All of NickRetallack's Comments + Replies

Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided

There must be something I'm missing here. The previous post pretty definitively proved to me that the no communication clause must be false.

Consider the latter two experiments in the last post:

A transmitted 20°, B transmitted 40°: 5.8%
A transmitted 0°, B transmitted 40°: 20.7%

Lets say I'm on Planet A and my friend is on Planet B, and we are both constantly receiving entangled pairs of photons from some satellite stationed between us. I'm filtering my photons on planet A at 20°, and my friend on planet B is filtering his at 40°. He observes a 5.8% ... (read more)

2shinoteki12y

Those are the probabilities that both halves of a pair of photons are transmitted, so you can't determine them without the information from both detectors. The distribution at each individual detector doesn't change, it's the correlation between them that changes.

NickRetallack12y-30

There is so much wrong with this example that I don't know where to start.

You make up a hypothetical person who dies because she doesn't heed an explicit warning that says "if you do this, you will die". Then you make several ridiculous claims about this hypothetical person:

1) You claim this event will happen, with absolute certainty. 2) You claim this event occurs because this individual has low intelligence, and that it is unfair because a person does not choose to be born intelligent. 3) You claim this event is a tragedy.

I disagree with all o... (read more)

Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided

Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided

Debates can easily appear one-sided, for each side. For example, some people believe that if you follow a particular conduct in life, you will go to heaven. To these people, any policy decision that results in sending less people to heaven is a tragedy. But to people who don't believe in heaven, this downside does not exist.

This is not just an arbitrary example. This shows up all the time in US politics. Until people can agree on whether or not heaven exists, how can any of these debates not seem one-sided?

NickRetallack12y20

I think it's a good thing to do this. It is analogous to science.

If you're a good reasoner and you encounter evidence that conflicts with one of your beliefs, you update that belief.

Likewise, if you want to update someone else's belief, you can present evidence that conflicts with it in hopes they will be a good reasoner and update their belief.

This would not be so effective if you just told them your conclusion flat out, because that would look like just another belief you are trying to force upon them.

Psychic Powers

What's this "the Matrix" everyone in this thread is talking about? The movie? The idea that we're all in a computer simulation?

Btw, as for causality loops, Feynman describes antimatter as "just like regular matter, only traveling backwards in time", which means if we allow for time travel, we've just reduced the number of types of particles in our description of reality by half =].

4linkhyrule512y

The latter. If you see telepathy, it's more likely that you're in a simulation in a reductionist universe than in an irreducible universe.

What is life?

Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality

Anthropomorphizing animals is justified based on the degree of similarity between their brains and ours. For example, we know that the parts of our brain we have found are responsible for strong emotions are also present in reptiles, so we might assume that reptiles also have strong emotions. Mammals are more similar to us, so we feel more moral obligation to them.

NickRetallack12y40

I'm with you. You have to look at the outcomes, otherwise you end up running into the same logical blinders that make Quantum Mechanics hard to accept.

After reading some of the Quantum Mechanics sequence, I am more willing to believe in Omega's omniscience. Quantum mechanics allows for multiple timelines leading to the same outcome to interfere and simply never happen, even if they would have been probable in classical mechanics. Perhaps all timelines leading to the outcome where one-boxing does not yield money happen to interfere. Even if you take a m... (read more)

0christopheg12y

I have more or less the same point of view and applied it to non iterated prisonner's dilemma (as Newcomb's is merely half a Prisonner's Dilemma as David Lewis suggested in an article, and on this I agree with him, but not on his conclusion). What is at stakes here (in Newcomb's or PD) may not be that easy to accept anyway. It's probability and Bayes against causality. The doom loop in Newcomb's (reasoning loop leading to loose 1 million, as I see it) is stating that The content of the boxes is already put when you play, henceforth you action won't change anything. The quantum mechanical reasoning would go the other way: as long as you did'nt observe/interact with it it is merely a probability. You may even want to go futher than that: imagine that someone else see the content of the box, then see you choosing the predicted set of boxes. He will conclude you have no freewill, or something along theses lines. I understand that people puting freewill as a fact - not merely a belief that could be contradicted by experiment - and so reject unthinkingly the probabilist reasoning. My comment about PD is in this Sequence (http://lesswrong.com/lw/hl8/other_prespective_on_resolving_the_prisoners/). I merely applty probability rules. I'm interrested to know if you see any fault in it from a probabilist point of view.

Configurations and Amplitude

Are you implying that the presence of a detector instead of an obstacle changes what the other detectors detect, or not?

The text is unclear here:

Detector 1 goes off half the time and Detector 2 goes off half the time.

Does "half the time" mean "half the time that any detector goes off", or "half the time you shoot a photon"? I would expect that, with the obstacle in place, half the time you shoot a photon no detector would go off, because the first mirror would deflect it into an obstacle. Seeing no detector go off is dis... (read more)

1wizzwizz45y

It means "half the time that any detector goes off", assuming that the block is a bog-standard lump of wood and not a magical construct like the measurement tool.

NickRetallack12y20

I'm going to read the QM sequence now. I have always been confused by descriptions of QM.

I know calculus. Not enough to enjoy looking at the harmonic equation though.

It's a shame I never took a class on Quantum Mechanics. Most descriptions I've heard of it, even from professors, are indistinguishable from magical thinking.

8Vaniver12y

Ok. Here's the brief sketch with slightly simplified details: In classical mechanics, "position" and "momentum" are different features, and so can be totally independent. In quantum mechanics, "position" and "momentum" are both derived from the same source (the wavefunction), and thus are dependent. In QM, reality is the wavefunction. This is a complex-valued continuous function over the spatial dimensions of the universe which integrates to a certain amount. Let's consider a universe with only one particle in it: If you want to find out something classically recognizable about that particle, you use an operator on the wavefunction. (The classical values now come with probabilities attached to them, and in realistic situations it only makes sense to ascribe probabilities to position and momentum ranges, even though energy is restricted to particular values.) For the position of the particle, this corresponds to integrating the magnitude of the wavefunction across the part of space that you're interested in. For the momentum of the particle, the operator is the derivative, which cashes out as taking its Fourier transform. The more localized a particle is in location-space, the more spread out it is in momentum-space, because the Fourier transform of something narrow is broad, and the Fourier transform of something broad is narrow. Now, what about entanglement? Let's add some more particles to our universe; now, the wavefunction is defined over three spatial dimensions per particle. In typical situations, we can factor the wavefunction of the universe into independent wavefunctions for each particle, which are then multiplied together. When particles are entangled, that means we can't factor the universe's wavefunction when it comes to the set of entangled particles- they're dependent on each other / unified in some way. This doesn't alter where position and momentum come from- they're both still the same functions of the wavefunction, with the same fundamental re

NickRetallack12y30

I didn't come up with it. It's called the EPR Paradox.

1DSherron12y

Neat. Consider my objection retracted. Although I suspect someone with more knowledge of the material could give a better explanation.

If you have a set of entangled particles, would it not be possible to measure one aspect of each particle in the set, and thus achieve a fully accurate observation?

1fractalman12y

erm...not quite...you technically run into "knowledge about each element of a system versus knowledge about the entire system" tradeoffs. Although...you CAN partially bypass "no quantum Xerox" if you have a large sample. It's the principle used in error-correction for quantum computers. Take a laser. point it at a perfect polarizer of unknown orientation, and fire a pulse. Send the photons that get through one by one through filters of known orientation as you hone in convergently (hehe) on the orientation of the first polarizer. There is a tiny chance that you won't have a remotely correct value, and you never get exact with a finite sample, but you can probably do well enough to satisfy the typical engineer with only a "couple hundred" photons.

6Vaniver12y

Do you know calculus? If so, it will be very easy to explain what the uncertainty principle actually means quantitatively, which should reduce any qualitative confusion.

-1DSherron12y

I'm not a physicist, and I couldn't give a technical explanation of why that won't work (although I feel like I can grasp an intuitive idea based on how the Uncertainty Principle works to begin with). However, remember the Litany of a Bright Dilettante. You're not going to spot a trivial means of bypassing a fundamental theory in a field like physics after thinking for five minutes on a blog. Incidentally, the Uncertainty Principle doesn't talk about the precision of our possible measurements, per se, but about the actual amplitude distribution for the observable. As you get arbitrarily precise along one of the pair you get arbitrarily spread out along the other, so that the second value is indeterminate even in principle.

Truly Part Of You

The Pythagorean Theorem is just a special case of the magnitude of a vector, aka the Euclidean Norm#Euclidean_norm). Though, I wouldn't be able to derive that if that were deleted from my brain.

Applause Lights

When I click that link, my browser downloads a file called redirect.php.