For convenience, I gathered a few comments of mine into a blog post.
I just read the post about 0 and 1 being invalid probabilities. Here’s my best attempt at interpreting it as a joke: This is clearly yud’s attempt at creating a mathematical trollpost using only words.
But yeah as someone with a (honestly atrophied) degree in mathematics I am struggling to figure out the post. Whatever he’s doing, he’s not performing mathematics; at best it is sophistry. Honestly it makes me sad that he wrote it at all and that people read it and agreed with it.
Reading it is like going to a restaurant, seeing “bowl of plain rice” on the menu, ordering it, and getting served an old boot full of glitter and sawdust. Seeing the comment section and seeing people that think yud is smart or correct about anything is reading the yelp reviews later for the restaurant and seeing people talk about how they’ve never tried rice before having it at the restaurant, and that it was really good and that now when they go to other restaurants with rice it’s never the real thing and they shouldn’t be trusted.
For actually interesting contrarian maths, go watch some Norman Wildberger videos or something.
Reading the article is like seeing a guy at a party pick up a guitar, announce he’s going to play wonderwall, but for whatever reason he starts holding the guitar like a trumpet, blowing on the headstock and everything. There’s no indication that this is a joke. A crowd forms and they love it, tunelessly and arrhythmically chanting “wonder wall! Wonder wall!” Over and over. It’s not even part of the song. You see him later making out in a puddle, people still chanting “wonder wall!” at the puddle. Your only recourse is to set the couch on fire and leave.
and seeing people talk about how they’ve never tried rice before having it at the restaurant
And this is the fundamental, absolute, no-further-down essential appeal of rationalism. Fans have never encountered ideas before, or not in any way that they’ve been able to digest them (“what the author really meant: the curtains are fucking blue”). And it bubbles up throughout, in every environ of the culture. If you are ever as stupid and masochistic as I am and find yourself on TheMotte.org, it’s the key to everything they say: they literally have never encountered facts from beyond their own rabid whirlpool of hatred, and everything that they learned in the whirlpool was laced with contrarian ressentiment towards an enemy they literally haven’t seen.
oh dear god, a literal refinery for raw rat ore
If you really want to cite someone he admires, you could note that Eliezer Yudkowsky uses 1 as a probability when trying (and failing) to explain quantum mechanics, because he writes probability amplitudes of absolute value 1.
I’m glad I’ve never pissed off a career physicist, cause this is concise, targeted destruction
If you want more of this, I wrote a full critique of his mangled intro to quantum physics, where he forgets the whole “conservation of energy” thing.
Thanks for taking on that task (I linked to your post to provide further details).
fuck yes. I can tell already this’ll need more brain than I can give it during work, but from the first few paragraphs this seems like absolutely my kind of shit
despite phase shifts being the main cause of the described effects.
what are the other ones?
(when i’m thinking about splitter with pi/2 phase shift, i’m thinking about coupled line coupler or its waveguide analogue, but i come from microwave land on this one. maybe this works in fibers?)
what are the other ones?
I guess the rest of the experimental setup that recombines the photon amplitiudes. Like if you put 5 extra beam splitters in the bottom path, there wouldn’t be full destructive interference.
when i’m thinking about splitter with pi/4 phase shift, i’m thinking about coupled line coupler or its waveguide analogue, but i come from microwave land on this one. maybe this works in fibers?
I’m not sure how you’d actually build a symmetric beam splitter: wikipedia said you’d need to induce a particular extra phase shift on both transmission and reflection. (I’m fully theoretical physics so I’m not too familiar).
pi/2, sorry
In microwave land we have something called rat race coupler which can be used as an in-phase 1:1 splitter. This thing can be manufactured in waveguides so maybe (narrowband) fiber optic implementation is possible
https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/rat-race-couplers
This is great, and also immediately sends me back to 10ish years ago when I would read these things and laugh without the incredible weight of (a) being harassed and stalked by Yudkowsky (et al.) fans (b) the knowledge that at one point I could have used that time fruitfully © the fact that we live in Yudkowsky’s Clown Car California Ideology Nightmare now
Deeply complicating matters, 0 and 1 can be excluded from theories of probability, and there is a good informal reason to do it, known as Cromwell’s rule. The issue is that there no longer are units in such a system; 0 is the disjunctive unit and 1 is the conjunctive unit. This is part of a bigger theme in maths where units are increasingly seen as optional, but Yud is completely unaware of this bigger theme.
Personally, I’ve always found Cromwell’s rule a deeply boring proposal for screwing with the axioms. Try doing the Dutch-book argument with surreal numbers, then I’ll pay attention. :-P
(I would expect that many subjectivist Bayesians would take Cromwell’s rule as an addition to the basic rules that are themselves justified by Dutch book or some such means. Not assigning sharp-edged probabilities out of general prudence is a thing an individual gambler can choose to do, if that’s the way their tendencies lie, while not being part of the mathematical definition of the subject itself. But, well, 46,656 varieties and all that. Moreover, it is hard to do physics having chopped off the endpoints of the interval without chopping other structures as well. For example, if you don’t even allow 0 and 1 to be available as idealizations, you might end up peeling the skin off quantum state space. Some could cope with this, but not Yud, since he demands that all of reality be a single pure quantum state. Insofar as any sense can be made out of Yud’s rambles, he is wanting something stronger than Cromwell’s rule, anyway, since he wants to forbid probability 1 even for logical implications, which Lindley allowed.)
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