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When I design a toaster oven, I don't design one part that tries to get electricity to the coils and a second part that tries to prevent electricity from getting to the coils. It would be a waste of effort. Who designed the ecosystem, with its predators and prey, viruses and bacteria? Even the cactus plant, which you might think well-designed to provide water fruit to desert animals, is covered with inconvenient spines.

I understand your point and your examples, but it is wrong to infer that conflicting subsystems are evidence of poor design or no des... (read more)

The Two-Party Swindle

Mat12y20

They have to worry about the edge because they get their base vote no matter what

that's true... but it is still a fact that

they would rather appeal to their base than cater to "the enemy".

I think because in this way they charge up their base voters, which are then more willing to do some work for them, such as proselyte around, sharing on facebook, talking only about the good things of their party and the bad things of the opposite one, and that kind of stuff. In this way they can easily catch the edge voters who see the distinction betwee... (read more)

Dark Side Epistemology

Mat13y00

Read up on Feyerabend

Aehm, was Feyerabend a scientist?

Fake Morality

Mat13y00

The fear of losing a moral compass is itself a moral compass

Doesn't this sound like a belief in belief?

I don't want God to be my moral compass, because I don't believe in it and I don't want my good behaviour (and others' behaviour, too) to be built upon a sand castle. But I don't like this foundation of morality, too: it sounds absolute, which makes it incomparable with others'. Also, what about sociopaths who don't have this moral commanding hard wired in their brain? Should them be allowed to kill?

I prefer to give value to human life, *just because I... (read more)

Three Worlds Collide (0/8)

Mat13y10

could you please make an EPUB version, as for your Harry Potter fanfiction? With PDFs you can't change font size, so it's a big pain to read with an ebook reader. thanks

Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable

Mat13y20

No, I don't: actually we probably agree about that, with that sentence I was just trying to underline the "being understood" requirement for an effective theory. That was meant to introduce my following objection that the order in which you teach or learn two facts is not irrelevant. The human brain has memory, so a Markovian model for the effectiveness of theories is too simple.

-3Shmi13y

I doubt that you will be successful in convincing EY of the non-privileged position of the MWI. Having spent a lot of time, dozens of posts and tons of karma on this issue, I have regretfully concluded that he is completely irrational with regards to instrumentalism in general and QM interpretations in in particular. In his objections he usually builds and demolishes a version of a straw Copenhagen, something that, in his mind, violates locality/causality/relativity. One would expect that, having realized that he is but a smart dilettante in the subject matter, he would at least allow for the possibility of being wrong, alas it's not the case.

Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable

Mat13y1-3

I disagree on five points. The first is my conclusion too; the second leads to the third and the third explains the fourth. The fifth one is the most interesting.

1) In contrast with the title, you did not show that the MWI is falsifiable nor testable; I know the title mentions decoherence (which is falsifiable and testable), but decoherence is very different from the MWI and for the rest of the article you talked about the MWI, though calling it decoherence. You just showed that MWI is "better" according to your "goodness" index, but th... (read more)

3YVLIAZ13y

I agree that he didn't show testable, but rather the possibility of it (and the formalization of it). There's a problem with choosing the language for Solomonoff/MML, so the index's goodness can be debated. However, I think in general index is sound. I don't think he's saying that theories fundamentally have probabilities. Rather, as a Bayesian, he gives some priors to each theory. As more evidences accumulate, the right theory will update and its probability approaches 1. The reason human understanding can't be part of the equations is, as EY says, shorter "programs" are more likely to govern the universe than longer "programs," essentially because these "programs" are more likely to be written if you throw down some random bits to make a program that governs the universe. So I don't buy your arguments in the next section. EY is comparing the angel explanation with the galaxies explanation; you are supposed to reject the angels and usher in the galaxies. In that case, the anticipations are truly the same. You can't really prove whether there are angels. What do you mean by "good"? Which one is "better" out of 2 models that give the same prediction? (By "model" I assume you mean "theory") You admit that Copenhagen is unsatisfactory but it is useful for education. I don't see any reason not to teach MWI in the same vein. If indeed the expectation value of observable V of mercury is X but we observe Y with Y not= X (that is to say that the variance of V is nonzero), then there isn't a determinate formula for predict V exactly in your first Newton/random formula scenario. At the same time, someone who has the Copenhagen interpretation would have the same expectation value X, but instead of saying there's another world he says there's a wave function collapse. I still think that the parallel world is a deduced result from universal wave function, superposition, decoherence, and etc that Copenhagen also recognizes. So the Copenhagen view essentially say "actually

0asparisi13y

Do you have some notion of the truth of a statement, other than effectively describing reality? If so, I would very much like to hear it.

LESSWRONG
LW

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