monktastic1

I find the irony of this comment overwhelming. I suspect one day we will be asking AI to summarize the smell of the forest, and the beauty of a wildflower meadow, because ain't nobody got time for that.

It's a bit like:

"Doc, I feel pain in my toe."

"No, sorry, the math says you don't."

"Okay, but like... I do."

"Sorry, you're just not good at accepting math!"

Not a perfect analogy, of course, but people have competing intuitions of what to do when the map fails to match the territory. MWI abandons the latter, most prefer the former.

Decoherence isn't an interpretation, but an experimentally established fact. What makes interpretations interpretations is that they cannot be experimentally distinguished (or in some cases, can only be with great difficulty). That said, the study of decoherence has certainly made aspects of the measurement problem easier to come to terms with, which in turn has bearing on the intuitive draw of some interpretations over others. In particular, it helps answer when universes should be said to "split" in MWI (though, as many will rightly tell you, that's not a complete solution to the measurement problem, as decoherence is still unitary--i.e., there's no in-principle irreversibility there).

That's fair. The example OP gave us was the use of the word "function." I'd be very impressed at a (useful) tutorial that never mentioned that word.

Were you hoping they would explain what is essentially a rather sophisticated math structure without using any... math?

Whenever I read this anecdote, I want to believe it is largely made up. I don't want to believe that none of these towering intellects (let alone von Neumann himself) didn't instantly recognize the more elegant way to view the problem. Technical abilities aside, that's the part that's always made them so impressive to me. I easily recognized it myself when I was younger, and I'm nowhere near as clever as them.

But this oracle doesn't just say true / false. It also gives a proof. That makes it much less exciting (not to mention beneficial for your career) to find another one (or even worse, the same one).

Thanks for this clarification of your position. The brief answer is:

> If we didn't move the goalposts, then by definition we already knew exactly where we were headed at the beginning, and we very clearly did not.

The criticisms are directed toward people who did clearly act like they knew, not the ones who were honest that they did not know.

So you defined your own idiosyncratic version of "moving the goalposts" and used it to rebut his argument, with a condescending "you understand that's how science works, right?"--instead of being honest that it is you who are changing the definition, and not his failure to understand anything.

I don't see how that's any better.

Not sure how to suggest edits to titles, but @dang: his first name is Terence, not Terrence.

Yes, this is a huge omission, because it means that as engines improve, the stated advantage becomes increasingly meaningless to humans (which is the opposite of what we may intuitively expect).

What I really want to know as a player is how easy it will be for me to win from this position against someone of my opponent's strength, which is admittedly a very hard thing to define, let alone compute.

I think you're misreading the comment you're responding to. Its parent comment said that life can be a blessing or a curse depending on how you choose to look. They responded by asking whether the word "curse" is appropriate if it can be changed based only on perspective.

Indelible, probably -- though I admit that both trying to eat and trying to delete that passage failed. (I jest -- "impossible to forget," of course.)

Your account seems relatively new, so you might be unfamiliar with the rule to be charitable here. If you'd like to be snarky and lower the bar for discourse, Reddit is a much better place to do that (though ideally it would be kept out of public spaces altogether).

Huh, I would guess there's a different mechanism at work. In my experience, movies playing on TV during the holidays tend not to get people's deep, persistent, undivided attention.