All of paragonal's Comments + Replies

 Most people will do very bad things, including mob violence, if they are peer-pressured enough.

Shouldn't this be weighted against the good things people do if they are peer-pressured? I think there's value in not conforming but if all cultures have peer-pressure there needs to be a careful analysis of the pros and cons instead of simply strifing for immunity from it.

 I'm not sure anybody "just" innately lacks the machinery to be peer-pressured.

My first thought here aren't autists but psychopaths.

Specifically, I would love to see a better argument for it being ahead of Helion (if it is actually ahead, which would be a surprise and a major update for me).

I agree with Jeffrey Heninger's response to your comment. Here is a (somewhat polemical) video which illustrates the challenges for Helion's unusual D-He3 approach compared to the standard D-T approach which CFS follows. It illustrates some of Jeffrey's points and makes other claims like Helion's current operational poc reactor Trenta being far from adequate for scaling to a productive reactor when ... (read more)

For example, the way scientific experiments work, your p-value either passes the (arbitrary) threshold, or it doesn't, so you either reject the null, or fail to reject the null, a binary outcome.

Ritualistic hypothesis testing with significance thresholds is mostly used in the social sciences, psychology and medicine and not so much in the hard sciences (although arbitrary thresholds like 5 sigma are used in physics to claim the discovery of new elementary particles they rarely show up in physics papers). Since it requires deliberate effort to get into the ... (read more)

Unfortunately, what I would call the bailey is quite common on Lesswrong. It doesn't take much digging to find quotes like this in the Sequences and beyond:

This is a shocking notion; it implies that all our twins in the other worlds— all the different versions of ourselves that are constantly split off, [...]

Thanks, I see we already had a similar argument in the past.

I think there's a bit of motte and bailey going on with the MWI. The controversy and philosophical questions are about multiple branches / worlds / versions of persons being ontological units. When we try to make things rigorous, only the wave function of the universe remains as a coherent ontological concept. But if we don't have a clear way from the latter to the former, we can't really say clear things about the parts which are philosophically interesting.

I’m reluctant to engage with extraordinarily contrived scenarios in which magical 2nd-law-of-thermodynamics-violating contraptions cause “branches” to interfere.

Agreed. Roland Omnes tries to calculate how big the measurement apparatus of Wigner needs to be in order to measure his friend and gets 10 to the power of 10E18 degrees of freedom ("The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics", section 7.8).

But if we are going to engage with those scenarios anyway, then we should never have referred to them as “branches” in the first place, ...

Well, that's one of the p... (read more)

Rick Beato has a video about people losing their absolute pitch with age (it seems to happen to everyone eventually). There are a lot of anecdata by people who have experienced this both in the video and in the comments.

Some report that after experiencing a shift in their absolute pitch, all music sounds wrong. Some of them adapted somehow (it's unclear to me how much development of relative abilities was involved) and others report not having noticed that their absolute pitch has shifted. Some report that only after they've lost their absolute pitch compl... (read more)

I am quite skeptical that hearing like a person with absolute pitch can be learned because it seems to be somewhat incompatible with relative pitch.

People with absolute pitch report that if a piece of music is played with a slightly lower or higher pitch, it sounds out of tune. If this feeling stays throughout the piece this means that the person doesn't hear relatively. So even if a relative pitch person would learn to name played notes absolutely, I don't think the hearing experience would be the same.

So I think you can't have both absolute pitch and relative pitch in the full sense. (I do think that you can improve at naming played notes, singing notes correctly without a reference note from outside your body, etc.)

Thanks for this pointer. I might check it out when their website is up again.

Many characteristics have been proposed as significant, for example:

• It's better if fingers have less traveling to do.
• It's better if consecutive taps are done with different fingers or, better yet, different hands.
• It's better if common keys are near the fingers' natural resting places.
• It's better to avoid stretching and overusing the pinky finger, which is the weakest of the five.

Just an anecdotal experience: I, too, have wrist problems. I have tried touch typing with 10 fingers a couple of times and my problems got worse each time. My experience agre... (read more)

You might be also be interested in "General Bayesian Theories and the Emergence of the Exclusivity Principle" by Chiribella et al. which claims that quantum theory is the most general theory which satisfies Bayesian consistency conditions.

By now, there are actually quite a few attempts to reconstruct quantum theory from more "reasonable" axioms besides Hardy's. You can track the refrences in the paper above to find some more of them.

As you learn more about most systems, the likelihood ratio should likely go down for each additional point of evidence.

I'd be interested to see the assumptions which go into this. As Stuart has pointed out, it's  got to do with how correlated the evidence is. And for fat-tailed distributions we probably should expect to be surprised at a constant rate.

Note you can still get massive updates if B' is pretty independent of B. So if someone brings in camera footage of the crime, that has no connection with the previous witness's trustworthiness, and can throw the odds strongly in one direction or another (in equation, independence means that P(B'|H,B)/P(B'|¬H,B) = P(B'|H)/P(B'|¬H)).

Thanks, I think this is the crucial point for me. I was implicitly operating under the assumption that the evidence is uncorrelated which is of course not warranted in most cases.

So if we have already updated on a lot of evidence... (read more)

From the article:

At this point, I think I am somewhat below Nate Silver’s 60% odds that the virus escaped from the lab, and put myself at about 40%, but I haven’t looked carefully and this probability is weakly held.

Quite off-topic: what does it mean from a Bayesian perspective to hold a probability weakly vs. confidently? Likelihood ratios for updating are independent of the prior so a weakly-held probability should update exactly as a confidently-held one. Is there a way to quantifiy the "strongness" with which one holds a probability?

Thanks for your answer. Part of the problem might have been that I wasn't that proficient with vim. When I reconfigured the clashing key bindings of the IDE I sometimes unknowingly overwrote a vim command which turned out to be useful later on. So I had to reconfigure numerous times which annoyed me so much that I abandoned the approach at the time.

A question for the people who use vim keybindings in IDEs: how do you deal with keybindings for IDE tasks which are not part of vim (like using the debugger, refactoring, code completion, etc.)? The last time I tried to use vim bindings in an IDE there were quite some overlaps with these so I found myself coming up with compromise systems which didn't work that well because they weren't coherent.

At least for me, I think the question of whether I'm buying too much for myself in a situation of limited supplies was more important for the decision than the fear of being perceived as weird. This depends of course on how limited the supplies actually were at the time of buying but I think it is generally important to distinguish between the shame because one might profit at the expense of others, and the "pure" weirdness of the action.

We have reason to believe that peptide vaccines will work particularly well here, because we're targeting a respiratory infection, and the peptide vaccine delivery mechanism targets respiratory tissue instead of blood.

Just a minor point: by delivery mechanism, are you talking about inserting the peptides through the nose à la RadVac? If I understand correctly, Werner Stöcker injects his peptide-based vaccine.

You could also turn around this question. If you find it somewhat plausible that that self-adjoint operators represent physical quantities, eigenvalues represent measurement outcomes and eigenvectors represent states associated with these outcomes (per the arguments I have given in my other post) one could picture a situation where systems hop from eigenvector to eigenvector through time. From this point of view, continuous evolution between states is the strange thing.

The paper by Hardy I cited in another answer to you tries to make QM as similar to a cla... (read more)

There are remaining open questions concerning quantum mechanics, certainly, but I don't really see any remaining open questions concerning the Everett interpretation.

“Valid” is a strong word, but other reasons I've seen include classical prejudice, historical prejudice, dogmatic falsificationism, etc.

Thanks for answering. I didn't find a better word but I think you understood me right.

So you basically think that the case is settled. I don't agree with this opinion.

I'm not convinced of the validity of the derivations of the Born rule (see IV.C.2 of th... (read more)

I think it makes more sense to think of MWI as "first many, then even more many," at which point questions of "when does the split happen?" feel less interesting, because the original state is no longer as special. [...] If time isn't quantized, then this has to be spread across continuous space, and so thinking of there being a countable number of worlds is right out.

What I called the "nice ontology" isn't so much about the number of worlds or even countability but about whether the worlds are well-defined. The MWI gives up a unique reality for things. Th... (read more)

I agree that the question "how many worlds are there" doesn't have a well-defined answer in the MWI. I disagree that it is a meaningless question.

From the bird's-eye view, the ontology of the MWI seems pretty clear: the universal wavefunction is happily evolving (or is it?). From the frog's-eye view, the ontology is less clear. The usual account of an experiment goes like this:

• The system and the observer come together and interact
• This leads to entanglement and decoherence in a certain basis
• In the final state, we have a branch for each measurement outcome.

There isn't a sharp line for when the cross-terms are negligible enough to properly use the word "branch", but there are exponential effects such that it's very clearly appropriate in the real-world cases of interest.

I agree that it isn't a problem for practical purposes but if we are talking about a fundamental theory about reality shouldn't questions like "How many worlds are there?" have unambiguous answers?

Right, but (before reading your post) I had assumed that the eigenvectors somehow "popped out" of the Everett interpretation.

This is a bit of a tangent but decoherence isn't exclusive to the Everett interpretation. Decoherence is itself a measurable physical process independent of the interpretation one favors. So explanations which rely on decoherence are part of all interpretations.

I mean in the setup you describe there isn't any reason why we can't call the "state space" the observer space and the observer "the system being studied" and then write down

This

Ok, now comes the trick: we assume that observation doesn't change the system

and this

I think the basic point is that if you start by distinguishing your eigenfunctions, then you naturally get out distinguished eigenfunctions.

doesn't sound correct to me.

The basis in which the diagonalization happens isn't put in at the beginning. It is determined by the nature of the interaction between the system and its environment. See "environment-induced superselection" or short "einselection".

I mean I could accept that the Schrödinger equation gives the evolution of the wave-function, but why care about its eigenfunctions so much?

I'm not sure if this will be satisfying to you but I like to think about it like this:

• Experiments show that the order of quantum measurements matters. The mathematical representation of the physical quantities needs to take this into account. One simple kind of non-commutative objects are matrices.
• If physical quantities are represented by matrices, the possible measurement outcomes need to be encoded in there somehow.

Do you see any technical or conceptual challenges which the MWI has yet to address or do you think it is a well-defined interpretation with no open questions?

What's your model for why people are not satisfied with the MWI? The obvious ones are 1) dislike for a many worlds ontology and 2) ignorance of the arguments. Do you think there are other valid reasons?

No. The property which you are describing is not "mixedness" (technical term: "purity"). That the state vector in question can't be written as a tensor product of state vectors makes it an *entangled* state.

Mixed states are states which cannot be represented by *any* state vector. You need a density matrix in order to write them down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_radical

Smolin's book has inspired me to begin working on a theory of quantum gravity. I'll need to learn new things like quantum field theory.

If you don't know Quantum Field Theory, I don't see how you can possibly understand why General Relativity and Quantum Theory are difficult to reconcile. If true, how are you able to work on the solution to a problem you don't understand?

In Smolin's view, the scientific establishment is good at making small iterations to existing theories and bad at creating radically new theories.

I agree with this.

It's therefore not implausible that the solution to quantum gravity could come from a decade of solitary amateur work by someone totally outside the scientific establishment.

For me, this sounds very implausible. Although the scientific establishment isn't geared towars creating radically new theories, I think it is even harder to create such ideas from the outside. I agree that... (read more)

I think so, too, but I don't know it (Eliezer's Sequence on QM is still on my reading list). Given the importance people around here put on Bayes theorem, I find it quite surprising that the idea of a quantum generalization -which is what QBism is about- isn't discussed here apart from a handful of isolated comments. Two notable papers in this direction are

https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0106133

https://arxiv.org/abs/0906.2187

Einstein was a realist who was upset that the only interpretation available to him was anti-realist. Saying that he took the wavefunction as object of knowledge is technically true, ie, false.

I agree that my phrasing was a bit misleading here. Reading it again, it sounds like Einstein wasn't a realist, which of course is false. For him, QM was a purely statistical theory which needed to be supplemented by a more fundamental realistic theory (a view which has been proven to be untenable only in 2012 by Pusey, Barrett and Rudolph).

Thanks for conceding

I don't think that the QM example is like the others. Explaining this requires a bit of detail.

From section V.:

My understanding of the multiverse debate is that it works the same way. Scientists observe the behavior of particles, and find that a multiverse explains that behavior more simply and elegantly than not-a-multiverse.

That's not an accurate description of the state of affairs.

In order to calculate correct predictions for experiments, you have to use the probabilistic Born rule (and the collapse postulate for sequential measurements). T... (read more)

Does the book talk about schizophrenia? I'm a bit skeptical that coherence therapy and IFS can be used to heal it but I'm quite interested in hearing your thoughts about schizophrenia in relation to subagent models.

Thanks!