[SEQ RERUN] Class Project

This is, after all, kind of the whole point of the MWI sequence!

It does not demonstrate this point, because it simply substitutes one kind of incompetence for another, and it also creates a myth or two about what the intellectual situation in quantum physics actually is.

The myth is that physicists believe in collapse of the wavefunction as a physical process caused by observation, rather than in many worlds, and that this is their main intellectual error. In fact, the central error of the subject is still just instrumentalist or pragmatist or anti-realist complacency, which says the quantum formalism works, we can apply it to new situations as required, what more does a theory need? You have to understand that the empirical content of quantum mechanics is found in the expectation values of operators, the eigenvalues of wavefunctions, etc, not in saying whether wavefunctions are real or are just devices for calculation, and not in saying whether they collapse or not. Many worlds only becomes a well-defined alternative to the instrumentalist attitude, in the way that Bohmian mechanics is a well-defined alternative, when it offers an objectively specified account of why the empirically relevant part of quantum mechanics works. Otherwise, this debate is just a game of "my god is better than your god".

Remember the part of the sequence which says "where does the Born rule for probabilities come from?" And notice that, in answering this absolutely fundamental question, Eliezer doesn't draw upon some standard idea, instead he highlights an almost unknown speculation by his pal the economist who used to be a physicist. He has to resort to this because professional physicists in the post-quantum era are bad at realism, even the many-worlds advocates. Most of the latter think that handwaving about decoherence explains everything; they have retained some bad and confused standards of explanation from their positivist predecessors, even while they reject the pragmatist philosophy.

Meanwhile, the sequences have created a small population of nonphysicists who think they know what the correct ontology of quantum mechanics is, even though they lack vital concepts like operators and observables, and have never even heard of alternatives like retrocausal interpretations or 't Hooft's holographic determinism. You know how there are all these people who, having heard of the problem of friendly AI, think they have a quick fix, whereas the SI perspective is that it is a dizzyingly hard problem full of pitfalls, and the real solution requires all sorts of unnatural-sounding efforts and methods? That's my attitude to the problem of quantum ontology. And I regard what you see on this site, about this issue, as enthusiastic, but uninformed, and very naive, dilettantism.

I'm talking about an ethos, a culture, where people talk like they do in this story:

That is what I meant, too.

Now, as for why no one has done this already: well, besides the "why", there is also the "who", the "what", the "where", and the "when". Who would have thought to try it before, and under what circumstances?

Some of those who read and believed the Class Project post 4 years ago.

To him and his colleagues at SI, the only really important problem is Friendly AI, and that (directly or indirectly) is what he's been spending his time on

And, given that it takers only "five whole minutes to think an original thought", how many thousands of original thoughts should he have come up with in 4 years? How many Einstein-style breakthroughs should he have made by now? How many has he?

Unless I misunderstand something, the Class Project post was a falsifiable model, and it has been falsified. Time to discard it?

I would like to develop a social support structure for the-kind-of-people-who've-read-the-Sequences to pursue certain kinds of research outside of (existing) academia

One problem with this approach is that the existing academia has access to all kinds of useful lab equipment, up to and including the Large Hadron Collider. It would be very difficult for a group of enthusiasts to acquire that kind of equipment; and, without it, it's hard to do any truly revolutionary research.