Viewing profile — superposeur

1. An NYT commenter clarifies that the “Second Grade Teacher” of the article’s title is from a family worth $30+ billion. If true, this would seem to be egregious omission of conte…

Ok got it, thanks.

I don’t understand the claim that Kolmogorov lower bounds are uncomputable. Three digit strings are unlikely to run as a program so surely 3 is a lower bound on Kolmogorov of the f…

Hard agree. Railing against the “mainstream media” is such a cliched and, ironically, uncritical mode of argument.

If this experiment: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024arXiv240202618T/abstra... or others like it turn up positive results, MWI is falsified.

There are several layers of structure here. Indeed, as you say, Decoherence explains why certain bases are special: when a system is in a pointer basis state, it does not continue …

Yes, except for the “asymmetrically” part. In other words, Many Worlds.

These debates over the interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (i.e. what ultimately happens when a “measurement” takes place) are important but don’t bear on the effectiveness of quan…

Yes, the MWI is falsifiable. It asserts that objective collapse does not occur, therefore any observation of objective collapse (such as predicted by GRW or Penrose-Diosi) would fa…

It doesn’t. Decoherence is the technical step in the Everett picture defining what a “classical branch” even is and explaining how the state vector branches. Every claim that “Deco…

Can you believe that This is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand by Me, Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and A Few Good Men were all directed by the same man ? What an e…

The Maple syntax may superficially seem easier but actually leads to more problems in practice. The point of the [ ] is that argument of a function is logically distinct from algeb…

The introduction to Vol 1 of Weinberg’s Quantum Theory of Fields does this really well, albeit briefly. It feels like getting an “insider’s view” of the historical developments.

Ok, to be clear, let’s say I’m dumb and accidentally go with the default (I get the color of the opt out button wrong or something). As if there’s a “publish my private emails to t…

Everyone seems to be unsurprised by this move, but I’m genuinely shocked. What a shoot your own foot business decision. Google, evil though it be, doesn’t post the text of your gma…

Yes, totally. Relevant study: https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...

My path crossed Nguyen many years ago and I can vouch that he is a very smart, nice, ethical, and solid dude who knows his stuff. I’m also a physicist and know enough about the rel…

Great ep.

The problem I’ve always had with over-weighting deathbed advice is that dying people rarely think through the counterfactuals involved. What would actually be the consequence of no…

Agreed, if you look beyond the bro-ey tone of the presentation, it is smart and nontrivial advice he is delivering here. It is so easy to get distracted by complexity (esp with so …

In any field, what it even means to be good morphs as you go up in skill level. Non mathematicians know only about arithmetic so they often imagine that mathematicians must be real…

Ha ha, first time I’ve seen another reference to this! Back in the day, I got such a kick out of his description that I began imitating it myself, calling it my “David Lynch Specia…

It’s worth mentioning that, brilliant as Dirac’s “sea of filled negative energy states” picture was, no one believes that interpretation now. The Dirac equation is better seen as t…

Truly a vision of dystopia.

Photons.