3 ms·

Is there really reason to believe that practicing theoretical physicists who advocate wavefunction collapse are so mistaken as to be not worth learning from? I

Is there really reason to believe that practicing theoretical physicists who advocate wavefunction collapse are so mistaken as to be not worth learning from? I find the lesswrong cultural insistence on going with MWI pretty troubling when it gets to the point of not listening to actual physicists who don't use it, as as far as I can tell, very few people there are actual active quantum physics researchers. MWI could well be a better way to develop understanding of quantum mechanics, but dissing people who actually actively work with the stuff because their established notation has historical baggage doesn't seem like a good idea when you're not actively working with the stuff yourself.

Jach 16y ago
I believe they are very mistaken, just like I believe practicing scientists who also believe in God are very mistaken. There are arguments for and against my beliefs, and I don't want to go into them here. I'm just explaining that to me a spiritual scientist (or a collapse-postulate scientist) is placed in a category where I can't believe that they take their science all that seriously. This doesn't make them impossible to learn from, or not worth it, or wrong about everything, but honestly I'd rather learn from someone more serious and excited about learning like Feynman. Someone who revels in the odd and beautiful nature of reality and doesn't need to invent comfortable intuition-friendly (and complicated) "reasons" why or how something does something. That said, if such scientists that I put into my would-rather-not-learn-from category want to teach me some math or programming or something solid and backed by experiment, if they want to show me an experiment to learn from, I'm all for it! I grew up in Utah, I can't think of a single influential teacher not a Mormon, obviously I didn't think because they were religious they weren't worth learning from.

Jach 16y ago

I believe they are very mistaken, just like I believe practicing scientists who also believe in God are very mistaken. There are arguments for and against my beliefs, and I don't want to go into them here. I'm just explaining that to me a spiritual scientist (or a collapse-postulate scientist) is placed in a category where I can't believe that they take their science all that seriously. This doesn't make them impossible to learn from, or not worth it, or wrong about everything, but honestly I'd rather learn from someone more serious and excited about learning like Feynman. Someone who revels in the odd and beautiful nature of reality and doesn't need to invent comfortable intuition-friendly (and complicated) "reasons" why or how something does something. That said, if such scientists that I put into my would-rather-not-learn-from category want to teach me some math or programming or something solid and backed by experiment, if they want to show me an experiment to learn from, I'm all for it! I grew up in Utah, I can't think of a single influential teacher not a Mormon, obviously I didn't think because they were religious they weren't worth learning from.