Hugh Everett's birthday! Pioneer of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Let us celebrate by thinking about ontological extravagance. I will do so by way of analogy, because I have found that everyone loves analogies and nobody ever willfully misconstrues them.

We look at the night sky and see photons arriving to us, emitted by distant stars. Let's contrast two different theories about how stars emit photons.
One theory says, we know how stars shine, and our equations predict that they emit photons roughly uniformly in all directions. Call this the "Many-Photons Interpretation" (MPI).
But! Others object. That is *so many photons*. Most of which we don't observe, and can't observe, since they're moving away at the speed of light. It's too ontologically extravagant to posit a huge number of unobservable things!
So they suggest a "Photon Collapse Interpretation." According to this theory, the photons emitted toward us actually exist. But photons that would be emitted in directions we will never observe simply collapse into utter non-existence.
The Photon Collapse Interpretation posits far fewer photons, and doesn't strain our credulity by suggesting that we believe in a huge number of unobservable entities. Clearly it is vastly preferable on the basis of Occam's Razor.
Wait, say the Many-Photons proponents. That's not simple. Who cares how many photons there are, or whether we can see them? What matters is the simplicity of the underlying concepts, and whether or not the predictions fit the data. Who cares if you can't observe every photon?
And this whole "collapse" thing is completely ad hoc. Not to mention clunky, unnecessary, and ill-defined. You aren't actually concerned with simplicity or scientific integrity, you're just reluctant to accept things you can't see for yourself.
Nonsense, insist the collapsers. Science is about what we observe. Positing unobservable entities is extravagant, wasteful, and undermines the very nature of science and the Enlightenment project. Who knows to what kind of hideous relativism it will lead?
https://t.co/G19NR7Hvwa
I'm on the Many-Photon side of things. Simplicity is judged by your concepts, not how many entities are in your theory. Happy 90th, HEIII!

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I want to share my thoughts, as someone who has been so alarmed by the so-called "dissident" scientists like Gupta, Heneghan, Kuldorff, Bhattacharya, & Ioannidis who consider themselves brave Galileos unfairly treated by "establishment scientists." I will try not to swear. 1/n


I want to talk about 3 things:
‼️Their fringe views are inhumane, unethical junk science that promotes harm
‼️They complain that they've been marginalized but this is simply untrue
‼️I am sick of people telling me we have to "listen to both sides." There aren't 2 sides here 2/n

These 'dissident' scientists have consistently downplayed COVID-19, urging policymakers not to take aggressive control measures. They claim it is not a serious threat. Gupta even went on TV saying people under 65 shouldn't worry about it!

RECEIPTS

They have consistently argued that policymakers should just let the virus rip, in an attempt to reach herd immunity by natural infection. Kuldorff *continues* to argue for this even now that we have many highly effective, safe vaccines.


We've never controlled a deadly, contagious pandemic before by just letting the virus spread, as this approach kills & disables too many people. In Manaus, Brazil, 66% of the city was infected & an astonishing *1 in 500* people died of COVID-19

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"I lied about my basic beliefs in order to keep a prestigious job. Now that it will be zero-cost to me, I have a few things to say."


We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.

Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)

It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.

Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".