Animavore wrote:Wow! This introduction is great. It's all about YOU! As in ME ( ). He singled me out for consideration
I'm going to learn to "dip into a twin YOU" (meaning ME ).

Just don't get any fucking ideas about dipping into me sunshine.

Regarding parsimony - there's a whole discussion to be had there, in my view, about what parsimony should be taken to mean and what we should demand of a theory.

I think it is worth pointing out, however, that whether Everett's model (the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics or the relative state formulation) is true or not isn't going to make any difference here. The many-worlds theory does not allow you to jump between universes to make money - or whatever is this man is selling. We could have conclusive proof, tomorrow, that Everett was right and many-worlds is true - and this get-rich-quick scheme would still be fraud.

EDIT- I note that they aren't selling jumping between worlds as many people might imagine it, but instead are selling the ability to communicate with versions of yourself in other worlds. The idea seems to be that you mentally jump into your "other selves" and experience their lives, so you can learn from them. This is still a fraudulent claim, of course.

The scam aspect of this is that people will use their own imaginations to tell them they did just that - someone will spend half an hour thinking he was in the life of another him that was doing something interesting and will think he "quantum jumped" - when in fact he was just imagining things.

You're jus' ign'rant.

Paul Almond wrote: - and this get-rich-quick scheme would still be fraud.

What are you implying ?

Paul Almond wrote:Regarding parsimony - there's a whole discussion to be had there, in my view, about what parsimony should be taken to mean and what we should demand of a theory.

Indeed. For me, parsimony is useful up to a point, but a very important point. When we have two models that explain precisely the same thing, the more parsimonious should take precedence over the less, up until the point where the less parsimonious model explains something that the other does not. This is what Einstein was talking about when he said 'Things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler' (although parsimony as simplicity is a mis-statement). The thing is, Everett's model doesn't explan anything that, say, the path integral formulation doesn't, so it should be discarded until something crops up that it, uniquely, can explain.

I think it is worth pointing out, however, that whether Everett's model (the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics or the relative state formulation) is true or not isn't going to make any difference here. The many-worlds theory does not allow you to jump between universes to make money - or whatever is this man is selling. We could have conclusive proof, tomorrow, that Everett was right and many-worlds is true - and this get-rich-quick scheme would still be fraud.

Indeed.

More FB goodness:

some fucking wooster wrote:Jacqueline Smith Fahey
I had an amazing experience at an ear-candling workshop with Sandra Yemm in Halifax. Sandra was showing the class how to see auras (anybody can do it!) by standing each of us in front of a white wall. We could all see the white light around each of us but on one girl's shoulder there was a face, just a circle of white light with the suggestion of eyes and mouth, very like a 'happy face'. We were blown away. Sandra explained that it was the woman's guardian angel. The woman knew about it and even knew her guardian's name! I was amazed and have never forgotten the sight of that 'face' on her shoulder.

Ear-candling? Is that a euphemism?

hackenslash wrote:Ear-candling? Is that a euphemism?

You'd think so wouldn't you.

"I'm just about to stick this candle up my <cough> ear </cough>."

but no, it's real.

It seems strange to me that people think guardian angels are exclusively human spirits. They can be animal spirits too. I have a guardian beaver.

Ben Goldacre talks about ear-candling in his book Bad Science. Apparently you end up with a brown substance that is supposedly your ear wax with all your toxins taken out with it.
Apparently there is a very simple experiment which can be done to see if the substance is earwax or not. You bring it up to your mouth and lick it.

Animavore wrote:Ben Goldacre talks about ear-candling in his book Bad Science. Apparently you end up with a brown substance that is supposedly your ear wax with all your toxins taken out with it.
Apparently there is a very simple experiment which can be done to see if the substance is earwax or not. You bring it up to your mouth and lick it.

That's very similar to anal candeling. I don't recomend testing the resulting substance in the same way however.

I've been trying to think who this guy reminds me of and it just dawned on me.
Did you ever see the episode of The Simpsons called Bart's Inner Child?
Notice the snake oil peddler in this episode is called Brad Goodman

-Since I'm a huge success in other dimensions, I guess I can afford to be a slacker in this one. *aaaaahh.... puts feet on table*

John P. M. wrote:-Since I'm a huge success in other dimensions, I guess I can afford to be a slacker in this one. *aaaaahh.... puts feet on table*

Unfortunately, there is an idea known as evidential decision theory that could cause problems for you.
When you make a choice, that "choice" is really determined by your brain - but the other versions of you will tend to have similar brains. They should be expected, all else being equal, to make the sorts of choices that you make.
If you are the sort of person who thinks it is a good idea to take it easy and let people very similar to him do all the work of being successful, it follows that it is likely that the other versions of you will think likewise: in other words, this very attitude probably means that you are not successful in other dimensions.
I know it may seem strange, because this suggests that you get to "choose" on behalf of all of you: of course all the others will have the same feeling.
There is one scenario for evidential decision theory that I like to give and it is this:
Suppose some scanner/cloning device is used to make an identical copy of you - right down to brain details. The original and the clone will both wake up in separate white rooms - and after this point they can diverge. One minute after you have been woken, someone offers you some money to kill the other version of you - and the other version of you is being told exactly the same thing. Ignoring ethics, should you take the money? There is a problem here - if you decide to take the money, the other version of you was indentical one minute ago, and has only had one minute to diverge - this suggests that it will be quite likely that it will think the same way. Conversely, rejecting the offer would seem to make it more likely that the other version of you does likewise. Strangely, there is no causal link between the two of you, but the statistical link should be apparent still.

If that sounds unconvincing, imagine an absolutely identical copy of you - then an almost identical copy.

So don't slack off. You are letting all of you down.

Isn't it strange how these threads about silly things always seem to get into deeper things?

Wow, I'm honored that you bothered to type all that over my quip remark.

Transferring that to what the thread was about then, there's no point in 'quantum jumping', because you wouldn't be able to gain anything from those other versions, that you didn't already do here.

On second thought, let's not go there; it is a silly place.

Quantum Quack wrote:My goal is to reach out to as many people as possible. And if that means less money for me, so be it. I’m 81 years old, what would I want with so much money anyway?

I imagine you'd have quite a need for a lot of money. You've got to plan for the future, after all, and a strong, fit 81 year old who is in perfect health on account of being able to quantum jump into realities in which he knows how to cure all disease and reverse aging and apply that knowledge here clearly has a long life ahead of him. When you've got billions of years of life to look forward to, as a result of knowing how to stay healthy indefinitely, you've really got to start saving up - you don't want to be going hungry in 537 million years time.

To add to that, we’re going through a recession, and I’m not some mega corporation trying to squeeze every last penny out of you.

Since you care so much about everybody, why aren't you telling us your brilliant plan to fix the economy that an alternate version of you devised in the universe in which you're the most brilliant economist who has ever lived? Why are you so reluctant to share that knowledge?

So I went through the usual struggle with my publisher on Quantum Jumping’s price tag. My publisher made some calculations, and said we should make it $497. Anyone could pull that off, and it’ll give me a reasonable profit.

Why not self publish? After all, you have access to the knowledge possessed by an alternate version of you in a universe in which you're a highly successful publisher. Why pay some other guy to publish your work, when you could instead keep 100% of the profits, and sell many more copies as well, since your own publishing company will be far more successful than his?

Fair enough. Most people, maybe with a bit of effort, could scrape together $497. But I wasn’t comfortable with it. I didn’t want anyone to starve for a month, even though Quantum Jumping will make sure they never do again!

"Slash it,” I said. “We’ll still make a profit if more people can afford it.” So my publisher whipped out that calculator again. And so it went…

$397

$297

$197

…until we hit a ceiling.

“Any lower than this, and we’ll be making a loss just to keep the website up,” said my publisher when we got to this figure:
$97

And that’s as low a cost as you’ll ever pay for an immediate, unbelievable change to your life. Is $97 a fair deal? No. It’s an incredible deal.

Why charge at all? It should be a simple matter to get the money required to be able to supply this wonderful knowledge for free - just quantum jump into a reality where you know how to build a machine that can predict the winning lottery numbers, and use it to win the lottery. Then you'll never have to worry about whether you can afford to keep the website up, and you'll be able to spread the word across the globe.

John P. M. wrote:Wow, I'm honored that you bothered to type all that over my quip remark.

Transferring that to what the thread was about then, there's no point in 'quantum jumping', because you wouldn't be able to gain anything from those other versions, that you didn't already do here.

Well, I suppose there would be, if you could do it (which you can't): you would just have to make sure you "jumped" to vserions of yourself which were different enough to tell you something interesting, but not so different enough that what they did would be irrelevant. The "further" you jumped across possible worlds, the more different the lives of the different versions would become, as they would have diverged from you further in the past. The closest versions of you would live in worlds in which just one particle is in a different place. Other versions of you, more distant but still very nearby would be just like you, except they would have taken their last breath 0.00001 seconds earlier, or would be standing 0.00001 metres nearer to the TV. As you went further across "possibility space", you would encounter increasingly different versions, with histories that diverged from yours further back. Eventually, you would encounter versions with histories that diverged before you were born - eventually with different DNA, and at at this stage it starts to become debatable when they stop being "versions of you". This is clearly all very strange and the best way of making sense of it is to give that man your money.

Why doesn't this guy just jump to a parallel universe where he is already a billionaire, rather than milking hapless gullible people of $197 each?

Edit: Arcayn meat me to it

iamthereforeithink wrote:Why doesn't this guy just jump to a parallel universe where he is already a billionaire, rather than milking hapless gullible people of $197 each?

Ideally, he would set up some device to buy a lottery ticket online, automatically, with the numbers chosen being determined by a series of quantum events. He would have himself made unconscious temporarily, with the machine set to generate the numbers and buy the ticket just before the draw, with a device set up to blow his brains out if his numbers don't come up. If many-worlds is true, his future would branch into many futures, in which he bought every possible lottery ticket, and he would only ever wake up in worlds in which he had won: in other worlds he would have his brains blown out while asleep when his ticket loses. So maybe he can say that the worlds in which he loses are ones in which he will never make observations, and so he can disregard them?

It may seem that this is a very clever idea because it somehow allows him to manufacture a lottery win.

Really, though, I was thinking that this is a very clever idea because it gets rid of him and his nasty little business.