I have several questions related to this:
- Did anyone reading this initially get the impression that Less Wrong was cultish when they first discovered it?
- If so, can you suggest any easy steps we could take?
- Is it possible that there are aspects of the atmosphere here that are driving away intelligent, rationally inclined people who might otherwise be interested in Less Wrong?
- Do you know anyone who might fall into this category, i.e. someone who was exposed to Less Wrong but failed to become an enthusiast, potentially due to atmosphere issues?
- Is it possible that our culture might be different if these folks were hanging around and contributing? Presumably they are disproportionately represented among certain personality types.
If you visit any Less Wrong page for the first time in a cookies-free browsing mode, you'll see this message for new users:
Less Wrong is a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality. Please visit our About page for more information.
Here are the worst violators I see on that about page:
Some people consider the Sequences the most important work they have ever read.
Generally, if your comment or post is on-topic, thoughtful, and shows that you're familiar with the Sequences, your comment or post will be upvoted.
Many of us believe in the importance of developing qualities described in Twelve Virtues of Rationality: [insert mystical sounding description of how to be rational here]
And on the sequences page:
If you don't read the sequences on Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions and Reductionism, little else on Less Wrong will make much sense.
This seems obviously false to me.
These may not seem like cultish statements to you, but keep in mind that you are one of the ones who decided to stick around. The typical mind fallacy may be at work. Clearly there is some population that thinks Less Wrong seems cultish, as evidenced by Google's autocomplete, and these look like good candidates for things that makes them think this.
We can fix this stuff easily, since they're both wiki pages, but I thought they were examples worth discussing.
In general, I think we could stand more community effort being put into improving our about page, which you can do now here. It's not that visible to veteran users, but it is very visible to newcomers. Note that it looks as though you'll have to click the little "Force reload from wiki" button on the about page itself for your changes to be published.
The criticisms at those links have nothing to do with the argument for MWI. They are just about a numerical mistake in an article illustrating how QM works.
The actual argument for MWI that is presented is something like this: Physicists believe that the wavefunction is real and that it collapses on observation, because that is the first model that explained all the data, and science holds onto working models if they are falsified. But we can also explain all the data by saying that the wavefunction is real and doesn't collapse, if we learn to see the wavefunction as containing multiple worlds that are equally real. The wavefunction doesn't collapse, it just naturally spreads out into separate parts and what we see is one of those separate parts. A no-collapse theory is simpler than a collapse theory because it has one less postulate, so even though there are no new predictions, by Bayes (or is it Occam?) we can favor the no-collapse theory over the collapse theory. Therefore, there are many worlds.
This is informal reasoning about which qualitative picture of the world to favor, so it is not something that can be verified or falsified by a calculation or an experiment. Therefore, it's not something that a hostile physicist could crisply debunk, even if they wanted to. In the culture of physics there are numerous qualitative issues where there is no consensus, and where people take sides on the basis of informal reasoning. Eliezer's argument is on that level; it is an expression in LW idiom, of a reason for believing in MWI that quite a few physicists probably share. It can't be rebutted by an argument along the lines that Eliezer doesn't know his physics, because it is an argument which (in another form) a physicist might actually make! So if someone wants to dispute it, they'll have to do so, just as if they were intervening in any of these informal professional disagreements which exist among physicists, by lines of argument about plausibility, future theoretical prospects, and so on.
ETA One more comment about the argument for MWI as I have presented it. Physicists don't agree that the wavefunction is real. The debate over whether it is real, goes all the way back to Schrodinger (it's a real physical object or field) vs Heisenberg (it's just a calculating device). The original Copenhagen interpretation was in Heisenberg's camp: a wavefunction is like a probability distribution, and "collapse" is just updating on the basis of new experimental facts (the electron is seen at a certain location, so the wavefunction should be "collapsed" to that point, in order to reflect the facts). I think it's von Neumann who introduced wavefunction realism into the Copenhagen interpretation (when he axiomatized QM), and thereby the idea of "observer-induced collapse of the wavefunction" as an objective physical process. Though wavefunction realism was always going to creep up on physicists, since they describe everything with wavefunctions (or state vectors) and habitually refer to these as "the state" of the object, rather than "the state of our knowledge" of the object; also because Copenhagen refused to talk about unobserved realities (e.g. where the electron is, when it's not being seen to be somewhere), an attitude which was regarded as prim positivistic virtue by the founders, but which created an ontological vacuum that was naturally filled by the de-facto wavefunction realism of physics practice.