The Contrarian Status Catch-22

Right. This is why I think it's under-ratedly important for contrarians who actually believe in the potential efficacy of their beliefs to not seem like contrarians. If you truly believe that your ideas are underrepresented then you will much better promote them by being appearing generally "normal" and passing off the underrepresented idea as a fairly typical part of your ostensibly coherent worldview. I will admit that this is more challenging.

Most smug contrarians have many contrarian beliefs, not just one. If we average over all the various beliefs of smug contrarians, what level of accuracy will we find? (Could we find data on smug contrarians from a century ago?) I suspect accuracy will be far too low to justify such smugness. Even if we limit our attention to high IQ smug contrarians, I suspect accuracy will also be low. Yes the typical objection to smugness is probably to the cockiness of asserting higher status than one has been granted, but the typical reason people are smugly contrarian is also probably wanting to defy current status rankings. You can't assume that because they are hypocrites and disagree with you that you are not a hypocrite.

Assuming collapse is quantitatively unlike assuming the existence of God. The collapse postulate is extremely unlikely a priori, in terms of the usual probabilities humans deal with, but the order of magnitude of unlikeliness is not even in the same order of magnitude as for an intelligent creator. Collapse is easy to describe (if you are careful and use thermodynamic degrees of freedom rather than consciousness to check when it will happen) and consistent with all observations. Of course MWI is way simpler, so I would bet on it against overwhelming odds; so would Scott Aaronson. That said, we still have huge unexplained things (the Born probabilities; the coexistence of GR and quantum) whose improbability a priori is very large compared to the gap between many worlds and collapse. So it is conceivable that we could discover a formulation with collapse which accounts for the Born probabilities and which is simpler than any formulation without collapse. I would bet anything against this, but it is certainly more likely than discovering that the world is flat or that God exists.

Human experience with quantum mechanics has been confined to experiments with extremely low entanglement. The question we are asking is: do the laws of physics we have observed so far continue to hold up in the high entanglement limit? This is very much analogous to asking: do the laws of physics we have observed so far continue to hold up in the high energy limit? Even if you expect the answer to be yes, there is broad consensus among physicists that investigating the question is worthwhile. I also suspect that if you knew more physics you would be less confident in your position.

(I recently took a class from Scott Aaronson which caused me to stop being confused about quantum mechanics very effectively and made me understand precisely how obvious MWI is. I think that his pedagogy is one of the most powerful forces in the world right now for getting students to understand quantum mechanics and see that MWI is obvious. I think you are basically manufacturing disagreement, which you can do successfully mostly because Scott Aaronson expresses himself less precisely than you do.)

The quantum interpretation debate is merely the illustrative starting point for this article, so perhaps it is boorish of me to focus on it. But...

the obvious absurdity of attempts to make quantum mechanics yield a single world.

Even if some form of many worlds is correct, this is going too far.

Eliezer, so far as I can see, in your life you have gone from a belief in objective-collapse theories, derived from Penrose, to a belief in many worlds, derived perhaps from your extropian peers; and you always pose the theoretical choice as a choice between "collapse" and "no-collapse". You do not seem to have ever seriously considered - for example - whether the wavefunction is not real at all, but simply a construct like a probability distribution.

There are at least two ways of attempting "to make quantum mechanics yield a single world" which are obviously not absurd: zigzag interpretations and quantum causal histories. Since these hyperbolic assertions of yours about the superiority and obviousness of many-worlds frequently show up in your discourses on rationality, you really need at some point to reexamine your thinking on this issue. Perhaps you have managed to draw useful lessons for yourself even while getting it wrong, or perhaps there are new lessons to be found in discovering how you got to this point, but you are getting it wrong.

What I'm uncomfortable with isn't the idea of a god-free physical universe, it's the air of satisfaction that atheists give off.

There are many who are uncomfortable with the air of satisfaction that the faithful give off. I'm not convinced there's an asymmetry here.

The instinctive status hierarchy treats factual beliefs in pretty much the same way as policy proposals.

Bingo. Like I've harped on and on about, humans don't naturally decouple beliefs from values, or ought from is. If an ought (esp. involving distribution of resources ) hinges on an "is", it's too often the "is" that gets adjusted, self-servingly, rather than the ought.

Take note, Wei_Dai and everyone who uses could-should-agents as models of humans.

I came up with quote for a closely related issue:

"Don't let the fact that idiots agree with you be the sole thing that makes you change your mind, else all you'll have gained is a different set of idiots who agree with you."

Naive people (particularly contrarians) put into a situation where they aren't sure which ideas are truly "in" or "out" or "popular" may become highly confused and find themselves switching sides frequently. After joining a "side", then being agreed with by people whose arguments were poor in support of something good, they find themselves making an argument like "Wow. So many idiots support this! There's no way this can be good." only to find out after switching sides again that the same thing keeps happening. Why? It's because there are likely complete fools who support every cause you might consider good.

Bottom line: consider arguments on their merits, and avoid automatically thinking that they're bad (or good) simply because of who believes them or the (bad) arguments made on behalf of the idea. That's difficult, but if you don't, you wind up with situations similar to Eliezer's.

As the post is written, Eliezer seems too quick to presume that if people do not want to affiliate with a belief because of the low status of folks who hold that belief, that must mean those people admit that the evidence favors the belief. Yes if the belief happens to be correct then having the wrong sort of early enthusiasts will sadly discourage others from accepting a correct belief. But this same process will also play out if the belief is wrong.

Note that not all new beliefs first gain the interest of low status folks - many new beliefs are first championed by high status groups. So we should ask: what sorts of beliefs tend to be first championed by low status folks? If those beliefs tend to be less true on average than the beliefs first championed by high status folks, then the usual status moves would actually make epistemic sense.

Thanks for writing this, Eliezer.

I consider it so informative I wrote a note to myself to re-read it in 6 months.

Excellent, spot on Eliezer!

Huh? That is not at all what I read from Scott Aaronson on this and I don't see how your interpretation can be supported upon a close reading.

My interpretation about this is that people who are smugly contrarion suffer from their own rationality bias that leads them to a higher likelihood of truth but at the cost of a much, much higher variance.

Sure, the smug contrarians taught to wash our hands between surgery & discovered America, but they were also the ones who ushered in the French Revolution, the Cambodian Genocide & the Zimbabwe Land Reforms.

Hi Eliezer,

I personally like many worlds because it helps me count on quantum immortality in case I get hit in the head by a falling 2x4 before the singularity comes. However, I was disturbed when I read about the Ashfar experiment, as it seems to disprove many worlds.. I couldn't find anything on your blog about it.. What do you think about it?

But is MWI really contrarian? At least according to the Wikipedia page, several polls have shown a majority of quantum physicists accept it.

What may be bothering people about MWI is the question of what it actually means for these other worlds to exist: are they just theoretical constructs, or are they actually "out there" even though we can't ever interact with them?

Also, I've seen a great deal of confusion about what worlds actually exist: a number of people seem to think that MWI means that any world you can verbally describe exists somewhere, rather than just worlds that have split off from quantum events. No, there is not necessarily a world out there in which the Nazis won WWII.

I don't agree with the interpretation of Scott's comment.

Scott Aaronson doesn't object to Many Worlds because he associates it with particular contrarian group characteristics, he objects to it because (1) he disagrees with Many Worlds by his way of thinking and (2) doesn't like the idea that people who do believe Many Worlds with another way of thinking are projecting superiority.

"What you've forced me to realize, Eliezer, and I thank you for this: What I'm uncomfortable with is not the many-worlds interpretation itself, it's the air of satisfaction that often comes with it."

So I believe that with this comment, Scott Aaronson was saying that while he can with some effort relate to believing Many Worlds, he is aware that this requires a subtle difference in thinking compared to his usual way of thinking. Perhaps he sees both ways of thinking as viable, but there is an irritation that goes with thinking expansively, especially if the other group is smug about their point of view.

And we do find different ways of thinking threatening, and feel smug about our own way of thinking. It’s really quite general. For example: people who dislike Brittany Spears are often smug about not liking her. This seems strange when you consider that music is just meant to be enjoyed -- why should it be a source of pride to enjoy or not enjoy a particular music style?

What we “feel” is logical or natural varies from person to person, and as humans we form general classes of which you and Scott are in separate ones. Libertarian, democratic, republican, physical materialism, theist are some of these groups. Instead of focusing on the science of Many Worlds, I think it would be more interesting to characterize the different aesthetics that are involved in different opinions about Many Worlds, and realize that these are subjective differences.

I think that, while there's some truth in what you say, you're twisting yourself into intellectual knots to avoid having to reify (and thus admit to) arrogance. As far as atheism goes, I think you were much more on the money with your post about untheism and antitheism: in a secular society, untheism is rarely an issue, but antitheism (like all proselytising belief-systems) is very annoying to the recipients.

to me this sounds an awful lot like: "Sure, many-worlds is the simplest explanation that fits the facts, but I don't like the people who believe it."

Then, sorry to put it this way, but you have a hearing problem! :-) All he said was "many worlds could be true". Not "I would believe it if only I could let myself do so". He's agnostic about the truth; he considers many worlds a possibility; and he's put off by people who consider it a certainty.

I prefer to abstract the dynamic to "oppositional state" rather than personify into a "contrarian". That is, a contrarian is someone who places themselves in an oppositional state to another.

many-worlds is the simplest explanation that fits the facts,

I find it utterly baffling that anyone could say such a thing. Many worlds, the "simplest" explanation? And what facts does it fit at all, let alone as the best possible fit?

Just a question for MWI advocates.

If this world W1 has a parallel world W2, which has a parallel world W3, and which W1 hasn't - this is the very difference between W1 and W2 - is the W3 second order parallel to us?