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I have already seen that. It has the error I mentioned. As for raw QM, it corresponds to reality, but people are right to also want to know what it means. And

by xlnt 18y ago

I have already seen that. It has the error I mentioned. As for raw QM, it corresponds to reality, but people are right to also want to know what it means. And we do know. MWI is a good explanation of QM. There's no need to be an instrumentalist, and being one is not a way of overcoming bias. Explanations of what bias is, and how to overcome it, are one of our major tools against it. (See, again, The Fabric of Reality on MWI (chapter 2), instrumentalism (chapter 1), and about explanations in chapters 1,3,4,7 and mixed in throughout.) The book QED by Feynman also contains very good explanations about QM, but without mention of MWI, so you can see that even with no particular interpretation of QM there is a lot of scope for explanation.

gaika 18y ago
All the explanations you are talking about are very nice, and give you a lot of warm comfort, but they all are just rationalizations. There's not much you can predict about the rest of the world using them. The cold rationality lies in the math you have to study for 2-3 years to learn how to add up these little amplitude arrows. Using that you can actually model and make predictions. Another great example is Maxwell, he got all the rationalizations "wrong" but the math survived and is called after him.
- xlnt 18y ago
  You are presenting an explanation of why I should discount explanations in general. Isn't that a contradiction?
  - gaika 18y ago
    Exactly, I'm being irrational here too - I'm addressing your irrational self that would listen to the arguments of a stranger for no good reason :) Here's the kind of arguments I would find rational - http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Causality-AI/lm/R2GX832Q1M6CHV/ref=cm_lm_byauthor_full http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Causality-AI/lm/R2GX832Q1M...
    - xlnt 18y ago
      Since you believe you are irrational and make decisions based on bias, and Bayesian anti-science positions forgive you for this, whereas I do not (for example, science says the source of an idea is irrelevant, so you are wrong to be concerned with whether the source is a stranger), might it be that you only believe these anti-science ideas because of bias? They offer you comfort, and you revealed earlier that you do think about ideas in terms of which are more comfortable.

by xlnt 18y ago

gaika 18y ago

All the explanations you are talking about are very nice, and give you a lot of warm comfort, but they all are just rationalizations. There's not much you can predict about the rest of the world using them. The cold rationality lies in the math you have to study for 2-3 years to learn how to add up these little amplitude arrows. Using that you can actually model and make predictions. Another great example is Maxwell, he got all the rationalizations "wrong" but the math survived and is called after him.

xlnt 18y ago
You are presenting an explanation of why I should discount explanations in general. Isn't that a contradiction?
- gaika 18y ago
  Exactly, I'm being irrational here too - I'm addressing your irrational self that would listen to the arguments of a stranger for no good reason :) Here's the kind of arguments I would find rational - http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Causality-AI/lm/R2GX832Q1M6CHV/ref=cm_lm_byauthor_full http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Causality-AI/lm/R2GX832Q1M...
  - xlnt 18y ago
    Since you believe you are irrational and make decisions based on bias, and Bayesian anti-science positions forgive you for this, whereas I do not (for example, science says the source of an idea is irrelevant, so you are wrong to be concerned with whether the source is a stranger), might it be that you only believe these anti-science ideas because of bias? They offer you comfort, and you revealed earlier that you do think about ideas in terms of which are more comfortable.