.).

Meta: How is this supposed to be different from the existing rationality quotes thread?

Nope, sorry.

Also, I still don't buy the claim about the temperature. You said in the linked comment that putting a known-microstate cup of tea in contact with an unknown-microstate cup of tea wouldn't really be thermal equilibrium because it would be "not using all the information at your disposal. And if you don't use the information it's as if you didn't have it."

If I know the exact state of a cup of tea, and am able to predict how that state will evolve in the future, the cup of tea has zero entropy.

Then suppose I take a glass of water that is Boltzmann-distributed. It has some spread over possible microstates - the bigger the spread, the higher entropy (And also temperature, for Boltzmann-distributed things).

Then you put the tea and the water in thermal contact. Now, for every possible microstate of the glass of water, the combined system evolves to a single final microstate (only one, because you know the exact state of the tea). The combined sytem is no longer Boltzmann in either subsytem, and has the same entropy as the original glass of water, just moved into different microstates.

Note that it didn't matter what the water's temperature was - all that mattered was that the tea's distribution had zero entropy. The fact that there has been no increase in entropy is the proof that all the information has been used. If the water had the same average energy as the tea, so that no macroscopic amount of energy was exchanged, then these thing would be in thermal equilibrium by your standards.

I suspect it's parameter uncertainty rather than data uncertainty--that is, instead of showing the the fit plus/minus one stdev so you can check that about two-thirds of the data points fall in that rectangle, it's giving you a sense of what family of fit lines all fit the data 'well enough' (i.e. within some distance of the best fit).

-8 seems like a lot of disapproval towards what amounts to "look at some random dude who is groping towards the simulation conclusion.".

I mean, its not a super valuable post, the linked post is just a personal narrative, but -8 still seems excessive. I'd expect a post like this to end up at 0 or -1/-2. Its not like its anti-rationality, right?

Super-resolution microscopy is an interesting recent development that won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year. Here's another article on the subject. It has been used to image mouse brains, but only near the surface. It won't be able to view the interior of any brain, but still interesting.

What's the shaded area in the very first plot? Usually this area is one deviation around the fit line, but here it's clearly way too small to be that.