With the demise of Reddit, we have lost /r/SneerClub, the Internet’s hot spot for mocking those who proclaim allegiance to capital-R Rationality and related ideologies like longtermism. Somewhere in between the discussions of heavy stuff like sexual harassment in Effective Altruism culture and total frivolity were the rambles about science. I thought I would pull a couple such comments out of the archives and edit them into something shaped like a blog post. So, consider this your Attention Conservation Notice: if you’d rather not work through a self-admittedly rough explanation of how Eliezer Yudkowsky’s claims about quantum physics are just silly, exit now.

Yudkowsky clearly intends to argue that the scientific community is broken and his brand of Rationalism(TM) is superior, but what he’s actually done is take all the weaknesses that physicists have when discussing quantum foundations and present them in a more concentrated form. There’s the accepting whatever mathematical formulation you learn first as the ultimate truth, the reliance upon oversimplified labels and third-hand accounts rather than studying what the pioneers themselves wrote, the general unwillingness to get out of the armchair and go even so far as the library…
Continue reading Friends Don’t Let Friends Learn Physics From Yudkowsky →