Rationalist check-list:
- Incorrect use of analogy? Check.
- Pseudoscientific nonsense used to make your point seem more profound? Check.
- Tortured use of probability estimates? Check.
- Over-long description of a point that could just have easily been made in 1 sentence? Check.
This email by SBF is basically one big malapropism.
A reminder that Rationalists have absolutely No Fucking Clue what they’re talking about when it comes to quantum mechanics, and this is evident from the very top.
Here is their prophet’s, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s, brilliant writings on QM: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5vZD32EynD9n94dhr/configurations-and-amplitude
In this stunning vindication of Dunning-Kruger, EY sets up a thought experiment of a photon being ejected at a half-silvered mirror. Then, he realizes that QM is formulated with complex numbers, so he decides to shoehorn them by imagining a “computer program” that computes the result of the experiment and using the complex numbers as the internal state (because he read somewhere that a wave function is a complex-valued function). From there, he goes on to realize that he needs to actually justify the use of complex numbers, so he drops the fact that multiplying the “internal state” by i represents the photon turning 90 degrees (what?! yes, multiplying by i rotates complex numbers by 90 degrees but this has literally nothing to do with the direction the photon travels, what the ACTUAL fuck am I reading?)
I seriously want to pull my hair out after reading this asinine nonsense. MIT OCW’s QM course is extremely accessible to anyone with a decent high-school math education but these chucklefucks’ need to prove to themselves that they’re smart supercedes any process of actual learning.
edit because I can’t stop sneering: “wave function collapse” is purely born of the Copenhagen interpretation which EY rails against as ridiculous (which, admittedly, isn’t a totally unpopular opinion for real physicists to have). This is, of course, 100% lost on SBF.
If you spend as many words as Yud does, you could actually teach quantum mechanics. But his goal isn’t to teach physics; it’s to convince the reader that physicists are all wrong about physics. It’s cult shit disguised as a science lesson.
Yeah but the remarks about “wave function collapse” are not about QM, they are cargo cult stuff. To create the appearance of being learned and smart.
QED.
What I think happened is that he got confused by the half mirror phase shifts (because theres only a phase shift if you reflect off the front of the mirror, not the back). Instead of asking someone, he invented his own weird system which gets the right answer by accident, and then refused to fix the mistake ever, saying that the alternate system is fine because it’s “simpler”.
That blog post irritates me in multiple directions every time I am reminded of it. The wrongness is so layered that any response I attempt degenerates into do you even Bloch sphere, bro before I give up and find something more worthwhile to do with my life.
Yud loves to go on about how the map is not the territory, to the extent that his cult followers think he coined the phrase, but he is remarkably terrible at understanding which is which. Or, to be a little more precise, he is actively uninterested in appreciating that the question of what to file under “map” versus “territory” is one of the big questions that separate the different interpretations of quantum mechanics. He has his desired answer, and he argues for it by assertion.
He’s also just ignorant about the math. Stepping back from the details of what he gets wrong, there are bigger-picture problems. For example, he points to a complex number and says that it can’t be a probability because it’s complex. True, but so what? The Fourier transform of a sequence of real numbers will generally have complex values. Just because one way of expressing information uses complex numbers doesn’t mean that every perspective on the problem has to. And, in fact, what he tries to do with two complex numbers — one amplitude for each path in an interferometer — you can actually do with three real numbers. They can even be probabilities, say, the probability of getting the “yes” outcome in each of three yes/no measurements. The quantumness comes in when you consider how the probabilities assigned to the outcomes of different experiments all fit together. If probabilities are, as Yud wants, always part of the “map”, and a wavefunction is mathematically equivalent to a set of probabilities satisfying some constraint, then a wavefunction belongs in the “map”, too. You can of course argue that some probabilities are “territory”; that’s an argument which smart people have been having back and forth for decades. But that’s not what Yud does. Instead, through a flavor swirl of malice and incompetence, he ends up being too much a hypocrite to “steelman” the many other narratives about quantum mechanics.
How can anyone take a fanfic writer seriously.
I used to read fanfiction, and by the standards of Harry Potter fanfiction, it’s not even good fanfiction.
(insert “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy” joke here)Maybe it’s just a matter of taste, but I couldn’t get through more than a chapter. I wonder if most of the audience for it were people who didn’t normally read fanfiction. Actually, I just looked it up on fanlore to see what fandom people have said about it, and the reviews are mixed…
“I read it longer than I planned to because I kept expecting it to turn into Harry/Draco slash […] But then I realized the author was just a weird neckbeard who had some kind of strange Draco fixation but was probably not going to make them go gay. Also it was just a really bad fic.”
Lots of gold in there. Apparently Eliezer was bullied by a Harry Potter fan forum, to the point that some of the users set up a blog called “Methods of Rationality sucks”.
His reaction was where Sneerclub got its name
That quote has always been mildly amusing but learning it’s from a fanfic beef makes it hilarious.
And people gave this man money. Lots of money. My God.
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With the amount of lies, scams, cults and frauds that have been perpetuated in online fandoms, particularly big ones like Harry Potter, I suppose HP fans could spot a cult leader at 10 paces. They certainly had Yudkowsky’s number pretty quickly
It’s as if /r/iamverysmart sat down to write it. So clearly it’s Eliezer self-inserting himself into a children’s book as a Jimmy Neutron wannabe and trying to pass is as a legitimate improvement.
@dingleberry @sinedpick At least fanfic writesr are not Yudkowsky fanboys.