3 ms·
PNAS publishes a lot of junk. If you're connected to the Academy you can get papers through with very light review. In fact, one can even seen this happened in
by spekcular 4y ago
PNAS publishes a lot of junk. If you're connected to the Academy you can get papers through with very light review.
In fact, one can even seen this happened in the Tipler paper: "This Direct Submission article had a prearranged editor." [0]
Andrew Gelman calls it a "tabloid": https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2014/06/17/hurricaneshimmicanes-extra-problematic-nature-scientific-publication-process/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2014/06/17/hurricanes....
I will check the paper out though.
[0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/no-more-prearranged-editors-pnas https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/no-more-prearrange...
Edit: I read the paper. It is borderline crank work. There are decent arguments for the Born rule in MWI but this is not one of them. (I like David Wallace's book, for example.)
- boole1854 4y agoCare to elucidate some critiques of the paper?
- spekcular 4y agoCare to outline a precise argument for me to respond to? I'm honestly not sure one can even be extracted from pages 3 through 5, and I don't want to attack a strawman. One basic problem is that using symmetry arguments to justify the assignment of subjective probabilities (cf. page 4, right column) is going to fail when there isn't a symmetry available, for example for irrational probabilities. A deeper issue is the implicit assumption that one can coarse-grain into discrete "effectively distinguishable universes" for the purpose of doing these counting arguments. There are significant conceptual difficulties doing this, and this claim is much stronger than the bare MWI. Wallace discusses this at length; see for instance the citations in the blog post you responded to.
- ahazred8ta 4y agoPerhaps it occupies the gray area between "wrong" and "not even...". O:-)