Oh, don't get me wrong, I have no trouble with multiple outcomes, or to put it in a different way, the whole wavefunction being real. Otherwise you'd have a pre

Oh, don't get me wrong, I have no trouble with multiple outcomes, or to put it in a different way, the whole wavefunction being real. Otherwise you'd have a pretty strange time explaining interference ("oh, one thing is real, but it considers the other possibilities anyways" or "oh no, the waveform hasn't collapsed just yet, but it will once we observe it"). In fact, the Feynman path integral, i.e. the sum over all histories, appeals a lot to me on a conceptual level. But that isn't the point really. I just feel like saying "oh, it's in some weird quantum state of being both this and that at the same time" is a bit disingenuous, since it is not true in any classical sense, which, shockingly, most people would assume and get utterly confused. It is necessarily true if you consider many worlds as the valid interpretation (which I do like, but let's not go there), but it doesn't I think hint that well enough, nor does it hint that we have entered a cloud of possibilities that is about to collapse if that was the point. More than just being clear on what is physically happening (and I do say "oh, it's just equations, they have no meaning" is the biggest hand waving of all), it feels kind of immature. The tone hints to a confusion in the speaker, as if we've just gotten these strange experimental results and we're not sure how to deal with them yet. It's something that could've been acceptable when practically nothing was known about quantum mechanics, but more than half a century later? And to be perfectly fair, I'm not sure how you would phrase the wavefunction / amplitude distribution to at least give someone without knowledge of the subject a workable model. Maybe the inferential distance is too long to even have a not completely wrong intuition, but I feel we can do better.