Even if all Stein votes went to Clinton, she still would’ve lost, so the country ultimately followed your strategy of not voting third party. You need to take responsibility as the current situation we are in is the result of your endorsed strategy.

If only everyone else did.

Capitalist oligarchs are the ones who rule society, and so if there are problems in society, the fault ultimately comes back to them as they are the rulers. They, however, will never admit responsibility to anything, and so they will always seek to shift to blame to other people, but they are the ones who rule, so their blame must be shifted to the non-rulers, i.e. to regular people. Shifting the blame to all of regular people would be vastly unpopular, and so they instead pick out a subset of regular people to blame. Whether it is Jews, Somalis, transpeople, immigrants, etc, it is always the fault of some minority group of people who have no political power, and it is never the fault of those who control everything and are in the position of power to make all the decisions.

Americans would vote to cut off their own nose to spite their neighbor’s face.

EPR proves quantum mechanics violates locality without hidden variables, and Bell proves quantum mechanics violates locality with hidden variables, and so locality is not salvageable. People who claim quantum mechanics without hidden variables can be local tend to redefine locality to just be about superluminal signaling, but you can have nonlocal effects that cannot be used to signal. It is this broader definition of locality that is the concern of the EPR paper.

When Einstein wrote locality, he didn’t mention anything about signaling, that was not in his head. He was thinking in more broad terms. We can summarize Einstein’s definition of locality as follows:

(P1) Objects within set A interact such that their values are changed to become set A’. (P2) We form prediction P by predicting the values of A’ while preconditioning on complete knowledge of A. (P3) We form prediction Q by predicting the values of A’ while preconditioning on complete knowledge of A as well as object x where x⊄A. (D) A physical model is local if the variance of P equals the variance of Q.

Basically, what this definition says is that if particles interact and you want to predict the outcome of that interaction, complete knowledge of the initial values of the particles directly participating in the interaction should give you the best prediction possible to predict the outcome of the interaction, and no knowledge from anything outside the interaction should improve your prediction. If knowledge from some particle not participating in the interaction allows you to improve your prediction, then the outcome of the interaction has irreducible dependence upon something that did not locally participate in the interaction, which is of course nonlocal.

The EPR paper proves that, without hidden variables, you necessarily violate this definition of locality. I am not the only one to point this out. Local no-hidden variable models are impossible. Yes, this also applies to Many Worlds. There is no singular “Many Worlds” interpretation because no one agrees on how the branching should work, but it is not hard to prove that any possible answer to the question of how the branching should work must be nonlocal, or else it would fail to reproduce the predictions of quantum theory.

• Einstein, incompleteness, and the epistemic view of quantum states
• A no-go theorem for Quantum theory ontological models
• An Elementary Proof That Everett’s Quantum Multiverse Is Nonlocal

Pilot wave theory does not respect locality, but neither does orthodox quantum mechanics.

The fear of developing nonlocal hidden variable models also turn out to be unfounded. The main fear is that a nonlocal hidden variable model might lead to superluminal signaling, which would lead to a breakdown in the causal order, which would make the theory incompatible with special relativity, which would in turn make it unable to reproduce the predictions of quantum field theory.

It turns out, however, that none of these fears are well-founded. Pilot wave theory itself is proof that you can have a nonlocal hidden variable model without superluminal signaling. You do not end up with a breakdown in the causal order if you introduce a foliation in spacetime.

Technically, yes, this does mean it deviates from special relativity, but it turns out that this does not matter, because the only reason people care for special relativity is to reproduce the predictions of quantum field theory. Quantum field theory makes the same predictions in all reference frames, so you only need to match QFT’s predictions for a single reference frame and choose that frame as your foliation, and then pilot wave theory can reproduce the predictions of QFT.

There is a good paper below that discusses this, how it is actually quite trivial to match QFT’s predictions with pilot wave theory.

• Relativistic QFT from a Bohmian perspective: A proof of concept

tldr: Quantum mechanics itself does not respect locality, hidden variables or not, and adding hidden variables does not introduce any problems with reproducing the predictions of quantum field theory.

I’ve used LLMs quite a few times to find partial derivatives / gradient functions for me, and I know it’s correct because I plug them into a gradient descent algorithm and it works. I would never trust anything an LLM gives blindly no matter how advanced it is, but in this particular case I could actually test the output since it’s something I was implementing in an algorithm, so if it didn’t work I would know immediately.

Economics isn’t supposed to make sense, it’s just meant to justify the prevailing system for the time. It is like theology back when we used to live under religious monarchies. It treats itself as “academic,” has universities and degrees, very serious “scholarly” debate, entire textbooks written on it, all its adherents will insist that it is a genuine scholarly enterprise and anyone who disagrees just “doesn’t understand it,” but it is ultimately not a genuine scientific program but merely exists to justify the prevailing order at the time.

Nah, they’re right, it is fantasy. I think some people have in their heads that particles spread out like waves in 3D space and Many Worlds is just like an objective collapse model where it collapses back into a particle when you look at it, but where all outcomes happen in a different branch of the multiverse rather than just having one outcome.

The reality is that it is only actually possible to consistently map quantum waves to 3D space when you have a single particle. The moment you introduce two or three, it quickly breaks down because the number of quantum waves grows exponentially. If you have 3 spin-1/2 particles then you would describe their state with 8 waves. You cannot consistently break apart 8 into 3. You end up quickly finding that it is actually impossible to assign the waves to any location at all in space or time, so you cannot think of them as something like a propagating field mode or anything like that.

These are waves made of nothing that do not exist anywhere and nobody can see them. One of the weirdest things about quantum mechanics I do not think people appreciate enough is how you evolve something that seems to have no relationship at all to the real-world system and yet it can predict its behavior statistically.

Most other interpretations see the waves as playing some role in determining where the particle in 3D space actually shows up. This is where MWI begins to make no sense: it denies that there ever even is a particle at all and physical reality is just the invisible waves. It does not actually posit that when an observation is made, the wave is reduced to an eigenstate on two different branches of a multiverse. It denies that there is ever a reduction at all.

Imagine a photon hits a beam splitter and has a 50%/50% chance of being reflected/transmitted, and you have two detectors on either side. At the end of the day, you will detect one or the other. But MWI denies that you will detect one or the other. It does not actually posit that the universe literally splits into two branches where you detect one or the other, because if all that exists is the quantum state and the quantum state also never reduces to anything, then neither detectors actually ever enter into an eigenstate where you can say a detection was made.

If you take MWI seriously, then what it is literally doing is denying the entirety of the reality that we observe. Everything we observe is just a lie, and true reality merely consists of a single giant infinite-dimensional wave that exists nowhere, is made of nothing, and nobody can ever see it. But clearly that is not what we perceive in the real-world, so MWI proponents have to claim what we perceive is an “illusion” created by “consciousness,” and then will just kick the can down the road and say that the mystery of why what we perceive is nothing like “true” reality is caught up in the “mystery of consciousness” and when we solve that then we will also understand how the “illusion” is created. It doesn’t really “solve” anything but just shifts one loaded topic under the umbrella of another.

Tim Maudlin has a good lecture on this problem in particular.

MWI proponents also constantly misrepresents the state of MWI to make it seem more “proven” than it actually is, such as repeatedly making the false claim that it is “simpler” because it deletes the Born rule. The Born rule was not added because it is funny, it was added because it is necessary rule to actually make predictions with the theory, to tie the quantum waves back to what we actually observe. If you delete it, you are left without any ability to derive probabilities, at least without adding another assumption.

Lev Vaidman did a survey of all the attempts to derive the Born rule in the literature and found every single one of them ends up introducing some additional assumption somewhere. They always at some point need to take on an assumption as arbitrary as the Born rule itself. Sean himself published a paper where he tries to develop a “quantum epistemic separability principle” to derive it which is based on doing a partial trace on the universal wave function and treating the diagonal entries in the reduced density matrix as probabilities, yet Richard Dawid and Simon Friederich pointed out in a response paper that there is no coherent justification for his ESP-QM other than it simply being proposed for the purpose of deriving the Born rule, and there is no justification that the diagonals of a reduced density matrix even tell you anything about probabilities unless you’re already assuming the Born rule.

You can derive the Born rule through Gleason’s theorem, but Gleason’s theorem relies on one of its assumptions the idea that the quantum state actually translates to classical probabilities across classical measurement devices. This is obviously something denied in MWI as there are no classical measurement devices, and so Gleason’s theorem cannot be used to justify the Born rule for MWI.

There is also an issue with locality. The EPR paper is basically a no-go theorem against local psi-complete interpretations of quantum mechanics. You cannot have a local psi-complete interpretation. MWI proponents may try to say it is “local” in Hilbert space, but this is rather meaningless as locality refers to position in 3D space. Something that is nonlocal is superluminal, it moves through space faster than light, but quantum waves do not “move.” They have no position. The concept of locality is hardly relevant to them. If you actually look at the behavior of particles in 3D space, then MWI is manifestly nonlocal. I am not even claiming it being nonlocal is inherently a flaw, but more that they always claim it is local when you just look at the mathematics and it is not meaningfully local in any sense.

Sean also likes to say misleading statements like MWI is just “taking the Schrodinger equation seriously.” This plays into a myth pushed by David Deutsch, which I constantly see this fallacy repeated by MWI believers, which is that the only two interpretations are MWI, which says things always evolve according to the Schrodinger equation, or objective collapse models, which say they do not, and since it’s trivial to prove that objective collapse models are not mathematically consistent with quantum mechanics, therefore if you just “take the Schrodinger equation seriously” then you must believe in MWI.

But this is fallacious because objective collapse models are incredibly niche and hardly anyone buys into objective collapse models anyways, except maybe Penrose and his crew these days, but it’s literally like <1% of academics. No interpretation is an objective collapse model, because objective collapse models necessarily make different predictions, so they fall under the category of a whole different theoretical model. There are like a couple dozen interpretations in the literature and they all “take the Schrodinger equation seriously.” Even Copenhagen does not claim that there is literally a physical collapse but treats it as merely epistemic.

Indeed, all interpretations treat the “collapse” as an epistemic measurement update in some way, including even MWI (as you are merely “realizing what branch you’re on”). When it actually comes to interpretations, MWI’s competition is other interpretations, not objective collapse theories. Poking holes in objective collapse theories doesn’t somehow provide evidence that MWI is correct.

Quantum mechanics does not have much to do with consciousness.