I find this idea (or a close relative) a useful guide for resolving a heuristic explanation or judgment into a detailed, causal explanation or consequentialist judgment. If someone draws me a engine cycle that creates infinite work out of finite heat (Question 5), I can say it violates the laws of thermodynamics. Of course their engine really is impossible. But there's still confusion: our explanations remain in tension because something's left unexplained. To fully resolve this confusion, I have to look in detail at their engine cycle, and find the error that allows the violation.

Principled explanations, especially about human behavior or society, tend to come into tension in a similar way. That tension can similarly point the way to detailed, causal explanations that will dissolve the question. For example, you say that an idea meeting a counter-idea may well fail to generate facts, which is contrary to your understanding of dialectics. It's not very useful to merely state these ideas in opposition to each other, but there's something to be learned by looking at where they conflict and why.

So in this case, where you doubt that this process generates facts, consider how it might or might not reliably do so. One way it could do so is if there were a recipe for turning the conflict into an opportunity for learning, like "look for detailed causal mechanisms where the two big ideas directly conflict." One way it might fail is if people who held each one of the two ideas entrenched themselves as opposed to the other, and everyone continued to simply talk past one another without attempting to understand. Now you've refined your heuristic so you can better judge how well this will work in individual cases, and you can iterate.

I think of the moral version of this as a generalization of the argument from marginal cases against giving moral standing to humans alone (i.e. that there's no value-relevant principle that selects all and only humans). The generalization is to come at this from both sides of a debate, and say that you can expect any principled judgment to fail on marginal cases. The content of your principle is in large part how it treats those marginal cases. From this perspective, you study the marginal cases to improve your understanding of your values, rather than try to use heuristics to decide the marginal cases. (Sometimes this perspective is useful, and sometimes it's not. Hmm, why is that?)

Yes, that's a good example, thanks.

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Theory also influences what data you consider in the first place. (Are you looking at your own local weather, global surface temperatures, stratospheric temperatures, ocean temperatures, extreme weather events, Martian climate, polar ice, or the beliefs and behavior of climatologists, and over what time scales and eras?) See also philosophy of science since at least Kuhn on theory-laden observation: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/science-theory-observation/

They address this in footnote 4: they're just deriving that the amplitudes squared should be interpreted as probabilities using quantum mechanics as defined, which includes unitary evolution and all that.

You could try the same thing with a QM variant with different mathematical structure, although you might be interested to know that linear transformations that preserve l^p norm for p other than 2 are boring (generalized permutation matrices). So you wouldn't be able to evolve your orthogonal environmental states into the right combinations of identical environments + coin flips. There also are other reasons why p = 2 is special. Scott Aaronson has written about this (and also linearity and the use of complex numbers) in the context of whether quantum mechanics is an island in theoryspace.

Going a bit deeper: it seems like all of the work is done by factoring out the environment. That is, they identify unitary transformations of the environment as producing epistemically equivalent states, but why shouldn't non-unitary transformations also be epistemically equivalent, whether or not unitary evolution is what happens in quantum mechanics? They have to leave the environment states orthogonal since that's assumed by decoherence, but why not (say) just multiply one of those environment states by an arbitrary number and derive any probability you want (i.e. why shouldn't the observer be indifferent to the relative measure of environment branches, since the environment is supposed to be independent, and then why not absorb any coefficients you like into the environment part)?

The answer is that you can't think of non-unitary transformations as acting independently on one part of a system, and that this is also part of the way quantum mechanics is specified. Given the mathematics of quantum mechanics, it only makes sense to talk about two parts of a wavefunction as independent under unitary transformations of the individual parts. See Appendix B of their companion paper, and think about what happens if you replace U_B with something non-unitary in equation B.4.

I've had a similar experience with wishlists. There are some worthwhile corollaries: rather than follow interesting-looking links as you encounter them, open them in new tabs or add them to a read-later list. Or rather than look up everything you have a passing curiosity about, or switch to whatever task catches your immediate attention, add a note to yourself in your GTD/whatever system. If you're like me, your immediate desire will be satisfied by the knowledge that you'll get to it soon if it's important. And when you get around to reviewing these things, you'll be in a more reflective mode and will notice that many of these things are not in fact worth your time.

There's the same caveat: avoiding these things (like sources of potentially worthless links) in the first place might be a better solution for you (depending on density of chaff, to what extent lists and tab explosions stress you out, how likely you are to responsibly prune these things, whether you'll still capture the important things without universal capture, and so on). Try both, decide for yourself.

I have no idea how likely it is, but an alternative explanation is that the vote counts were first converted to percentages to one decimal place, then someone else converted them back to absolute numbers for this announcement.

Failed theories of superconductivity. My favorite part:

The second idea proposed in 1932 by Bohr and Kronig was that superconductivity would result from the coherent quantum motion of a lattice of electrons. Given Bloch’s stature in the field, theorists like Niels Bohr where eager to discuss their own ideas with him. In fact Bohr, whose theory for superconductivity was already accepted for publication in the July 1932 issue of the journal “Die Naturwissenschaften”, withdrew his article in the proof stage, because of Bloch’s criticism (see Ref.[20]). Kronig was most likely also aware of Bloch’s opinion when he published his ideas[22]. Only months after the first publication he responded to the criticism made by Bohr and Bloch in a second manuscript[23]. It is tempting to speculate that his decision to publish and later defend his theory was influenced by an earlier experience: in 1925 Kronig proposed that the electron carries spin, i.e. possesses an internal angular momentum. Wolfgang Pauli’s response to this idea was that it was interesting but incorrect, which discouraged Kronig from publishing it. The proposal for the electron spin was made shortly thereafter by Samuel Goudsmit and George Uhlenbeck[29]. Kronig might have concluded that it is not always wise to follow the advice of an established and respected expert.

"History of what didn't work" seems like an important genre, for example if you want help avoiding hindsight/survivorship biases. Are there other good examples? It seems a lot of histories of science impose a false sense of direction or inevitability and don't cover many dead ends if any; all I can think of are some biographies that cover a lone genius's missteps on his way to the true theory.