David Wallace

speaker

1,940 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2025 last heard 20 Jul

David Wallace’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal · Emily Adlam & David Wallace: The Quantum Interpretation That Divides Physicists · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

One person's dilemma is another person's.

Yeah, I mean, there's a difference between things that happen due to...

really low probability mechanical events that still happen in certain branches versus things that happen as a consequence of things we naturally analyze as my choices so um is there a branch where i choose to i don't know pick up this laptop and smash it on the ground let's say um no um because i think my decision not to do that is like a really obvious and boring and clear um

act of my rational processes playing out, is there some kind of neurological malfunction in my brain which would cause a whole bunch of... very low probability, cause a whole bunch of neurons to fire that would cause my arms to move in such a way that I picked the laptop up and smashed it?

Yeah, sure.

I mean, almost certainly.

And therefore, yeah, there's presumably some...

incredibly low weight branch in which that happens.

But it's not as if there's some sense in which I chose that to happen.

And if you're going to find Everett viable anyway, and this is exactly what Emily wants to get off the bus, then you're going to have to have some reason to be unconcerned about even extremely bad things happening in Everett

exceptionally low weight branches, or more or less generally you have to be committed to a kind of strategy that, crudely speaking, treats exceptionally low weight branches as the kind of thing I just don't need to worry about.

And there are plenty of deep and interesting philosophical issues as to why you should make that commitment.

And again, if you're sufficiently convinced of your priors and you don't think it can be done, then you might reject Everett entirely on those grounds.

But conditional on accepting Everett in the first place, you're going to be committed to the idea that you don't much care if bad things happen in incredibly low weight branches.

So there's no particular reason, I'd say, to care differently or in some qualitatively different sense than in the Nun Everett case.

That's a strange line.

I mean, it can't be disqualifying of a theory that allows for people who behave very irrationally, but nonetheless things work out for them.

There are actual people like that.

Some of them are in high office.

I mean, look, this is getting into the weeds of the rationality stuff, but I mean, at some level, it's not quite clear even what it means to say constraints of rationality are not available to you.

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