Theory-testing in psychology and physics: a methodological paradox (1967) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/meehl1967.pdf

<comment><USER2> My favorite quote from this has to be

 _Meanwhile our eager-beaver researcher, undismayed by logic-of-science considerations and relying blissfully on the "exactitude" of modern statistical hypothesis-testing, has produced a long publication list and been promoted to a full professorship. In terms of his contribution to the enduring body of psychological knowledge, he has done hardly anything. His true position is that of a potent-but-sterile intellectual rake, who leaves in his merry path a long train of ravished maidens but no viable scientific offspring._

The problem boils down to the insistence on statistical significance testing. Whenever you test an intervention (priming experiments or whatever a psychologist might look for), it's reasonable to expect there's _some_ effect -- even if it's negligibly small or practically useless. But significance testing is about proving that the effect is not zero, so you will _always_ get a significant result as long as you collect enough data.

This is why I am so frustrated when I see a psychology paper claiming something like "Women wear pink shirts while more fertile" and the paper says the effect is statistically significant, but _doesn 't_ say how _big_ it is. Maybe it's a completely unimportant effect.

This is why someone (I forget who) suggested that null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) should be renamed Statistical Hypothesis Inference Testing, for the aptness of the resulting acronym.

There's a whole legion of other common problems (enough to write a book on [see my profile]), but in psychology especially this is a big one.

</comment><comment><USER3> Probably also worth a read is Feynman's Caltech commencement address, which talks a little about Psychology (or the state thereof in the 70's - I don't know enough to judge whether things have really changed, and doubt the media provides a balanced perspective)

[http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html](http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Excerpts of Meehl 1967: [https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/4sSbzwnP...](https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/4sSbzwnPkwd)</comment>


Ask HN: One small decision that had most impact on your app or startup? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Justify most features by data. Once you start doing so, the roadmap & the way to build it changes drastically and for the better. It allowed every function of our company to be 100% aligned and to avoid arguing with only gut feeling on what's prioritary.

<comment><USER3> > Justify most features by data. What kind of data do you mean: data related > to "this is something the customer wants", or "we've done studies showing > this shade of blue has XYZ effect", or...well, I hope you get the idea. An > example of what you mean would be interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Going to the Amazon AWS web summit and setting up a stall.

Lead to huge customers and lots of revenue. I'm normally pretty introverted and dont like doing such things, but I thought I'd get out of my comfort zone

</comment><comment><USER5> Automate everything, if I have to do the same thing twice, I would automate it... Automation is the best concept since the sliced bread :-)

<comment><USER6> Some examples of what specifically you'd automate?

<comment><USER5> everything about my stock trading robots, from stock selection, to order execution, to open position monitoring, to order closing...

<comment><USER6> Maybe I am confused but I don't see how this is related to a startup.

<comment><USER5> This is my startup, it is focused on stock trading robots....

<comment><USER6> I see, thank you for clarifying.

<comment><USER5> No problem, even tough it has been working great for many years and I am not looking for customers, investors on employees, I still consider it as a side project that grew in the same way as a startup, (using similar tools and strategies) and making me constantly more money than my "real" job without supervision and giving me the freedom to retire any time I wish to do so...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An easy transparent feedback section (where everyone can see everyone's comment and reply) Some of the best ideas came from their. But on the other hand alot of complaints too I guess.</comment>


Zhenhua Data leak: details of millions around world gathered by China tech co. - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/14/zhenhua-data-full-list-leak-database-personal-details-millions-china-tech-company <comment><USER2> Nothing surprising. The People's Republic China has least regard for data and privacy of their own citizen, they cannot respect the same for others. China doesn't respect sovereignty and borders of the countries. They do not honour any governmental agreements. Under CCP and Xi Jinping, China has become an imperialist state. There is no doubt that China today has emerged as biggest threat to the world peace. The Zhenhua data leak is just one of the proofs for China apologists. There are many more. recently a Chinese virologist claimed that coronavirus as engineered in a lab in Wuhan.

</comment><comment><USER3> Platforms such as apollo.io provide similar services. They also include data of residents and citizens of EU countries, which is subject to the GDPR, but since apollo.io is not based in the EU, no legal action can be taken. Such services are creepy, but let's not pretend they don't exist in the West. And since it was built with public data and web scraping of social networks, it must be assumed that any significant secret service has similar databases.</comment>


Examples of content marketing others than blog posts - <AUTHOR> https://plainly.shop/blog/alternative-content-marketing-strategies-with-examples <comment><USER2> Video is the best for today.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, but for a lot of people it's the scariest solution.</comment></comment>


Is Contact Tracing Working in the U.S.? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/08/contact-tracing-hr-6666-working-us/615637/ <comment><AUTHOR> Betteridge's law of headlines says "No".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)</comment>


X-Ray Update – General Availability, Including Lambda Integration - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-x-ray-update-general-availability-including-lambda-integration/ <comment><USER2> I'd be interested in hearing how this compares in practice to Google's Stackdriver Trace product ([https://cloud.google.com/trace/](https://cloud.google.com/trace/)). Both are apparently direct descendants of Google's internal "Dapper" design, which they published in 2010.</comment>


Placeholder API routes + schema with random data - <AUTHOR> http://www.schematico.co

<comment><USER2> I've seen a few of these placeholder api routes but they always start with just some default static data. This is much better.</comment>


Microsoft's attack on Linux: The hardware way - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxstall.com/microsofts-restricts-linux-arm/

<comment><USER2> Blog post from 3 weeks ago, discussing topic that was already discussed here when it was actually news.

Does not provide any new insight or perspective on the issue. It's just a restatement of what others said (and does not cite them).

Submitted by a newly created account that appears to be the blog owner, and has only been used to submit blog entries.

My blog spammer sense is tingling.

<comment><USER3> Link to previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3458679>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here we go again, last time the complaint was that MS didn't force OEMs to have the ability for users to disable secure boot on x86 machines, and there were claims that one OEM wouldn't do that (curiously, the Linux folks wouldn't name the OEM though).

But the news that Microsoft has made it mandatory for the OEMs to have a disable option(even though it compromises security a bit) on x86 machines has basically been ignored, so much that posters on various sites(including this one) still erroneously claim it's not needed.

So now the witchhunt has shifted to ARM devices, with nary a mention of the Kindle Fire or the Nook tablet or various other Apple and Android devices that ship with locked bootloaders.

Looks like there is an expectation that if a device is able to run Windows, it must be able to run Linux. I don't see any practical reason for this expectation. MS might be counting on sales through its Win 8 app store to subsidize the lower licensing costs on ARM devices, and hence locks down the hardware. If anything, they're following the tablet industry trend on this. Why isn't MS entitled to the same business model that Amazon and B&N are using?

The article quotes MS on saying the user is in control of their PC. They apparently mean x86 devices. ARM devices have been broadly referred to by everyone as Post-PC devices.

Are bootloaders a bad thing? Of course there are, but this continual MS bashing while giving Apple, Amazon, B&N and the rest a free pass is getting old and monotonous.

<comment><USER5> The difference is in expectations: Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble all sell hardware with their respective brands (Android is there, just very well hidden) and software that's seamlessly integrated into the whole. If you bought an HTC tablet with an HTC-branded OS your expectations would be different than if you bought an HTC tablet with a Microsoft-branded OS. The same sentiment exists regarding Android-powered (and Google-branded) phones that still sport locked bootloaders. I have unlocked mine.

It's also a good decision to unlock your device - the Cyanogenmod version of Android my phone now runs is orders of magnitude faster and more stable than the stock version that came installed. I wasn't happy with the phone before the update, but I am happy now.

<comment><USER3> The requirement for locking is only applicable to devices which are certified by Microsoft - i.e. only hardware bearing Microsoft's logo.

In other words, Windows branded hardware is no more locked down than one with an Apple on it...and it may be less so.

Last I read the certification requirements - devices had to boot to UEFI by default but could also offer a "legacy BIOS mode." And that mode was not specified in the certification.

See my comments here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3459104>

<comment><USER5> > i.e. only hardware bearing Microsoft's logo.

I scrapped the "Built for Windows" adhesives off my notebook. Can I install something else now?

> devices had to boot to UEFI by default but could also offer a "legacy BIOS > mode.

I think this doesn't apply to most ARM devices. From your link "This requirement is If Implemented for Server systems and applies only if a Server system is UEFI capable." I am also not sure ARM servers have "legacy BIOSes".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The secret life of a games programmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/secret-life-games-programmer <comment><USER3> "If you like games and you're a programmer, go work for a firm that will pay. You will earn enough to buy all the games you want."

This and similar advice have been repeated through the decades and have stopped no one. I heard that line. Didn't stop me. I dispensed this line and have stopped no one. Life is a different thing when you're young.

Let me have another chance at giving out unwanted advice:

If you enjoy programming games get a regular job that you work at 9-5 and use the time you would've spent working unpaid overtime at a games studio to work on a game at home. You will have creative control and freedom to choose any tech and tools you want - neither of which you'd have at a games studio. Do I even need to mention a normal salary and other benefits at this point?

<comment><USER4> I thought HN would be the last place to see advice that would derail people from diving into their independent endeavours. The reason no one heads your advice is because driven people don't stop to "play it safe". My 2-person part-time hobby project pales in comparison to the 6-person full time team operation and its potential for achievement.

Hobbies will only ever be just that. Some of us are in it to make something meaningful and if that means most of us will fail then it's better to have tried than to wake up 50 years old having never tried at all.

<comment><USER3> I am specifically talking about working as a salaried employee of a game studio. You are talking about starting a business. These are different issues.

<comment><USER4> I think there's a distinction between liking to play games and liking to make games. If you really enjoy making games, then see how far it takes you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Games developer here. Yes, I do work insane amount of hours and I would get paid a lot higher for my skills almost anywhere.

Why? We use technology not to 'disrupt' some industry, get bigger returns for a financial firm or big data problems with users information. Instead, we create software with the sole purpose of making people happy, And we also get the chance to tell stories that will influence thousands maybe millions of minds.

So we are in a never ending search for big insights about the world and ways to encode them into fun games. I'll never grow tired of that.

<comment><USER6> Do games actually make people happy? I used to play a lot of games thinking they would make me happy, but they hardly ever did. Mostly the games turned out to be a lot of extra unpaid work for no tangible benefit. Just grinding away trying to reach the next level, another cut scene, a higher score, etc. So I've pretty much quit playing.

<comment><USER7> The game of life is mostly like that. Most of the stuff that's suppose to make you happy does very little for you other than give you a reason to waste time and effort. The stuff that makes you happy is usually free but costs time, time you don't have because you spent it all trying to get money to buy stuff that doesn't make you happy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Management will always talk about having a healthy work-life balance but the > implication is there that you could be doing more, fixing more bugs, taking > on more work. > [...] feeling like your effort is constantly being judged > means you end up doing it again and again.

This resonates with me! I have experienced this kind of management schizophrenia many times, telling you that you have flexible working hours, that you can manage your time yourself, that you should take your time, do things right... And then, on the other side, appears the pressure to deliver, the "questions" that suggest you might need to "hurry" a bit more, to deliver more stuff, to cut some corners if necessary...

<comment><USER9> There is a technical name for that in psicology: Double-bind.

There are 2 acceptable responses to that, plus a taboo one. The 2 standard responses is either to try to uphold an unrealistically high standard (the neurotic overachiever type), or you can take the blame for not doing it and sacrifice your sense of self worth (the dilbertesque, paper pusher type). Both private and public sector have plenty of uses for workers of either type.

What is not permitted is to react like a grown up and point out to the inconsistency of the "mixed messages". I have read that this typically gets responded with hostility from higher-ups (who typically are not fully conscious of the dynamics of the game, or see themselves as just transmitting the requirements from upper management).

Of course I barely have a handful of first and second hand data points, but those seem consistent with the model as explained above.

<comment><USER10> The double-bind was a hallmark of a past job. Anytime a meeting, an event that the upper brass was hosting, or training was labeled as optional, there was always a heavy emphasis to attend on the day of.

 _Monday morning_ : ${Executive} is coming down to talk about ${something unrelated} on Thursday. Attendance is strictly optional. This is doubly so if you're working on something critical.

 _Tuesday and Wednesday morning_ : Don't forget about the talk on Thursday. You don't need to go, but it would be nice if you attended.

 _Thursday morning_ : Don't forget about the talk this afternoon. Plan head down there about 12:45.

<comment><USER11> Same thing happens here. Generally I think in these cases local management only gradually comes to the realization that nobody actually wants to sit and listen to a soulless executive spout off a bunch of non-information- transferring coporate newspeak.

So, to avoid the embarrassing spectacle of an empty conference room, they go from "invited" to "encouraged" to "drop what you're doing and get in there _now_."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why do people thing they would enjoy being a game developer? Do they assume they would have critical design or decision making input, or do they just love coding physics/graphic rendering software. I never got the appeal. I like games too, but I would never think making them in a large studio would be fun.

A simple game by myself as the complete owner on my own time seems way more fun by comparison.

<comment><USER13> If you work on small teams and/or for a small studio, then you will have quite a few opportunities to influence the design or decision making. I worked for three small studios and influenced the design of every game I worked on.

Getting paid 60% of what I could get outside the industry and the crunch time lowering that wage further, and screwing up my health, and leaving me with zero time for a social life eventually got to me, though, so I got out of the industry, despite my passion.

I now design board games in my spare time while working on enterprise software at a Microsoft shop, and get paid a lot more, and if I ever have to stay late (which happens every once in awhile) they credit me the time to take off in the future so I'm only working 40 hour weeks.

<comment><USER14> This has been my strategy for the last few years. I've been making games on my own dime for just a few years but I now have two self published games on Steam, and a few Micro-Consoles, and a Job in entirely different industry with great benefits and hard stop 40 hour weeks.

I absolutely love programming games! It's the most fun programming I've ever had in the 10+ years of writing code. Nothing beats showing off your creations with family and friends and them "getting it."

I've gone back and forth of whether I should join the industry but with a kid and high priority of family time, I just can't do away with what's actually important to me. I've never regretted working a solid job to support an awesome hobby.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, definitely. I have become a little disillusioned with the video game industry on the consumer side as well, though. There seems to be a lot of "download the newest game, play it for 30 minutes (for an app, 2-3 hours for a big game), then delete it and on to the next game" going on, and it seems very difficult to make a name for yourself unless you're working on large, artsy indie games that take many years to make.

I've started getting into the board game hobby recently and it seems like, while you're never going to get rich off of it, there's much greater opportunities to gain a reputation and while there's a lot of "play the game a few times and move on to the next" in the hobby as well, because games are physical they tend to stay out there and get reprinted for decades, instead of stay out there for a few months, on average.

I tended to design board-game-friendly designs in the first place, so I decided to pretty much switch to board games. As a bonus, there's a healthy demand for mobile app versions of board games anyway, so you can get a physical AND a digital version for the same game design.

Plus it's a hell of a lot faster to prototype new mechanics and build prototypes with physical board games.

But that's me. Programming games is still a lot of fun, just sucks when gamers spend so little time on your game before moving on to the next shiny thing.

<comment><USER14> For me it's more about what I put in to it than what I get out of it. I realized really quickly I wouldn't make much more than beer money out of this hobby.

I think the most difficult thing about the video game industry is the amount of drama in the hobbyest scene. Still trying to find a "group" that isn't jumping on the latest "cause" rather than feeding in depth discussions of randomly generated worlds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Do those extra hours even result in anything productive? I suspect you'd get more done in a regular 40-hour week - but of course it's much easier to measure how many hours you were at your desk than how much you did.

People need to stop enabling this kind of nonsense - a big part of the problem is so many people want to make games that they'll put up with terrible working conditions to do so. Ultimately the only thing that will fix it is the same thing that fixed working conditions elsewhere - unionization - but in a parallel to the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" line, everyone believes they're the best programmer, so no-one wants to do that.

<comment><USER16> _Ultimately the only thing that will fix it is the same thing that fixed working conditions elsewhere - <USER2>

I don't know. I've worked with ex game developers in Norway and Sweden, two countries with fairly strong unions, and the story is basically the same. The companies are very good at convincing you that you really want to work under those conditions and that doing so makes you awesome. They also know that if they insist on 'realistic', union approved, working conditions, the publisher/studio will just hand the next game off to another, less difficult, team. Hell, I've known people to straight up lie to their union rep about their working conditions because they don't want the unions stepping in and 'ruining' things.

<comment><USER17> That sounds like exactly the conditions that an _industry-wide_ unionization would fix. But that would be hard, because its so easy for a software shop to up and move. Unlike heavy industry in the 'age of unions', which had large fixed plants with heavy capital investment. So unionizing geographically, one business or industry at a time, was workable.

<comment><USER18> Unions just create another power structure that has to be appeased. I'd love to see the union rep telling the kind of engineers I work with why they're not allowed to fix something right now. Cue lynch mob!

<comment><USER19> There have been multiple animation companies that have unionized and still done well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> His mention of the open floor plan thing resonated with me a LOT. I have 2 coworkers who have a tendency to get into discussions who work in the same circle as me in our open floor plan. It makes it really hard to concentrate when they're constantly yelling back and forth behind me. I usually just put on some headphones and zone out but the obsession with open floor plans as somehow innovative is crazy. It's backward. "I want these people to think effectively and clearly and not have distractions. I know! Let's try an open floor plan!" I'm sure that's not the thought process but I can't imagine, other than control or cost, what the other one would be that would cause an open floor plan to be chosen.

All of the above said, it's not just them that are distracting. It's literally just the effect of the open floor plan. Someone is talking 4-5 desks down and your brain has to make the constant decision not to listen to them.

<comment><USER21> I have the same feeling toward them. They're chosen for the same reason new technologies are often chosen: because they're new. The people doing the choosing aren't concerned with effectiveness or improvement, only that they're keeping up with the cool new thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> >In the end I was incredibly lucky, landing a junior role at a major UK studio owned by a console manufacturer just after they had made some more experienced engineers redundant.

Company that fires experienced engineers to hire junior ones? Doesn't sound that lucky.

</comment><comment><USER23> As I have mentioned before my wife works in the games industry (producer not programmer) and her opinion is that the games industry treats programmers like shit. Maybe a true mad genius programmer isn't treated so badly but the 99% are seen as code monkeys that can be fired without a moments notice. It is a pretty horrible environment from the sounds of it.

</comment><comment><USER24> > You can identify programmers as the people with their headphones on, > frowning at the screen.

Yes!

<comment><USER25> Yep, even when walking between two places in the office (the toilets) for example, I'll have my headphone in and connected to my phone, just so I can't be distracted by the inevitable drive-by interruptions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> good god, this article is basically me working at a local startup 5 years ago.

When you have someone who only makes decision based on outcomes from a black box process with the counter productive passive aggressive nagging of when will it be done vs. someone who understands the stress,emotions (yeah programmers have them too),art and approximate effort management to avoid burning people out will be a godsend.

You can absolutely become the latter without technical expertise, I would say empathy is the biggest tool of someone who manages programmers.

The cigar smoking hunch back Soviet union styled factory owner who keeps saying he survived the dot com bubble like it was some world war and getting angry when programmers are trying to 'subvert' him by intentionally missing deadlines. I think it's good that these type of industrial revolution era work management culture is slowly eroding.

But yeah the disconnect between those on the front lines everyday with headphones on vs. the schmoozing politicizing manager with 30 years of restaurant experience is not going to be a good cultural fit. Eventually, everyone abandons you, people check glassdoor reviews and then you are finished, you can't hire anyone anymore without some insane turnover.

</comment><comment><USER27> Games and graphics are the whole reason I started programming, but after 20 years of on and off game programming, I mostly agree with the article. The technical details of how games and graphics work are very interesting, but the actual process of finishing a viable game is some degree of hellish nightmare. I can relate to the statement about being primarily a problem solver. There are tons of interesting problems in games, but they only make up a fraction of the necessary work. I've shipped a small number of both indie and studio titles, but it took me decades to admit that I'm primarily a problem solver, and probably not primarily a game-maker.

</comment><comment><USER28> This has been my impression of the industry for close to two decades now, just from the stories. From what I understand, it's not all that secret for programmers (remember EA spouse?). I remember counseling my step-cousin to be wary when while in college he mentioned he wanted to get into games development after he got his CS degree. It made me feel like an asshole, as it feels like I'm squashing his dreams, but I also didn't feel I could in good conscience not at least say something so he could look into it more if he wanted.

I hold out hope that independent games companies are different, and from what I've heard, they mostly are.

</comment><comment><USER29> Let me just say that there are game studios that are not run in this way. They may be hard to find, but they do exist - mostly outside of the console space - and I've worked at two of them and know of others. If the OP lives in the Seattle area, I'm happy to recommend a couple of studios that don't treat their employees like slaves.

</comment><comment><USER30> Articles like this make me glad I went into science.

If I'm going to work 16 hour days, 6 days a week, I may as well be getting something useful out of it.

<comment><USER20> Living the life described in this article makes me WISH I had gone into science. lol I don't want to work 16 hrs/day 6 days/week but, I'd rather be in science. I'm almost 30 though and own a house and 2 cars and have a wife and stuff so it's probably a little late for a full out career change... :-/

<comment><USER31> Mate, your 30! That is soo not too late for a career change. I've known people who jumped ship at 50 and never looked back. If you're honestly not happy doing what you're doing, start planning to do something different.

<comment><USER20> Thanks man. I'll look into it! I feel so trapped with my current lifestyle. I guess the idea would just be to slowly get rid of it...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can we completely anonymize and decentralize filesharing? - <AUTHOR> http://thebrainnetwork.bitballoon.com/ <comment><USER2> A technical solution [1] to a legal problem. If it got big enough to be targeted by copyright holders, it would fall afoul of the "What Colour are your bits?" problem: [http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23](http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23)

[1] large copyright holders will not care that a 'weak hash' might match multiple blocks. They will take the fact that the 'weak hash' matched a block in their copyrighted movie to assert that the downloader was, in fact, requesting and downloading the movie. And given the recent raid on a tor exit node operator where the judge was not even told the IP was a tor node, even though the police knew, means that big copyright will ignore the fact that there 'might' be plural matches and simply argue before a judge that 'weak- hash' matching block X of movie Y is evidence of copyright infringement. And because of the 'What colour are your bits?" problem, arguing that weak-hash X might also match open source file Z isn't likely to get very far due to lack of technical knowledge on the part of the judges.

<comment><AUTHOR> That might be so. But with this system it's a lot harder to figure out who was requesting and downloading that block in the first place.

And if the proof is an incomplete hash of only a part (a block) of copyrighted material... I don't know. I'm no legal expert, but that doesn't sound like it's enough to actually prosecute someone.

But hey, I'm just glad someone actually took the time to read the whole thing ;)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: As an individual developer, how to sell your software to a big company? - <AUTHOR> I have developed a good stack of software and I have a working prototype. There are 2-3 competitors out there but this stack is much ahead in features set.
It was fun developing this project since it's inception. My initial goal was to go startup way.
But its been a long run for me (finances) and currently I lack sufficient energies to push ahead.
How can I make most of this stack from where I stand ?
Have a list of small-medium-big companies who might be interested.
And of big five, have emails of teams/managers who are in slightly similar space.
Should I reach out to them directly ? I am trying to weigh best options.
Pls advise.
PS: I don't live in US. <comment><USER2> Three things:

\- Do you have real IP/patents? If not, a "working prototype" is probably going to be hard to sell.

\- What specific business problem does it solve, and who is the person with the budget who is trying to solve it. Reach out to them. A "team" trying to solve a similar problem is never going to buy a solution (manager will no longer have a team...).

\- Alternative to selling is to offer to do contract work for these companies, using prototype to help close the deal.

<comment><AUTHOR> IP/Patents ? no.

What it solves ? it is efficient, saves man hours and can make existing platform attractive.

Team solving never going to buy solution ? Hmm yes and I fear they might just get their team to work on it.

Contract work ? I will consider. But how can I ensure they are not going to just know/copy my idea and build it in house. Having a knowledgeable engineer in a meeting is sufficient to understand where lies the guts of my software.

<comment><USER3> Sorry to say this, you don't have a negotiation position.

At worse, they will fool you thinking they will buy something, just to extract the deeper details and then think they can do it on their own as you mention. Happens often.

Best bet is being hired to join their team, albeit I'm not sure how pleasant that would be for you. If you see a company/manager that you want to join, this might be a good opportunity.

In either case, your intuition will be the best help. If you don't feel you can trust someone you are negotiating on this topic, very likely you won't get a good outcome.</comment></comment></comment>


The Many-Worlds Interpretation Has Many Problems - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics-has-many-problems-20181018/ <comment><USER2> >What can you do with this power to generate worlds and selves? You could become a billionaire by playing quantum Russian roulette.

Quantum suicide isn't exploitable, for reasons I went over in a thread on reddit:

>One thing about these quantum immortality (or modal realism, dust theory, etc.) arguments is they imply one should expect to end up in those proportion of worlds that have the highest measure in which "you" exist. And the most probable actions you should expect to remember are the highest-measure actions that leads to the perpetuation of your conscious experience.

>In this way quantum suicide is not really exploitable, as the vast majority of "your" measure will be in worlds where you find quantum suicide to be unappealing. Even failed attempts will be of much smaller measure then those in which you never try. So stories like Permutation City are sort of the equivalent of stories in which magic is the result of quantum fluctuations. They don't violate any laws of physics but they focus on such a ridiculously myopic slice of possibility space that it is a little absurd, even when you condition on the continuation of conscious experience.

Even if it were exploitable, this is not a reason to doubt many worlds, any more than time dilation is a reason to doubt relativity.

This great comment on that piece by Sengachi is a must read: [http://disq.us/p/1wnl71q](http://disq.us/p/1wnl71q)

<comment><USER3> I think there is a still more straightforward and robust argument against quantum immortality: The same reasoning predicts you can never fall asleep.

If futures where you are not conscious are inaccessible by the anthropic principle, then dreamless sleep cannot be in your future.

Most sleep is dreamless. At 4:00am this morning I will almost certainly be in this state. But being unconscious is not an experience I can have, so by the reasoning of quantum immortality, I should expect with certainty to find myself awake at 4:00am if there are any Everett universes where this is the case. And of course the same argument applies to every other moment of my entire life, and yet somehow I haven't been trapped in a state of wakefulness since the day I was born...

(If sleep is breaking the rules, the substitute it in with "temporary death" if you prefer. Why I am I allowed to "fork into" the branch where I die as long as I wake up later? How does the information about my eventual revival make it to the branching point, earlier in time? Or does the revived version of me exist with measure zero? These seem plain absurdities to me).

Think carefully about why many-worlds doesn't prevent you from sleeping. I think this leads to the correct answer.

I think of it in terms of a phase space diagram. You are conscious in some parts of phase space. Those regions of phase space have certain measures. You should expect to find yourself in parts of phase space with large measures, and not in the parts with small measures. Like this: [1]

In the diagram, increasing purple is "increasing probability consciousness." You should expect to find yourself in the purple area, not 10,000 years off the top of the diagram, deep in a white region. Quantum immortality supposes the latter, and that should be a self-evidently bad hypothesis.

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/ETOqKs9.png](https://i.imgur.com/ETOqKs9.png)

<comment><USER4> I don't think that's accurate. The many worlds interpretation is fundamentally an interpretation of something unobservable; if there were a way for you to observe it (by noticing you haven't been able to sleep) and 'report back' to all/most universes, it wouldn't be an interpretation anymore. (If you did a quantum suicide experiment, you might be able to 'report back' to the subset of universes where you still exist, like in Permutation City. I'm not sure that would actually be a valid demonstration of many worlds – the classical equivalent is just "something unlikely happened", and you can justify that with the anthropic principle. But in any case, that's very different from reporting back to all universes.)

As for the diagram… Even in a classical universe (or just a non-many-worlds one), if you set a mechanism to have a 50% chance of killing you, you should expect to 'find yourself' alive afterwards – in the sense that if you 'find yourself' anything, that anything can only be alive. It's just that you have an equal chance of not having any further conscious experience. That doesn't apply to sleep or even temporary death, since the resulting universe would still be observable by you at some point in the future. Now, even in a classical universe, there is a possible set of values under which participating in a 'suicide lottery' could be rational! That would be, "I fundamentally _don 't care_ whether I exist or not, but I do prefer existing while being rich to existing while being poor". The many-worlds interpretation just lets you amend that to: "I don't care whether I exist or not in 'my' future, as long as someone else identical to me exists in an alternate universe." There is no reason you must or should care about someone benefitting in an inaccessible universe just because they're (very) similar to you; but there is also no reason you must not. To whose benefit you strive is an arbitrary choice, after all.

<comment><USER5> One day when we're able to use quantum technology to clone ourselves, we'll be able to test the theory. You split your consciousness into 1000 clones of yourself and kill 999 of them, do "you" always seem to end up in the one that survived?

<comment><USER6> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No- cloning_theorem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem)

<comment><USER5> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Quantum suicide is a fascinating thought experiment. If consciousness is a property of a certain type of brain (or calculation?), then the concept of '''me" is just a variation of the anthropic principle: I believe my subjective experience to be something unique, but there's nothing unique or special about a human brain and the conscious experiences it produces.

So even if there are billions of worlds, there aren't billions of "me"s out there. There are simply billions of consciousnesses which share common memories and thought patterns. Each variation would believe itself to be the true "me", when in fact they are all wrong: there is no "me". Just the consciousnesses that all those brains create.

So in quantum suicide, there is no transfer of any sort. One consciousness is simply extinguished forever. The other continues.

This aligns somewhat with Buddhist teachings about the illusion of "self". I don't believe in the supernatural, but one could consider the idea of reincarnation as merely the fact that there are not instances of consciousness, but instead manifestations of one phenomenon. Which could possibly mean that if you are a conscious being reading this comment at this moment, you can rest assured that your death will not stop "you" from continuing to experience subjective experiences as another person, in another place, at another time. You just won't realize it, because you won't be "you" anymore.

Or maybe it's all nonsense.

I have a hunch there is a variation of quantum suicide that would be less lethal, but no less measurable.

<comment><USER8> >One consciousness is simply extinguished forever. The other continues.

If there is one instance of a widely-distributed program installed on a particular computer, and the instance of the program on that particular computer is deleted, but the program continues to exist in identical form on many other computers, then the program continues to exist in spite of the fact that one of its instances has been deleted.

If consciousness is thought of as a process inextricably tied to a particular physical substrate, then our own consciousnesses are constantly being extinguished, and we all die countless 'deaths' every day as the matter in our brains is recycled and replaced.

If, on the other hand, consciousness is viewed as an information process that can be realised on any suitable physical substrate, then extinguishing one instance of consciousness in one particular universe by means of quantum suicide doesn't necessarily mean that that particular consciousness is extinguished forever, as long as an identical instance, or instances, of it continue to exist somewhere in the wavefunction. The Many Worlds Interpretation suggests there may be an infinity of such instances.

There is a tendency to think of these instances as copies, and to think of each such copy of a consciousness as a separate doppelganger existing in some unreachable reality. But if the instances are truly identical in every respect, then Leibniz' principle of the identity of indiscernibles [1] suggests that it might not be right to think of them as being separate: in some deep sense, they're all actually the same single thing.

The philosopher Derek Parfit developed a now-famous thought experiment in the phiolosophy of identity [2] in which he encouraged people to think about a scenario in which a malfunctioning teleporter creates two identical copies of a person, one of which must then be destroyed by the machine. Obviously we tend to sympathise with the 'copy' faced with imminent destruction, and that might lead us to reject the idea that the continuation of a physically identical copy of our self is a sufficient condition for survival.

There is a problem with this thought experiment though, in my view, and quantum suicide is in a sense a type of 'fix' for it. If there is a situation in which two copies of a person exist, and one copy is about to be destroyed, then the two copies are necessarily no longer 'indiscernible' in Leibniz' sense. Parfit's example is actually a striking case of indiscernibility, because at the point at which one of the copies is about to be destroyed, the two copies actually have some very different memories and thoughts. This version of Parfit's thought experiment therefore really involves two similar, but not identical, people, one of whom is about to be killed.

The quantum suicide thought experiment, in contrast, necessarily ensures that no conscious entity ever experiences its own imminent death in the same manner as Parfit's version, because the 'suicide' is designed to take place faster than the brain can process a thought. The other major difference is of course that the 'copies' that survive the suicide are not created by a teleporter, but are a necessary feature of the wavefunction.

An alternative to saying that one consciousness is extinguished forever in quantum suicide would be to say that the single consciousness existing across the 'copies' in the wavefunction no longer has conscious access to events in the universes in which the suicide occurs, but survives in, and continues to have conscious access to, the universes where the suicide does not take place.

It only makes sense to think of one consciousness as having been 'extinguished' if that consciousness is thought of as being inextricably linked to one particular physical substrate. If consciousness is thought of as an information processing pattern that can be instantiated on any suitable substrate, then all that matters is that such a substrate exists somewhere. If the substrate is physically possible, then the Many Worlds Interpretation requires it to exist.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_of_indiscernibles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_of_indiscernibles)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox)

<comment><USER9> For any of this to have meaning, you need to define what "consciousness" even is. I'm not aware of any definition that is not hopelessly metaphysical.

<comment><USER10> The continued experience that you exist. You literally have never known anything else, only the representations which consciousness allows.

The stuff itself is hopelessly metaphysical, the only good way I know to define is the above: since you have are consciousness, its easy enough to just say 'look around'. Its difficult to think of any material definition when there's not much of an understanding of how it relates to anything material. Obviously the images you see are dictated by physical rods and cones in the eyes, but what the hell are colors?

<comment><USER9> > The continued experience that you exist. You literally have never known > anything else, only the representations which consciousness allows.

Right, but that's what makes it so meaningless. We generally define things by specifying how they're different from other things. But you can't do it with consciousness, because you can't really know what the absence of consciousness is like. And if you can't do that, the definition of consciousness becomes null - and nothing meaningful can be derived from it.

With colors, at least, you can define different ones in terms of different sensations - red is not-green etc. And because they're derived from observation of phenomena, you can compare notes with other people to make sure that what you consider red is also what they consider red etc - it's not a perfect system, but it's "good enough". I don't think we have anything even remotely resembling such a "good enough" definition of consciousness, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Philip Ball explores the problems that many world interpretation poses to the concepts of self and meaningfulness of life in the sense that he understands them.

Nothing in the article clearly points to problems in physics or even philosophy of physics in many world interpretation.

Makes me feel uncomfortable is not very deep argument.

<comment><USER12> Agreed - the idea that selfhood and duality are illusions of perception have been around at least as long as Buddhism, and philosophically well articulated. They are hardly grounds for dismissing a theory of the fundamental universe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's the article in short.

1\. "Roland Omnès says the idea that every little quantum "measurement" spawns a world "gives an undue importance to the little differences generated by quantum events, as if each of them were vital to the universe." This, he says, is contrary to what we generally learn from physics: that most of the fine details make no difference at all to what happens at larger scales."

2\. "What can it mean to say that splittings generate copies of me? In what sense are those other copies "me?"" / "Consciousness relies on experience, and experience is not an instantaneous property: It takes time, not least because the brain's neurons themselves take a few milliseconds to fire. You can't "locate" consciousness in a universe that is frantically splitting countless times every nanosecond"

3\. "You could become a billionaire by playing quantum Russian roulette. Your quantum splitter is activated while you sleep, and if the dial says Up then you're given a billion dollars when you wake. If it shows Down then you are put to death painlessly in your sleep." / "But a committed Everettian should have no hesitation about doing so using the quantum splitter. For you can be certain, in this view, that you'll wake up to be presented with the cash. Of course, only one of "you" wakes up at all; the others have been killed. But those other yous knew nothing of their demise. Sure, you might worry about the grief afflicted on family and friends in those other worlds. But that aside, the rational choice is to play the game."

4\. "Alice is put to sleep before the measurement is made, knowing she will be wheeled into one of two identical rooms depending on the outcome. Both rooms contain a chest. Inside one is twice her stake, while the other is empty." / "But what if Alice were to say, "The experience I will have is that I will wake up in a room containing a chest that has a 100-percent chance of being empty"? The Everettian must accept this statement as a true and rational belief too, for the initial "I" here must apply to both Alices in the future." / "In other words, Alice Before can't use quantum mechanics to predict what will happen to her in a way that can be articulated — because there is no logical way to talk about "her" at any moment except the conscious present (which, in a frantically splitting universe, doesn't exist)."

Sengachi's reply in the comments below basically summarises my reaction.

<comment><USER14> People ridicule the nonlocality of Pilot Wave theory. But I'd rather question locality than embrace Everett's many-worlds theory. If you need to postulate such amazing complexity just to say basically nothing in terms of realism, then you've already lost.

Meanwhile as one good physics professor pointed out, none of these alternatives to PWT even rule out nonlocality. So why not just assume it and be done with the weirdness?

<comment><USER15> The evidence against Pilot Waves keeps stacking up. [https://www.quantamagazine.org/famous-experiment-dooms- pilot...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/famous-experiment-dooms-pilot-wave- alternative-to-quantum-weirdness-20181011/)

<comment><USER16> That experiment really has nothing to do with actual pilot wave theories. It just rules out a fluid-mechanical analogue of quantum mechanics (which anyone could predict anyway since fluid mechanics isn't non-local in the same way).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Could the anthropic principle taken into conjunction with our continued existence be used to show that the MWI is more probable?

Here's the situation that I'm thinking about: it's well known that we've come close to nuclear annihilation multiple times, either by accident or by tensions between the US and the USSR in the Cold War. If the MWI is correct, it is probable that a good chunk of these worlds have been reduced to ash. However, we currently find ourselves in a world where that has not happened, presumably due to the anthropic principle. Could we then give a numerical probability that MWI is correct, based on this fact?

I'm not a philosopher or physicist - just an interested layman.

<comment><USER18> I don't think that's how the anthropic principle works, but I'm not actually sure how the anthropic principle works.

To my understanding, the anthropic principle is basically: among the near- infinite set of possible physical laws, we can immediately rule out the ones that would prevent us from being around trying to figure out which physical laws govern the universe.

I think there's two varieties of this. The "weak anthropic principle" says, that doesn't mean those laws _couldn 't exist_, there's no weird metaphysics around it, it's just that if the underlying physical laws didn't allow us to exist, you'd just have a universe that didn't have anyone in it and so the physics of that universe would be a moot point that didn't matter to anyone.

The "strong anthropic principle" says, wait, no, there _is_ some metaphysical significance to this, and it's somehow not even logically possible for a non- anthropic universe to exist. I find that a little self-absorbed on the part of humanity as a whole, but that would tie in a little better to your quantum suicide idea. The weak anthropic principle, in contrast, would just kind of say, "yeah, there's a chance we all blow ourselves up, and if we do, I guess nobody will be around to care about physics anymore".

Even the strong anthropic principle doesn't prove much here. "Nuclear annihilation" probably wouldn't actually result in complete human extinction. Some people would survive. Individual quantum immortality doesn't stop you from shooting a hole through your brain and being neurologically disabled for the rest of your life, so collective quantum immortality also wouldn't stop you from living in a post-apocalyptic hellhole. Also, even the strong anthropic principle doesn't actually mean that humanity can't go extinct; after all, it didn't prevent the universe from existing for billions of years before humans started to exist. Maybe the real strong anthropic principle doesn't even apply to us, it applies to a species of avian hive-minded critters on a planet circling an unnamed star in the Andromeda galaxy, and as a weird side effect of living in a universe that is metaphysically required to permit for the existence of the Andromeda flying hivemind, humanity kind of shows up for a few hundred millennia and gets to do some physics before getting wiped out by a swarm of paperclip maximizers.

<comment><USER17> If the MWI is true, then there must be some universes that would experience multiple highly improbable events. These events would be a hint to residents of that universe that the MWI is correct. Why wouldn't the usual Bayesian analysis apply here?

<comment><USER18> Your personal probability of observing a universe that experiences multiple highly improbable events is the same whether or not MWI is true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> MWI seems more elegant than Copenhagen in many formulations because the problem of the relative magnitudes of the worlds is swept under the rug. If I perform a quantum coin-flip with 2/3 possibility of heads, then it creates two worlds - but I end up in one of them twice as often - why? The only solutions I've seen to preserve the relative probabilities are: 1) sufficiently unlikely worlds sometimes just disappear, or 2) some kind of appeal to consciousness. These are at least as ad-hoc and hand-wavy as waveform collapse.

<comment><USER20> Or it actually creates three worlds, two heads worlds and one tails.

<comment><USER21> Being able to count worlds in the manner you describe is apparently not easy to justify. If I recall correctly, this is actually a pretty thorny epistemological problem with the theory. IIRC the current response among Many Worlds people is that either (1) it doesn't really matter because there is no reason to believe that probabilities are "real" in the first place, or (2) attempting to show that if you did insist on finding a metric that looked like probability, it would provably have to be the Born probability (see [https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.7577](https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.7577)). All this stuff is way over my head so I have no way of evaluating whether it's persuasive or not, but it does at least seem to be contentious among physicists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I enjoyed reading this article. But at the beginning the author has this to say about objections to the MWI that are based on feeling:

> "This objection is rightly dismissed by saying that an affront to one's > sense of propriety is no grounds for rejecting a theory. Who are we to say > how the world should behave?"

But really at the end of the article the conclusion about the problems with MWI feel similar:

> "But an idea that, when we pursue it seriously, makes that view inchoate and > unspeakable doesn't fulfill the function of science."

</comment><comment><USER23> Of course it seems weird to think of Many Worlds as somehow manufacturing universes for each fluctuation. That seems weird and wrong ... because it probably is.

A better way to think of it is as the equivalent of the relativistic block universe. All these different spaces already exist in some superspace, and 'random' events take you from one space to a neighboring one. Nothing is manufactured.

<comment><USER8> Well put; this is more or less what Everett actually proposed, and it's the interpretation that mainstream Everettians like Sean Carroll and Max Tegmark subscribe to.

<comment><USER24> Yes, before reading Tegmark I thought that MW was silly because "splitting" the whole universe for every tiny event just seemed crazy. Thinking of the multiverse as more like a probability distribution where everything exists in a kind of overlay seemed to make sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Unless I'm missing it, his argument about why MWI is untenable in terms of physics is:

\- If the universe splits with each measurement (or interaction), then every possible outcome does occur

\- Therefore nothing could be predicted based on probabilities, and that proves MWI is wrong

This seems to have a few logical errors:

Just because everything that can happen does, in MWI, happen in at least one universe, that doesn't mean that the probability of each outcome is identical.

Probabilities still apply: higher probability outcomes mean that one is more likely to find one's self in a universe in which that outcome takes place.

In this way of describing things, it's still a very low (but non-zero!) probability that all the air in your room will move to the corner, leaving you to suffocate in a vacuum. But the way we state it would be, "it's a very low probability that you will find yourself in one of the universes in which this happens".

</comment><comment><USER16> Philip Ball has previously written very similar articles on his objections to Many Worlds:

[https://aeon.co/essays/is-the-many-worlds-hypothesis- just-a-...](https://aeon.co/essays/is-the-many-worlds-hypothesis-just-a- fantasy)

Whilst I share his frustration with how readily it is being taken up and the dogmatic glamour surrounding it, I feel like he consistently misses the primary issues with it.

Copy-pasting a previous comment trying to describe succinctly what I see as the central problem:

> Although there are many versions of MWI, the general claim is that a single > axiom (a unitarily evolving wavefunction) is sufficient to explain our > observations of the universe. Without getting into what it means to > "explain" something, it seems fair to demand that a sufficiently intelligent > agent with no prior knowledge of our physics should be able to predict what > the theory says about their future observations. However no one would be > able to make any experimental predictions based on the above axiom. There's > nothing there to suggest that if the agent becomes entangled with a quantum > system then they would only experience a single branch of the entanglement. > Even if you add that in, there's nothing to suggest which branch the agent > will experience (this is roughly the preferred basis problem). Even if you > add that in, there's nothing to suggest with what probability the agent will > experience that branch.

> You could always add in the above as additional axioms. You could postulate > some physical content to the Born-rule, or to something weaker from which to > deduce the Born rule. But this would break the illusion that MWI requires > fewer axioms. Instead, a great deal of energy has been expended into > deducing the Born rule purely from that single axiom. There have been many > very clever attempts at this, but none convincing enough to settle the > matter.

If you're interested in reading more, Adrian Kent has written some fairly thorough critiques on arxiv:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/0905.0624](https://arxiv.org/abs/0905.0624)

<comment><USER26> > there's nothing to suggest which branch the agent will experience

isn't this accurate modelling though? as far as we can tell the collapse picks a branch at random. I just don't see how this is a problem of the model.

<comment><USER16> My description there was pretty crude, apologies. The measurement problem is often loosely expressed in terms of metaphors like "live cat vs dead cat". But if you actually look at the quantum state of such a complicated system, it's this huge tangled mess of Hilbert dimensions lumped together into one big global wave function. The "alive vs dead" separation is just one possible perspective (technically it's a slicing of the Hilbert space into mutually orthogonal sub-spaces). There are infinitely many possible such ways of splitting the space up, i.e. infinitely many possible basis sets. It's not directly clear why, when we physically interact with the system, one specific basis is chosen for us to "collapse" into one branch of.

Perhaps it could be better explained as "there's nothing to suggest which _branching_ the agent will _experience splitting into_ ".

I should note that the process of decoherence goes some way towards removing this obstacle (although not the following question of explanation of probabilities).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Some counterpoints:

[https://www.hedweb.com/manworld.htm](https://www.hedweb.com/manworld.htm)

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9cgBF6BQ2TRB3Hy4E/and-the- wi...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9cgBF6BQ2TRB3Hy4E/and-the-winner-is- many-worlds)

</comment><comment><USER8> The Many-Worlds Interpretation is seriously mischaracterised in the summary at the top of the article (presumably not written by Ball himself) when it says this:

" _The idea that the universe splits into multiple realities with every measurement has become an increasingly popular proposed solution to the mysteries of quantum mechanics._ "

This is a misrepresentation of what the Many-Worlds Interpretation actually suggests, and it is contradicted in the article itself by Ball:

" _In effect, this implies that the entire universe is described by a gigantic wave function that contains within it all possible realities. This "universal wave function," as Everett called it in his thesis, begins as a combination, or superposition, of all possible states of its constituent particles. As it evolves, some of these superpositions break down, making certain realities distinct and isolated from one another. In this sense, worlds are not exactly "created" by measurements; they are just separated. This is why we shouldn't, strictly speaking, talk of the "splitting" of worlds (even though Everett did), as though two have been produced from one. Rather, we should speak of the unraveling of two realities that were previously just possible futures of a single reality._ "

The error in the summary is a common misrepresentation, and it leaves many people (including me, when I first heard of the Everett Interpretation) with the mistaken impression that the interpretation proposes some mysterious new mechanism that causes the entire universe to 'split' every time a physical interaction or observation occurs. This is pretty much the opposite of what the interpretation actually suggests, since its purpose is to dispense with the significance of observation and 'wavefunction collapse' in the Copenhagen Interpretation.

The physicist Max Tegmark (an adherent of the Everett Interpretation, who made a film[1] about Everett with Everett's son; a sad story, as Everett was unable to make a career for himself in physics due to the unpopularity of his most famous idea) I think puts it best when he says this about the Many-Worlds Interpretation in his book, Our Mathematical Universe:

" _The rumours I 'd heard suggested that Everett proposed crazy-sounding stuff like parallel universes and that our Universe would split into parallel universes whenever you made an observation. Indeed, even today, many of my physics colleagues still think that this is what Everett assumed. Reading Everett's book taught me a lesson not only in physics but also in sociology: I learned the importance of going back and checking the source material for yourself rather than relying on secondhand information. It's not only in politics that people get misquoted, misinterpreted and misrepresented, and Everett's Ph.D. thesis is a great example of something that, to first approximation, every-one in physics has an opinion about and almost nobody has read.[2]_"

" _The notion that at certain magic instances, reality undergoes some sort of metaphysical split into two branches that subsequently never interact isn 't only a misrepresentation of Everett's thesis, but also inconsistent with Everett's postulate that the wavefunction never collapses, since the subsequent developments could in principle make the branches interfere with each other._"

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Worlds,_Parallel_Live...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Worlds,_Parallel_Lives)

[2] [https://www- tc.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/manyworlds/pdf/dissertation...](https://www- tc.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/manyworlds/pdf/dissertation.pdf) (Everett's original thesis)

<comment><USER28> Thankyou for clearing this up. I've been confused about this for a long time. It also explains why the decoherence theory fits in with this story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> My own problem with many worlds is (a) it seems to me to require a ridiculous amount of energy and (b) what happens when two world splits occur "at the same time" on opposite sides of our planet? Also (c), it just doesn't appeal to intuition, but it seems like much of physics does not :)

</comment><comment><USER30> One thing that others me about the MWI: Is the so-called "set of all possibilities" a well-defined set?

<comment><USER16> Yes - the universe is still described by a single, pure wavefunction. I think this kind of confusion is inevitable when people talk about different "universes" or "worlds" being created, when nothing of the sort is occurring in the theory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This feels a bit like JIT processing.

There may be a number of states possible but there is no need to 'process' which one it is until that information is needed.

</comment><comment><USER32> In some universes it has no problems.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is a very philosophical / meta-physical discussion of quantum mechanics, and not in line with our modern understanding of the measurement process. For example, there really is no sudden wave function collapse in quantum mechanics, as every measurement process can be described as a purely quantum- mechanical process that produces an apparent "collapse" of a wave function through entanglement and decoherence. There's nothing magical or abrupt about it, today we can even perform quantum measurements that precisely control the amount of decoherence that is introduced to a system (see e.g. some of Irfan Siddiqi's seminal quantum feedback experements like [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11505](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11505), or the earlier work done in Serge Haroche's group). Taking aside the philosophical problems that people have with "pure" quantum mechanics (i.e. an interpretation that does away with the second postulate of wave function collapse) it perfectly describes our experimental results.

The largest problem with wave function collapse (which the author only briefly skims) is that you need a way to explain how it works: Basically when the wavefunction collapses we go from a fully reversible, deterministic quantum system to an irreversible, stochastic system. At which scale is this supposed to happen? Let's say one day we can build huge quantum computers (think billions or trillions of qubits) that we can perfectly control. We could then prepare a single qubit in a superposition state. We can entangle this qubit with the other qubits (the measurement system) and manipulate the state of the measurement system using a deterministic but highly chaotic control program. If we'd then measure the state of the single qubit (e.g. by preparing many identical systems and performing quantum state tomography) we'd find that the wave function has collapsed, i.e. there is no more coherence between the two qubit states. Now, after entangling the qubit and evolving the large system we could just reverse its deterministic evolution (as we have perfect control over it) and bring it back to the state it was in directly after entangling it with the qubit. If we then perform quantum state tomography of the qubit we should see that the coherence is back. Now, if we believe that wave function collapse is a phenomenon that occurs independently and not as an effect of the evolution of the large quantum system, we would expect to observe a loss of coherence in the qubit even after perfectly reversing the state of the large quantum system. The question is then of course: At which scale does this happen, and what is the physical theory that governs this behavior? Are one billion qubits enough to produce it? One quadrillion? To my knowledge, no one came up with even an idea of how to describe this. If someone finds a good theory for describing wave function collapse I'll consider it as valid theory, until then I'll stick with the "many worlds" interpretation, though I'd really prefer calling it "plain" quantum mechanics instead.

</comment><comment><USER34> > This, he says, is contrary to what we generally learn from physics: that > most of the fine details make no difference at all to what happens at larger > scales."

Oh? Since when have we disproved the butterfly effect?

<comment><USER35> > Since when have we disproved the butterfly effect?

There never was such a thing, not the way you are using it.

The butterfly effect is an observation in chaos theory that small changes in initial conditions can make large changes in output.

The "popular" usage of butterfly effect "A butterfly flapping its wings can eventually cause a hurricane" is not a thing that ever existed.

The difference is that one is directly fed into the output, the other is not, the other is filtered by huge amounts of noise.</comment></comment>


Moss Graffiti - <AUTHOR> http://wonderfulengineering.com/using-a-blender-this-guy-executes-the-coolest-but-most-illegal-diy-project-ever-brilliant/

<comment><USER2> Don't be fooled! Most of these pictures are moss glued to a wall or sculpted from existing moss on the wall, NOT painted on with the the recipe shown in the article. If you check out videos/blogs/etc about this, there are never follow ups, just people making it. It's because it fails most of the time.

I've tried it myself, it's possible, but don't expect results similar to those in the article. Getting it to grow on a vertical wall is very hard, it won't hold the water and unless you have windy rain it won't really get enough water in the beginning. Because before it's become nice moss, it's more like dry grass on a wall. I've experimented with adding super absorbent polymers to hold the water ("water beads for plants" or something like that). With that, I got better results. But mostly on angled/horizontal surfaces. For some reason, my country doesn't sell that kind of stuff, so I had to cut a bunch of diapers open.

<comment><USER3> Nothing like the results in the results in the article, but one person ([http://ourlittlegreendot.com/diy-moss-graffiti-paint- results...](http://ourlittlegreendot.com/diy-moss-graffiti-paint-results/)) reported success following a similar recipe and using the mixture to make a garden statue look like something found abandoned in a jungle.

These people ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBsIljmgm7o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBsIljmgm7o)) seem to show it working with diaper-stuff like you mentioned, though many people are crying "fake" about their video.

Man vs. Pin tried ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMfwen84Wmo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMfwen84Wmo)) and didn't have much success, though in the end a neighbor washed it away, and it looks like he was putting it on a sunny wall in a warm climate.

It'd be neat to figure out, but doing something like a vertical garden where you start out flat, grow the moss, then hang it on a wall seems more realistic to get anything like the Anna Garforth pieces everyone seems to post along with the recipes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Easier said than done. If the amount of humidity at the wall is not ideal, you have to visit and water the moss regularly. If the conditions aren't right you often just end up growing mold graffiti ([https://vimeo.com/44045555](https://vimeo.com/44045555)).

Guides like this one often include the work of Anna Garforth ([http://www.annagarforth.co.uk/](http://www.annagarforth.co.uk/)) but she uses a different method. She grows moss and cuts it into typography, then adheres it to the wall. I have yet to see a real example of grown moss graffiti.

<comment><USER5> Ah, thank you. Some of the pictures you can clearly see the depth of the moss and it was absurd to think that you could paint something on to a wall which would then grow an inch or two straight out with no spread across the surface whatsoever. I'd be interested in a more honest picture set showing the results of the actual instructions being followed; I suspect they're less impressive than the clearly-molded moss drawings.

<comment><USER6> Or, alternatively, instructions for how to grow and cut your own moss-mat to reproduce the photos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As others have pointed out this is fake. Not only that but this blogspam is full of stolen images.

</comment><comment><USER8> I feel like I saw this on stumbleupon like 10 years ago

</comment><comment><USER9> A friend did this on his sidewalk. Now he can't kill/remove it short of grinding out the concrete.

<comment><USER10> You should be able to use a high pressure washer to remove it.

<comment><USER11> Got an uncle who knows his way around a pressure washer. There are still some stains on my driveway he can't remove.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We have so much humidity and moss growing everywhere in Vancouver, and we love murals over here. Just saying...

I wonder whether a business would be required to clean up moss graffiti like they're required to remove painted graffiti. After all, moss does grow everywhere naturally in this city. I even have some on my balcony on 20th floor.

<comment><USER13> See this "reverse graffiti" \- someone washes some dirt off a car tunnel wall to create images.

It gets hosed off shortly after.

[http://youtu.be/JwsBBIIXT0E](http://youtu.be/JwsBBIIXT0E)

<comment><USER14> Thanks for sharing that - never seen it before. I like that it gets something accomplished if it needs to be removed. Reminds me of the pothole artist in Chicago.

[http://chicago.curbed.com/archives/2014/11/03/chicagos- potho...](http://chicago.curbed.com/archives/2014/11/03/chicagos-pothole- artist-returns-with-new-flower-mosaics.php)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This looks like a hoax. Moss is very sensitive.

<comment><USER11> So how do I get it out of my backyard?

<comment><USER15> With polluted, dry air and sun light.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Much prefer the title "Moss Graffiti" to the link-bait original title "Using A Blender, This Guy Executes The Coolest But Most Illegal DIY Project Ever."

Cool project, awful title. "Most Illegal DIY Project Ever?" Seriously, I thought it was going to be a home-made suitcase nuke.

<comment><USER17> I love how it is the most illegal DIY project ever. What is that based on?

<comment><USER18> I hate the modern internet sometimes. I think the radioactive boy scout would be much less legal than moss graffiti, for starters: [http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html](http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html)

<comment><USER19> That was an amazing read! Thank you :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Renowned Scientist Defects From Belief in Global Warming - Caps Year of Vindication for Skeptics - <AUTHOR> http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressRoom.PressReleases&ContentRecord_id=E58DFF04-5A65-42A4-9F82-87381DE894CD

<comment><USER2> This is yet another long, distorted tirade by Senator James Inhofe -- and a year old, too!

It would take hours to debunk every logical fallacy and twisted fact that Inhofe uses to justify his silly views; for brevity, let me recommend the book "The Republican War on Science" for a good overview of the level of intellectual dishonesty that Inhofe embraces.

</comment><comment><USER3> The link you posted is a year old. Stop posting junk please.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess I'm not clear on the correlation between age of information and junkiness?

<comment><USER4> You're correct that the junkiness does not stem from age. It stems from this piece being mostly name-calling, not information, and from the fact that the renowned scientist in question misrepresented the research he cited, according to the researchers.

<http://www.logicalscience.com/skeptics/Claude_Allegre.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What about the huge chunks of ice breaking off the antarctic ice sheets? That seems like some sort of warming phenomenon going on in the southern hemisphere.

<comment><USER6> Even the "global warming skeptics" aren't actually skeptical about the fact that warming has been happening. Rather, they're skeptical that there's a sudden uptick in the last few decades, and/or that global warming as it exists is human-caused.

It's well understood that several hundred years ago, it was colder (at least in the northern hemisphere), simply because of historical records we have that don't make much sense otherwise. Also, it's well understood (though recently challenged) that it was warmer than twentieth century levels before that for some amount of time.

So the controversy is all over whether humans are causing any significant part of the warming that is currently happening, and whether that can or should be fixed by reducing greenhouse gas levels.</comment></comment>


A new way to remove ice buildup without power or chemicals - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-08-ice-buildup-power-chemicals.html <comment><USER2> Not directly related to ice, but...

A fellow lives near a new wind farm, and a TV transmitter. Both the windmills and the TV tower are in direct view. He, and I assume also others on that area, have had great trouble receiving a good picture. Even the technicians from the broadcasting company are scratching their heads. 100m rotating blades create awful changing reflections.

It would help if the blades were coated by some absorbent material. Just the sharp edges, if the material is too costly.

The defence forces have even banned wind farms from certain areas, I read on the papers last week. Too much interference on radar.

I don't know what the current situation is with fellows TV reception. I assume careful aiming of TV antenna has helped.

<comment><USER3> There are a few companies that specializes in removing that noise from radar systems used in planes. Apparently it isn't easy.

You might try and look for a ground wave vhf antenna and see if you can pick up something from the TV station. 100m is very close

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _The top layer is an absorber, which traps incoming sunlight and converts it to heat. The material the team used is highly efficient, absorbing 95 percent of the incident sunlight, and losing only 3 percent to re-radiation_

Is there anything to prevent the surface from getting _too_ hot? Solar is powerful, but as anyone who knows of the dangers of fresnel lenses and magnifying glasses can tell you, it can sometimes be _too_ powerful.

<comment><USER5> The good news is that the heat isn't concentrated on a single spot, it's spread out quickly over the surface. In contrast, a lens concentrates the light to a small spot. It's the localized heating that causes things to catch fire.

And the heating isn't a one way street. It's either converted to the melting of the ice, or re-radiated at longer wavelengths.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That layer of insulation seems like a double-edged sword. It would keep incoming heat from being wasted on the interior, but without it, the internal heat of the object can keep the surface from freezing as quickly.

So, for example, if an object is moved entirely into the shade for 10 minutes, perhaps in certain cases without the insulation it would not freeze but with the insulation it would.

Also, it might be harder to use an internal heating element for the cases (like night time) where the solar approach isn't good enough.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is pretty cool, I wonder if this could be used on roofs in places where ice dams [0] are a big problem.

An alternative and cheaper system which my team and I developed in our undergrad senior capstone was to use drip irrigation mounted to roofs (and organic deicing fluid) to mitigate ice dams. This was accomplished by dripping fluid down the roof to "cut" channels into the ice dam to allow the water built up behind the dam, to drain off of the roof. I think you could possibly do something similar by placing strips of this 3-layered material vertically oriented on a roof to melt channels in the ice dam..

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_dam_(roof)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_dam_\(roof\))

</comment><comment><USER8> At power output produced by APU of a large airliner, electric deicing looks to be almost free.

For smaller planes, things are different. Pneumatics is an acceptable compromise, and piezoelectric that is soon to come to the market will have almost no flaws besides the upfront cost.

</comment><comment><USER9> From a thermodynamic perspective, roughly speaking fuel based engines convert the flow of heat from a high temperature heat bath to a low temperature heat bath into work. The higher the difference between the temperatures the more work can be extracted. It would seem to me that _in theory_ the vehicle surface area could be used as the colder heat bath for improved efficiency.

I am not claiming any actionable specific device or configuration design to improve the efficiency though!

</comment><comment><USER10> Would this work to deice heat pumps in winter? There are obviously some factors working against it (low temperature, shorter days), but maybe with enough surface area?

</comment><comment><USER11> Would these layers be thin enough to be translucent?

<comment><USER5> My thought is that in order to be thick enough to absorb sufficient sunlight, they also have to be thick enough to look black.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not so useful if your airliner flies at night as well

<comment><USER13> Or above 50degrees latitudes

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's actually incredibly useful. The aviation industry and any pilots must be stoked.

<comment><USER15> This probably wont work well if all in cloudy days or with any kind of snowfall (due to very low amounts of incoming irradiance). Also, just the aluminum coating in this 3 layer material weighs 586 kg for a 747 wing area.

<comment><USER16> Wow, that does seem like a huge amount. On the other hand, 184,567 kg is the empty weight so it's "only" a 0.3% increase. Maybe not so bad since they don't need to carry deicer anymore?

<comment><USER17> They dont carty deicer anyway...they use bleed air from the engines.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Do the Math - The Movie - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsIfokifwSo#!

<comment><USER2> Interesting movie but the data that they presented is not really backed up by the studies. All the time I've heard about global warming studies there was no reference to the said studies so we can see how the research was conducted and what methods were used to get those numbers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, this suffers from the same problems of efforts that have preceded it.</comment></comment>


Just ship. Seriously. - <AUTHOR> http://www.slash7.com/articles/2008/4/5/just-ship-seriously <comment><USER2> Yes, but what if your launch doesn't wow folks? Are people going to come back and give you a second try after you added those killer features?

It's already been four months, two more weeks can't hurt.

<comment><USER3> Actually, the "two more weeks" attitude can hurt a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I got the same feeling reading that just now as I did reading PG's Hiring Is Obsolete[1].

Really wish it made financial sense to walk in and quit my job tomorrow. Only 46 more days!

[1] <http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> _"... It's like exercise: you know it's good for you. People tell you how good you'll feel for it, and maybe you even remember vaguely that you thought it felt good after a long hot yoga session ... AND THAT is the motivation to go do it again. ... The fulfillment (sic) in shipping is shipping. ..."_

Shipping advice like this for software is to what _"out of shape PE teachers"_ prescribe to get fit.

</comment><comment><USER6> This advice is working great for Microsoft ;)</comment>


Is the U.S. Ready for Post-Middle-Class Politics? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/magazine/is-the-us-ready-for-post-middle-class-politics.html <comment><USER2> The Fed economic policies of strict inflation control have had a big part in holding down wages for working people. We all know when there is very strong job growth the Fed increases interest rates to slow the economy. This is done to limit inflation but it's executed at the very point when the "working person" would otherwise have the chance to get ahead. If interest rates were held lower longer strong job growth would elevate competition for labor... thereby increasing wages. This strategy caries with it a more pronounced risk of a spike in inflation but I would suggest that risk is worth it. If you look at the stagnation in real wages it starts around 1980, not coincidentally 1 year into Paul Volcker's term as fed chairman (whose clear mandate and legacy was controlling inflation at any cost).

<comment><USER3> Totally disagree. We're sitting at almost zero percent interest rates because the fed can't take their foot off the pedal. More isn't going to help bring back the middle class. Volker broke the stagflation of the 70s and is probably the only decent chairman. Bad trade deals, runaway education and health costs, regressive taxes, foreign wars, etc. have done more to decimate the middle class than interest rates being too high. If anything, the fed has helped accelerate / fund much of this mess with ridiculously low interest rates for decades. Certainly it will hurt when rates go up, but it hurts to pay off your credit cards too. Cheap money funds malinvestment, flows to the politically connected, and aggravates income inequality. It's just tough to notice. You may get a raise at work but don't realize the bosses mansion/stock just appreciated 100 times more than your raise. You feel good but your ability to purchase things decreased.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's probably a victim of over thinking and too much marketing. The forces which shape this allergic reaction to these phrases are the ones also turning voters away and towards the Sanderses and Trumps who are less afraid of plain populist/democratic speech.

It should be of little surprise to establishment showrunners this is happening, after all the blue collar middle class are an afterthought when it comes to economic policy -- quite the opposite of say China, who cater to the blue collar middle class.

Yes, on the whole we have benefitted from trade deals but we've made very few accommodations for the part of the middle class which loses out --be I outsourcing yesterday and today or automation tomorrow.

<comment><USER5> >on the whole we have benefited from trade deals

Despite the amount of rhetoric I see claiming this, I have yet to see any empirical evidence.

<comment><USER6> Well the fact that the global population has begun the climb out of poverty is a pretttttttty good indicator. You may be approaching from the protectionist side, of course, but I'm not and so the happy truth is plain to see.

<comment><USER5> That's a result of technology, not trade policy. Not only that, but I can't think of rising, developing countries that have free trade policies. Brazil, China, and the rest are all protectionist. Further, the the notion is that _we_ in the US have benefited from free trade.

So the answer is none of the above.

<comment><USER7> I agree with you, but would dispute that Brasil is rising at the moment

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _the campaign planned to "shy away from the characterization 'middle class' > — because, her advisers say, the term no longer connotes a stable life_

This should infuriate everyone who reads this. Somehow being an average, in the _middle_ of the income scale, means that the _majority of Americans_ should expect an unstable life. That seems so wrong on so many levels.

<comment><USER9> I don't think you understand. It's better for the billionaires, Wall Street bankers, and venture capitalists this way. Therefore sacrificing a middle class country and way of life is worth it.

There are still lots of options for the former middle class: we could have autocracy like China or grinding poverty like Bolivia. But broad prosperity just wasn't working out for the big money donors and had to be abandoned.

<comment><USER10> That's missing the point. Everyone knows the middle class has been gutted to benefit the one percent. The problem now is: how does a national political campaign appeal to the vast population without referring to them as the middle class, or as something realistic but depressing, or with some sort of hollow and transparent euphemism like "everyday Americans"?

<comment><USER6> Whenever "everyone knows" something so complicated, you can be certain it's a religious belief, not a fact

<comment><USER11> Are you crazy or in denial? Are you not aware of the many publications released about how we are no longer even close to the prosperity of the 1940s-1970s as regular Americans?

<comment><USER12> Properity measured how? On average Americans are _far_ better off now than in the 1970's if you think about income.

<comment><USER13> Measured by the amount of labour required to live a comfortable life? You say we're better off now but can a typical skilled or semi skilled worker today support a family in a secure home as was the case in previous generations?

<comment><USER12> _Measured by the amount of labour required to live a comfortable life?_

How do you define a "comfortable life"? I'm thinking the goal posts are constantly moving and that's why people think things were better back in the 1970's. Not blaming anyone for it, it's the human condition to always want things to be better.

Let's see: 1940's - WW2, America is _just_ coming out of a 15 year recession 1950's - Constant threat of nuclear war, Korean War, economically things are looking up 1960's - Numerous race riots, economy is still doing relatively well 1970's - Rampant inflation, rather stagflation, gas shortages

I've asked my family (older generations) and they agree things are way better now. And they aren't what you'd even call middle class.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


SINE editor found - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/ArchMach/Sine <comment><AUTHOR> Written in PL/1, Interdata 7/32 assembly language, and Lisp for the MagicSix operating system at the MIT Architecture Machine group.</comment>


Technical Interviews – An Instrument of Exclusion and Discrimination - <AUTHOR> http://www.careerconservatory.com/technical-interviews-an-instrument-of-exclusion-and-discrimination/ <comment><USER2> nice read. especially about determining the candidates baseline and assessing how fast they grow from there.</comment>


Shotspotter Found Phantom 'Gunshot' to Justify Officer's Deadly Force - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20181204/08442041156/man-shot-cops-claims-shotspotter-found-phantom-gunshot-to-justify-officers-deadly-force.shtml <comment><USER2> Badly written (lacks basic proofreading!) and has elements of utter bullshit, like this:

"A Ruger revolver was said to have been recovered at the site an hour or so later... The Ruger had an empty magazine and it was not in the lockback position, indicating it had not been recently fired."

Whether or not the slide is back says _nothing_ about how recently a gun was fired.

But the more basic problem with this account is that revolvers don't _have_ magazines. Or slides. And they don't eject shell casings automatically.

The ShotSpotter bullshit doesn't surprise me at all. They make their money on politics, not science. I don't know of a single case where ShotSpotter data made the case for a conviction anywhere.</comment>