Blog Plug: Overcoming Bias

[packbat]

I know some of you all (I'm thinking m'dad zhurnaly and the Dread Medievalist goblinpaladin for starters) will love this blog, for three reasons.

First, Overcoming Bias is a cool goal.

Second, because it's written by people who know stuff and like to share. (Like Edward Slingerland in What Science Offers the Humanities, and yes, I still owe goblinpaladin the review, it's halfway done.)

Third, tasty, tasty writing.

Decoherence is implicit in quantum physics, not an extra postulate on top of it, and quantum physics is continuous.  Thus, "decoherence" is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon - there's no sharp cutoff point.  Given two blobs, there's a quantitative amount of amplitude that can flow into identical configurations between them.  This quantum interference diminishes down to an exponentially tiny infinitesimal as the two blobs separate in configuration space.

Asking exactly when decoherence takes place, in this continuous process, is like asking when, if you keep removing grains of sand from a pile, it stops being a "heap".

The sand-heap dilemma is known as the Sorites Paradox, after the Greek soros, for heap.  It is attributed to Eubulides of Miletus, in the 4th century BCE.  The moral I draw from this very ancient tale:  If you try to draw sharp lines in a continuous process and you end up looking silly, it's your own darn fault.

(Incidentally, I once posed the Sorites Paradox to Marcello Herreshoff, who hadn't previously heard of it; and Marcello answered without the slightest hesitation, "If you remove all the sand, what's left is a 'heap of zero grains'."  Now that's a computer scientist.)

From The Conscious Sorites Paradox, by Eliezer Yudkowsky on Overcoming Bias, as part of a long digression-from-a-digression-from-a-digression-from-a-digression on quantum physics (and, back up the chain, philosophical zombies, reduction, the Mind Projection Fallacy, and ultimately - I think - AI research. Unless ultimately is "Overcoming Bias", in which case ... what am I saying?).

Anyway, you know the problem with WIkipedia? You can totally get the same groove here. Very hypertext.