4 ms·

The linked paper addresses this objection in a fun way: perhaps the tobacco company lawyers argue in court that "smoking doesn't cause cancer; every experiment

The linked paper addresses this objection in a fun way: perhaps the tobacco company lawyers argue in court that "smoking doesn't cause cancer; every experiment was super-determined to assign those pre-disposed to cancer into the smoking group!" The paper replies with the following argument: in super-determinism, statistical independence is an emergent property which holds at macro scales, so classical experiments do enjoy statistical independence. In your hypothesis - yeah, the game is rigged! But superdeterminism comes into play at the quantum scale where we know things are already kind of fucked, which is why we're talking about this at all. The idea is that God places Her thumb on the quantum scale alone. You might try to foil Her with an experiment exquisitely sensitive to a quantum measurement: the cat lives or dies according to the millionth decimal place of some measurement. But actually "cat lives" and "cat dies" might be very close in state-space - in the sense that two arbitrary real numbers might have some arithmetic relationship which cannot be proven (Chaitin's incompleteness theorem).

knzhou 7y ago
> The paper replies with the following argument: in super-determinism, statistical independence is an emergent property which holds at macro scales, so classical experiments do enjoy statistical independence. In your hypothesis - yeah, the game is rigged! > But superdeterminism comes into play at the quantum scale where we know things are already kind of fucked, which is why we're talking about this at all. But experiments already do use classical (i.e. macroscopic) sources of randomness. For example, to oversimplify a little, you might literally flip a coin to decide the specific measurements done in a run of a Bell test experiment. Such experiments still give puzzling results, so if superdeterminism is to work as an explanation of anything at all, it must hold all the way up. Superdeterministic explanations have to apply even to things like coin flips, which, again, leads to the end of science, wailing and gnashing of teeth, etc.
- trevyn 7y ago
  Perhaps all forms of randomness are pseudorandomness of various quality levels, which turns out to be good enough? It would be the end of the current interpretation of what science means, but the process and results of science could carry on as they always have. There is also the glimmer of post-science, in which we might be able to find a process/method that is more effective/efficient than the scientific in some domains. And you’re right — there will certainly be wailing and gnashing of teeth. :-)

knzhou 7y ago

> The paper replies with the following argument: in super-determinism, statistical independence is an emergent property which holds at macro scales, so classical experiments do enjoy statistical independence. In your hypothesis - yeah, the game is rigged! > But superdeterminism comes into play at the quantum scale where we know things are already kind of fucked, which is why we're talking about this at all. But experiments already do use classical (i.e. macroscopic) sources of randomness. For example, to oversimplify a little, you might literally flip a coin to decide the specific measurements done in a run of a Bell test experiment. Such experiments still give puzzling results, so if superdeterminism is to work as an explanation of anything at all, it must hold all the way up. Superdeterministic explanations have to apply even to things like coin flips, which, again, leads to the end of science, wailing and gnashing of teeth, etc.

trevyn 7y ago
Perhaps all forms of randomness are pseudorandomness of various quality levels, which turns out to be good enough? It would be the end of the current interpretation of what science means, but the process and results of science could carry on as they always have. There is also the glimmer of post-science, in which we might be able to find a process/method that is more effective/efficient than the scientific in some domains. And you’re right — there will certainly be wailing and gnashing of teeth. :-)