Historically they often actually have the reverse effect.

Sanctions aren’t subtle, they aren’t some sneaky way of hurting a country and so the people blame the government and try to overthrow it. They are about as subtle as bombing a country then blaming the government. Everyone who lives there sees directly the impacts of the sanctions and knows the cause is the foreign power. When a foreign power is laying siege on a country, then it often has the effect of strengthening people’s support for the government. Even the government’s flaws can be overlooked because they can point to the foreign country’s actions to blame.

Indeed, North Korea is probably the most sanctioned country in history yet is also one of the most stable countries on the planet.

I thought it was a bit amusing when Russia seized Crimea and the western world’s brilliant response was to sanction Crimea as well as to shut down the water supply going to Crimea, which Russia responded by building one of the largest bridges in Europe to facilitate trade between Russia and Crimea as well as investing heavily into building out new water infrastructure.

If a foreign country is trying to starve you, and the other country is clearly investing a lot of money into trying to help you… who do you think you are winning the favor of with such a policy?

For some reason the western mind cannot comprehend this. They constantly insist that the western world needs to lay economic siege on all the countries not aligned with it and when someone points out that this is just making people of those countries hate the western world and want nothing to do with them and strengthening the resolve of their own governments, they just deflect by calling you some sort of “apologist” or whatever.

Indeed, during the Cuban Thaw when Obama lifted some sanctions, Obama became rather popular in Cuba, to the point that his approval ratings at times even surpassed that of Fidel, and Cuba started to implement reforms to allow for further economic cooperation with US government and US businesses. They were very happy to become an ally of the US, but then suddenly Democrats and Republicans decided to collectively do a 180 u-turn and abandon all of that and destroy all the good will that have built up.

But the people of Cuba are not going to capitulate because the government is actually popular, as US internal documents constantly admits to, and that popularity will only be furthered by the increased blockade. US is just going to create a North Korean style scenario off the coast of the US.

I’ve used LLMs quite a few times to find partial derivatives / gradient functions for me, and I know it’s correct because I plug them into a gradient descent algorithm and it works. I would never trust anything an LLM gives blindly no matter how advanced it is, but in this particular case I could actually test the output since it’s something I was implementing in an algorithm, so if it didn’t work I would know immediately.

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Putting aside the fact that you cannot “experimentally prove” anything as proof is for mathematics, claiming you can experimentally demonstrate fundamental uncertainty is, to put it bluntly, incoherent. Uncertainty is a negative, it is a statement that there is no underlying cause for something. You cannot empirically demonstrate the absence of an unknown cause.

If you believe in fundamental uncertainty, it would be appropriate to argue in favor of this using something like the principle of parsimony, pointing out the fact that we have no evidence for an underlying cause so we shouldn’t believe in one. Claiming that you have “proven” there is no underlying cause is backwards logic. It is like saying you have proven there is no god as opposed to simply saying you lack belief in one. Whatever “proof” you come up with to rule out a particular god, someone could change the definition of that god to get around your “proof.”

Einstein, of course, was fully aware of such arguments and acknowledged such a possibility that there may be no cause, but he put forwards his own arguments as to why it leads to logical absurdities to treat the randomness of quantum mechanics as fundamental; it’s not merely a problem of randomness, but he showed with a thought experiment involving atomic decay that it forces you to have to reject the very existence of a perspective-independent reality.

There is no academic consensus on how to address Einstein’s arguments, and so to claim he’s been “proven wrong” is quite a wild claim to make.

“[W]hat is proved by impossibility proofs is lack of imagination.” (John Bell)

Quantum immortality is crackpot quantum woo pseudoscience.

How are you any better than a neonazi? Either you outright support a modern day holocaust or you are in denial of it. I genuinely don’t understand how a supposed human being can be so low. Americans in general are just disgusting people all around. Your beloved holocaust-loving candidate also ran on being “tough on the border” and having the “most lethal military in the world.” You people are just jingoistic, ultranationalist fascist freaks, completely brainwashed by your state and incapable of having a shred of empathy for others, gleefully cheering at the dismemberment of hundreds of thousands of babies and begging for just more militarization and aggression while your country is falling the fuck apart. Wake up. Normal human beings with a conscience who are not part of your brainwashed jingoistic bubble aren’t fine with industrial-scale genocide and endless war just because the person who does it is blue, but I know you brainwashed Americans cannot possibly even grasp that idea because the ultranationalistic brainwashing has rendered you incapable of conscious thought.

I would still hate the USA if Blue MAGA was doing a genocide and immigration crackdowns and jingoistic hypermilitarism.

the founding fathers would probably have a heart attack seeing that women and black people have some rights

you live in a fourth world country and are so mass deluded by your state media you think people are jealous of it xD

Sadly not that easy. Some countries don’t offer permanent residency at all, some offer it but it requires hoops not realistic for some people like marrying into it, some might have more options but then can be very competitive, and of course many places if you move to you will have to learn a whole new language which is hard for someone passed the critical period. Picking up the language and culture could take literal decades and if you don’t have connections to help you settle in during that time you’re probably not going to have a good time. Also the USA tries to discourage you from leaving by requiring you to submit taxes even if you don’t live in the USA anymore. You can only get out of it by renouncing your US citizenship which would make it harder to visit family. Not to mention up and moving can be initially rather expensive until things settle down. There are many barriers which can be overcome but I would not say it is “easy.”

Economics isn’t supposed to make sense, it’s just meant to justify the prevailing system for the time. It is like theology back when we used to live under religious monarchies. It treats itself as “academic,” has universities and degrees, very serious “scholarly” debate, entire textbooks written on it, all its adherents will insist that it is a genuine scholarly enterprise and anyone who disagrees just “doesn’t understand it,” but it is ultimately not a genuine scientific program but merely exists to justify the prevailing order at the time.

Nah, they’re right, it is fantasy. I think some people have in their heads that particles spread out like waves in 3D space and Many Worlds is just like an objective collapse model where it collapses back into a particle when you look at it, but where all outcomes happen in a different branch of the multiverse rather than just having one outcome.

The reality is that it is only actually possible to consistently map quantum waves to 3D space when you have a single particle. The moment you introduce two or three, it quickly breaks down because the number of quantum waves grows exponentially. If you have 3 spin-1/2 particles then you would describe their state with 8 waves. You cannot consistently break apart 8 into 3. You end up quickly finding that it is actually impossible to assign the waves to any location at all in space or time, so you cannot think of them as something like a propagating field mode or anything like that.

These are waves made of nothing that do not exist anywhere and nobody can see them. One of the weirdest things about quantum mechanics I do not think people appreciate enough is how you evolve something that seems to have no relationship at all to the real-world system and yet it can predict its behavior statistically.

Most other interpretations see the waves as playing some role in determining where the particle in 3D space actually shows up. This is where MWI begins to make no sense: it denies that there ever even is a particle at all and physical reality is just the invisible waves. It does not actually posit that when an observation is made, the wave is reduced to an eigenstate on two different branches of a multiverse. It denies that there is ever a reduction at all.

Imagine a photon hits a beam splitter and has a 50%/50% chance of being reflected/transmitted, and you have two detectors on either side. At the end of the day, you will detect one or the other. But MWI denies that you will detect one or the other. It does not actually posit that the universe literally splits into two branches where you detect one or the other, because if all that exists is the quantum state and the quantum state also never reduces to anything, then neither detectors actually ever enter into an eigenstate where you can say a detection was made.

If you take MWI seriously, then what it is literally doing is denying the entirety of the reality that we observe. Everything we observe is just a lie, and true reality merely consists of a single giant infinite-dimensional wave that exists nowhere, is made of nothing, and nobody can ever see it. But clearly that is not what we perceive in the real-world, so MWI proponents have to claim what we perceive is an “illusion” created by “consciousness,” and then will just kick the can down the road and say that the mystery of why what we perceive is nothing like “true” reality is caught up in the “mystery of consciousness” and when we solve that then we will also understand how the “illusion” is created. It doesn’t really “solve” anything but just shifts one loaded topic under the umbrella of another.

Tim Maudlin has a good lecture on this problem in particular.

MWI proponents also constantly misrepresents the state of MWI to make it seem more “proven” than it actually is, such as repeatedly making the false claim that it is “simpler” because it deletes the Born rule. The Born rule was not added because it is funny, it was added because it is necessary rule to actually make predictions with the theory, to tie the quantum waves back to what we actually observe. If you delete it, you are left without any ability to derive probabilities, at least without adding another assumption.

Lev Vaidman did a survey of all the attempts to derive the Born rule in the literature and found every single one of them ends up introducing some additional assumption somewhere. They always at some point need to take on an assumption as arbitrary as the Born rule itself. Sean himself published a paper where he tries to develop a “quantum epistemic separability principle” to derive it which is based on doing a partial trace on the universal wave function and treating the diagonal entries in the reduced density matrix as probabilities, yet Richard Dawid and Simon Friederich pointed out in a response paper that there is no coherent justification for his ESP-QM other than it simply being proposed for the purpose of deriving the Born rule, and there is no justification that the diagonals of a reduced density matrix even tell you anything about probabilities unless you’re already assuming the Born rule.

You can derive the Born rule through Gleason’s theorem, but Gleason’s theorem relies on one of its assumptions the idea that the quantum state actually translates to classical probabilities across classical measurement devices. This is obviously something denied in MWI as there are no classical measurement devices, and so Gleason’s theorem cannot be used to justify the Born rule for MWI.

There is also an issue with locality. The EPR paper is basically a no-go theorem against local psi-complete interpretations of quantum mechanics. You cannot have a local psi-complete interpretation. MWI proponents may try to say it is “local” in Hilbert space, but this is rather meaningless as locality refers to position in 3D space. Something that is nonlocal is superluminal, it moves through space faster than light, but quantum waves do not “move.” They have no position. The concept of locality is hardly relevant to them. If you actually look at the behavior of particles in 3D space, then MWI is manifestly nonlocal. I am not even claiming it being nonlocal is inherently a flaw, but more that they always claim it is local when you just look at the mathematics and it is not meaningfully local in any sense.

Sean also likes to say misleading statements like MWI is just “taking the Schrodinger equation seriously.” This plays into a myth pushed by David Deutsch, which I constantly see this fallacy repeated by MWI believers, which is that the only two interpretations are MWI, which says things always evolve according to the Schrodinger equation, or objective collapse models, which say they do not, and since it’s trivial to prove that objective collapse models are not mathematically consistent with quantum mechanics, therefore if you just “take the Schrodinger equation seriously” then you must believe in MWI.

But this is fallacious because objective collapse models are incredibly niche and hardly anyone buys into objective collapse models anyways, except maybe Penrose and his crew these days, but it’s literally like <1% of academics. No interpretation is an objective collapse model, because objective collapse models necessarily make different predictions, so they fall under the category of a whole different theoretical model. There are like a couple dozen interpretations in the literature and they all “take the Schrodinger equation seriously.” Even Copenhagen does not claim that there is literally a physical collapse but treats it as merely epistemic.

Indeed, all interpretations treat the “collapse” as an epistemic measurement update in some way, including even MWI (as you are merely “realizing what branch you’re on”). When it actually comes to interpretations, MWI’s competition is other interpretations, not objective collapse theories. Poking holes in objective collapse theories doesn’t somehow provide evidence that MWI is correct.

Quantum mechanics does not have much to do with consciousness.