Overcoming Bias

The Failures of Eld Science

Followup to:  Initiation Ceremony, If Many-Worlds Had Come First

This time there were no robes, no hoods, no masks.  Students were expected to become friends, and allies.  And everyone knew why you were in the classroom.  It would have been pointless to pretend you weren't in the Conspiracy.

Their sensei was Jeffreyssai, who might have been the best of his era, in his era.  His students were either the most promising learners, or those whom the beisutsukai saw political advantage in molding.

Brennan fell into the latter category, and knew it.  Nor had he hesitated to use his Mistress's name to open doors.  You used every avenue available to you, in seeking knowledge; that was respected here.

"- for over thirty years," Jeffreyssai said.  "Not one of them saw it; not Einstein, not Schrödinger, not even von Neumann."  He turned away from his sketcher, and toward the classroom.  "I pose to you to the question:  How did they fail?"

The students exchanged quick glances, a calculus of mutual risk between the wary and the merely baffled.  Jeffreyssai was known to play games.

If Many-Worlds Had Come First

Followup to: Collapse Postulates, Decoherence is Simple, Falsifiable and Testable

Not that I'm claiming I could have done better, if I'd been born into that time, instead of this one...

Macroscopic decoherence - the idea that the known quantum laws that govern microscopic events, might simply govern at all levels without alteration - also known as "many-worlds" - was first proposed in a 1957 paper by Hugh Everett III.  The paper was ignored.  John Wheeler told Everett to see Niels Bohr.  Bohr didn't take him seriously.

Crushed, Everett left academic physics, invented the general use of Lagrange multipliers in optimization problems, and became a multimillionaire.

It wasn't until 1970, when Bryce DeWitt (who coined the term "many-worlds") wrote an article for Physics Today, that the general field was first informed of Everett's ideas.  Macroscopic decoherence has been gaining advocates ever since, and may now be the majority viewpoint (or not).

But suppose that decoherence and macroscopic decoherence had been realized immediately following the discovery of entanglement, in the 1920s.  And suppose that no one had proposed collapse theories until 1957.  Would decoherence now be steadily declining in popularity, while collapse theories were slowly gaining steam?

Imagine an alternate Earth, where the very first physicist to discover entanglement and superposition, said, "Holy flaming monkeys, there's a zillion other Earths out there!"

In the years since, many hypotheses have been proposed to explain the mysterious Born probabilities.  But no one has yet suggested a collapse postulate.  That possibility simply has not occurred to anyone.

One day, Huve Erett walks into the office of Biels Nohr...

Zombies: The Movie

FADE IN around a serious-looking group of uniformed military officers.  At the head of the table, a senior, heavy-set man, GENERAL FRED, speaks.

GENERAL FRED:  The reports are confirmed.  New York has been overrun... by zombies.

COLONEL TODD:  Again?  But we just had a zombie invasion 28 days ago!

GENERAL FRED:  These zombies... are different.  They're... philosophical zombies.

CAPTAIN MUDD:  Are they filled with rage, causing them to bite people?

COLONEL TODD:  Do they lose all capacity for reason?

GENERAL FRED:  No.  They behave... exactly like we do... except that they're not conscious.

(Silence grips the table.)

COLONEL TODD:  Dear God.

Brain Breakthrough! It's Made of Neurons!

In an amazing breakthrough, a multinational team of scientists led by Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal announced that the brain is composed of a ridiculously complicated network of tiny cells connected to each other by infinitesimal threads and branches.

The multinational team - which also includes the famous technician Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, and possibly Imhotep, promoted to the Egyptian god of medicine - issued this statement:

"The present discovery culminates years of research indicating that the convoluted squishy thing inside our skulls is even more complicated than it looks.  Thanks to Cajal's application of a new staining technique invented by Camillo Golgi, we have learned that this structure is not a continuous network like the blood vessels of the body, but is actually composed of many tiny cells, or "neurons", connected to one another by even more tiny filaments.

"Other extensive evidence, beginning from Greek medical researcher Alcmaeon and continuing through Paul Broca's research on speech deficits, indicates that the brain is the seat of reason.

"Nemesius, the Bishop of Emesia, has previously argued that brain tissue is too earthy to act as an intermediary between the body and soul, and so the mental faculties are located in the ventricles of the brain.  However, if this is correct, there is no reason why this organ should turn out to have an immensely complicated internal composition.

Initiation Ceremony

    The torches that lit the narrow stairwell burned intensely and in the wrong color, flame like melting gold or shattered suns.
    192... 193...
    Brennan's sandals clicked softly on the stone steps, snicking in sequence, like dominos very slowly falling.
    227... 228...
    Half a circle ahead of him, a trailing fringe of dark cloth whispered down the stairs, the robed figure itself staying just out of sight.
    239... 240...
    Not much longer, Brennan predicted to himself, and his guess was accurate:
    Sixteen times sixteen steps was the number, and they stood before the portal of glass.
    The great curved gate had been wrought with cunning, humor, and close attention to indices of refraction: it warped light, bent it, folded it, and generally abused it, so that there were hints of what was on the other side (stronger light sources, dark walls) but no possible way of seeing through - unless, of course, you had the key: the counter-door, thick for thin and thin for thick, in which case the two would cancel out.
    From the robed figure beside Brennan, two hands emerged, gloved in reflective cloth to conceal skin's color.  Fingers like slim mirrors grasped the handles of the warped gate - handles that Brennan had not guessed; in all that distortion, shapes could only be anticipated, not seen.
    "Do you want to know?" whispered the guide; a whisper nearly as loud as an ordinary voice, but not revealing the slightest hint of gender.
    Brennan paused.  The answer to the question seemed suspiciously, indeed extraordinarily obvious, even for ritual.

Rationality Quotes 11

"If we let ethical considerations get in the way of scientific hubris, then the feminists have won!"
        -- Helarxe

"The trajectory to hell is paved with locally-good intentions."
        -- Matt Gingell

"To a mouse, cheese is cheese; that's why mousetraps work."
        -- Wendell Johnson, quoted in Language in Thought and Action

"'Ethical consideration' has come to mean reasoning from an ivory tower about abstract non-issues while people die."
        -- Zeb Haradon

"I intend to live forever. So far, so good."
        -- Rick Potvin

Rationality Quotes 10

"Yes, I am the last man to have walked on the moon, and that's a very dubious and disappointing honor. It's been far too long."
        -- Gene Cernan

"Man, you're no smarter than me. You're just a fancier kind of stupid."
        -- Spider Robinson, Distraction

"Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems."
        -- Rene Descartes, Discours de la Methode

"Faith is Hope given too much credit."
        -- Matt Tuozzo

"Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis."
        -- Pierre-Simon Laplace, to Napoleon, explaining why his works on celestial mechanics made no mention of God.

My Favorite Liar

[the following recounts an exceptionally powerful teaching technique employed by an economics professor of mine at university; teaching fact-checking and skepticism by salting it into the content of his delivery]

One of my favorite professors in college was a self-confessed liar.

I guess that statement requires a bit of explanation.

The topic of Corporate Finance/Capital Markets is, even within the world of the Dismal Science, a exceptionally dry and boring subject matter, encumbered by complex mathematic models and obscure economic theory.

What made Dr. K memorable was a gimmick he employed that began with his introduction at the beginning of his first class:

"Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures ... one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day." And thus began our ten-week course.

Rationality Quotes 9

"A world ought to have a few genuine good guys, and not just a spectrum of people running from bad to worse."
        -- Glen Cook, A Shadow of All Night Falling

"You couldn't get a clue during the clue mating season in a field full of horny clues if you smeared your body with clue musk and did the clue mating dance."
        -- Edward Flaherty

"We all enter this world in the same way: naked; screaming; soaked in blood. But if you live your life right, that kind of thing doesn't have to stop there."
        -- Dana Gould

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."
        -- Matt Groening

"Things do get better, all the time, maybe just not as fast as I'd like. I do what I can. Don't ask me to hate, too."
        -- Michael Wiik

Rationality Quotes 7

"People don't buy three-eighths-inch drill bits. People buy three-eighths-inch holes."
        -- Michael Porter

"I feel more like I do now than I did a while ago."
        -- Arifel

"Know thyself, because in the end there's no one else."
        -- Living Colour, Solace of You

"Student motivation? I'm gonna start hooking you all up to electrodes."
        -- Kevin Giffhorn

"A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral."
        -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery