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I don't really understand what your coin flip metaphor is supposed to mean in the context of the paper. That Superdeterminism could be used in an entirely facil

I don't really understand what your coin flip metaphor is supposed to mean in the context of the paper. That Superdeterminism could be used in an entirely facile way doesn't really suggest anything about the theory itself. When choosing Superdeterminism as an ontology it suggests different paths for doing research, paths that are unexplored and potentially full of insight. That's what is exciting about it to me.

knzhou 7y ago
While I can think of exciting questions sparked by many different interpretations of quantum mechanics, I can't think of any for superdeterminism, for exactly the reasons I said -- it's scientifically dead from the start. Other ideas have limits, superdeterminism doesn't. Do you have a good example?
- npo9 7y ago
  In Superdeterminism the obvious line of research is to look for hidden variables when we find things that are seemingly probabilistic or random. If we found hidden variables to control when a radioactive isotope will decay we could possibly have much safer handling of fission materials, depending on what these hypothetical hidden variables are. * I don’t have an opinion on Superdeterminism, I’m just thinking about hypotheticals out loud.
  - knzhou 7y ago
    Hidden variables would be cool. But there are plenty of hidden variable theories that aren't superdeterministic. My point is that if we all genuinely adopted the superdeterministic way of thinking and explaining, we wouldn't even do experiments in the first place.
    - npo9 7y ago
      Wouldn’t we? If Superdeterminism is correct than it wouldn’t be up to us if we continue to experiment. Maybe we are compelled to try to understand the world.
rtpg 7y ago
Superdeterminism boils down to "the universe has baked in all results for all these quantum interactions" In a dumb "the universe in a computer" metaphor, it's saying that instead of having `do_quantum_thing` be a function taking various physically interesting parameters and then resolving to something interesting (and thus making QM be _about finding that_), we just have a huge array like `result_of_all_quantum_things_ever_to_exist` filled with random garbage. It's a theory that precludes any notion of predictivity in effects. It's nihilism for physicists.
- deleted 7y ago
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- trevyn 7y ago
  I think this is a misinterpretation — superdeterminism says that there is no true randomness in the function, not that the function is of any other particular form. The excitement is from the possibility that the function may be very simple (in Kolmogorov complexity terms), yet yield only one possible result for the state of the universe at each point in time. (Much like the process for calculating pi is simple and there is only one value for pi, but without knowing the process, there appears to be a lot of complexity or randomness.)

knzhou 7y ago

While I can think of exciting questions sparked by many different interpretations of quantum mechanics, I can't think of any for superdeterminism, for exactly the reasons I said -- it's scientifically dead from the start. Other ideas have limits, superdeterminism doesn't. Do you have a good example?

npo9 7y ago
In Superdeterminism the obvious line of research is to look for hidden variables when we find things that are seemingly probabilistic or random. If we found hidden variables to control when a radioactive isotope will decay we could possibly have much safer handling of fission materials, depending on what these hypothetical hidden variables are. * I don’t have an opinion on Superdeterminism, I’m just thinking about hypotheticals out loud.
- knzhou 7y ago
  Hidden variables would be cool. But there are plenty of hidden variable theories that aren't superdeterministic. My point is that if we all genuinely adopted the superdeterministic way of thinking and explaining, we wouldn't even do experiments in the first place.
  - npo9 7y ago
    Wouldn’t we? If Superdeterminism is correct than it wouldn’t be up to us if we continue to experiment. Maybe we are compelled to try to understand the world.

rtpg 7y ago

Superdeterminism boils down to "the universe has baked in all results for all these quantum interactions" In a dumb "the universe in a computer" metaphor, it's saying that instead of having `do_quantum_thing` be a function taking various physically interesting parameters and then resolving to something interesting (and thus making QM be _about finding that_), we just have a huge array like `result_of_all_quantum_things_ever_to_exist` filled with random garbage. It's a theory that precludes any notion of predictivity in effects. It's nihilism for physicists.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
trevyn 7y ago
I think this is a misinterpretation — superdeterminism says that there is no true randomness in the function, not that the function is of any other particular form. The excitement is from the possibility that the function may be very simple (in Kolmogorov complexity terms), yet yield only one possible result for the state of the universe at each point in time. (Much like the process for calculating pi is simple and there is only one value for pi, but without knowing the process, there appears to be a lot of complexity or randomness.)