titotal
Current physicist here: yeah, most physicists are in the “shut up and calculate” camp, and view the interpretations as fun lunchroom conversation.
I also think that collapse is unsatisfying, and I think yud did an adequate job in relaying the reasons why a lot of physicists are unhappy with it. The problem is that “collapse is unsatisfying” is not sufficient evidence to declare that MWI is true and that MWI nonbelievers are fools. The obvious point being that there a shitload of other interpretations which neither feature many-worlds or “real” collapse. The other point is that MWI is an incomplete theory, as there are no explanation for the Born probabilities. Also, we know we don’t have the full picture of quantum physics anyway (as it’s incompatible with general relativity), so it’s possible that if we figure out a unified theory the problems with interpretations will go away.
As a physicist, this quote got me so mad I wrote an excessively detailed debunking a while back. It’s staggeringly wrong.
Yeah, I’ve been writing up critiques for a year or two now, collected over at my substack. I’ve been posting them to the EA forum and even Lesswrong itself and they’ve been generally well received.
I roll a fair 100 sided dice.
Eliezer asks me to state my confidence that I won’t roll a 1.
I say I am 99% confident I won’t roll a 1, using basic math.
Eliezer says “AHA, you idiot, I checked all of your past predictions and when you predicted something with confidence 99%, it only happened 90% of the time! So you can’t say you’re 99% confident that you won’t roll a 1”
I am impressed by the ability of my past predictions to affect the roll of a dice, and promptly run off to become a wizard.
Obvious reminder: do not assume that anonymous tumblr posts are accurate. (this is the only post the tumblr account made).
Has anyone attempted a neutral unpacking of the mess of claims and counterclaims around Ziz and related parties?
My impression is that the toxicity within EA is mainly concentrated in the bay area rationalists, and in a few of the actual EA organizations. If it’s just a local meetup group, it’s probably just going to be some regular-ish people with some mistaken beliefs that are genuinely concerned about AI.
Just be polite and present arguments, and you might actually change minds, at least among those who haven’t been sucked too far into Rationalism.
What I think happened is that he got confused by the half mirror phase shifts (because theres only a phase shift if you reflect off the front of the mirror, not the back). Instead of asking someone, he invented his own weird system which gets the right answer by accident, and then refused to fix the mistake ever, saying that the alternate system is fine because it’s “simpler”.
If you want more of this, I wrote a full critique of his mangled intro to quantum physics, where he forgets the whole “conservation of energy” thing.
what are the other ones?
I guess the rest of the experimental setup that recombines the photon amplitiudes. Like if you put 5 extra beam splitters in the bottom path, there wouldn’t be full destructive interference.
when i’m thinking about splitter with pi/4 phase shift, i’m thinking about coupled line coupler or its waveguide analogue, but i come from microwave land on this one. maybe this works in fibers?
I’m not sure how you’d actually build a symmetric beam splitter: wikipedia said you’d need to induce a particular extra phase shift on both transmission and reflection. (I’m fully theoretical physics so I’m not too familiar).