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The book is great for improving one's thinking. My long-standing advice is to ignore anything in it with the word "quantum," it detracts from the book's message. If you want to learn physics, read a physics book. For a good review of that link in Nature, see Scott Aaronson's post https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3975, and he also has a review of interpretations in https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3628 

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4philh
I'm afraid I don't think this was very ambiguous. Like, the bit where I introduced X and Y read At the time of writing, I had exactly one comment in this thread which remotely fit that schema. And, the start of that comment was where I think "this" is, in context, fairly obviously referring to the comment it replies to; and so "my comment" is fairly obviously the comment that was replying to? And then when I refer to "my comment" in the next paragraph, the obvious conclusion is that it's the same comment, which again is the only one which remotely fit the schema outlined in that paragraph. I predict that at least 90% of LW commenters would have parsed this correctly. (Is this relevant? I think it must be, because a lot of this discussion is about "what did person mean when they said thing?" And, there's no polite way to say this, but if you can't get this right... when you accuse Eliezer of being an unclear writer, I cannot help but consider that maybe instead you're a bad reader, and I suggest that you consider this possibility too. Of course, if I'm wrong and what I said wasn't clear, I have to downweight my trust in my own reading comprehension.) But do you think he actually said it? I reminded you, earlier, of the Sally-Anne fallacy, the failure to distinguish between "this person said a thing" and "this person said something that implies a thing", and I feel I must remind you again. Because if the thing you think LW has "quitely forgotten about" is something that Eliezer didn't say, but that you think follows from something Eliezer said, that is a very different accusation! It might be that LW and/or Eliezer don't realize the thing follows from what Eliezer said, and this would reflect badly on LW and/or Eliezer but it wouldn't say much about how errata work around here. Or, of course, it might be that you are wrong, and the thing doesn't follow from what Eliezer said. I mean, I think individuals should use Bayes. Whether Bayes is "systematically better
1TAG
I don't think he said it clearly, and I don't think he said anything else clearly. Believe it or not, what I am doing is charitable interpretation...I am trying to make sense of what he said. If he thinks Bayes is systematically better than science, that would imply "Bayes is better than science, so replace science with Bayes", because that makes more sense than "Bayes is better than science, so don't replace Science with Bayes". So I think that is what he is probably saying. Maybe it's Sally Anne fallacy, maybe its charitable interperetation. One should only use charitable interpretation where the meaning is unclear. Sally-Anne is only a fallacy where the meaning is clear. I am engaging in probablistic reasoning. Why should I make any attempt to provide evidence, when you are going to reject it out of hand. No, but he could do a lot better. (An elephant-in-the-room issue here is that even though he is still alive, no-one expects him to pop up and say something that actually clarifies the issue). It's about the most basic principle of epistemology, and one which the rationalsphere accepts: lucky guesses stopped clocks are not knowledge, even when they are right, because they are not reliable and systematic. Obviously, that would be the stuff that science is already doing, since EY has argued, at immense length, that it gets quantum mechanics right,. If there is some objective factor about a person that makes them incapable of understanding Bayes , then a Bayesian should surely identify it. But where else has EY ever so much as hinted that some people are un-Bayesian? Why do I have to tell you what I think in order for you to tell me what you think? Here's the exchange: Me: Do you think LessWrong-at-large currently thinks “individuals should be willing to trust in Bayes over science”? You: Dunno if you think this either, also probably not super relevant.
philh30

Believe it or not, what I am doing is charitable interpretation...I am trying to make sense of what he said.

You may be trying to be charitable. You are not succeeding, partly because what you consider to be "making sense" does not make sense.

But also partly because you're routinely failing to acknowledge that you're putting our own spin on things. There is a big difference between "Eliezer said X" and "I don't know what Eliezer was trying to say, but my best guess is that he meant X".

After you say "Eliezer said X" and I say "I don't think Eliezer was tr... (read more)

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by Valentin2026
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Is there any erratum for the "From AI to Zombies" book? There are so many essays, and many of them are written more than 10 years ago. It seems very likely that since then the errors or imprecisions were discovered.

To be specific, I have a very low belief in the chapter on quantum mechanics. It discusses just Copenhagen and many-worlds interpretation, ignoring all others that were already existing at this moment. What about Quantum Bayesianism, for example?

And two more personal accounts:

1) A couple of years ago I was at the conference, where few talks discussed this quite famous gedankenexperiment. When they were looking at different interpretations, according to them the many-world one was quite vaguely formulated, not allowing to make a definitive answer in the problem they considered. 

2) About five years ago I talked with my friend about "From AI to Zombies". He was studying interpretations of quantum mechanics way more than I did. He said something like "Great book but the quantum mechanics chapter is over-simplified".  

 

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Erratum for "From AI to Zombies"
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The book is derived from a series of postings, and the postings have comments, and the comments point out errors. But that doesn't add up to a set of officially accepted errata.

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[-]gilch*70

A lot of the findings of the "soft" sciences, including psychology, didn't survive the replication crisis. There should be material for errata about that part by now.

I found much of the quantum physics sequence confusing, but Sean Carroll still makes a solid case for MWI.

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