David Wallace

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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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Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal · David Wallace: Why Many Worlds Is the Only Consistent Interpretation · 29 May 2025 podcast

A probabilistic theory.

you're always kind of sticking your neck out.

You're saying something like, Well, I I think it's extremely likely

That.

The theory is true.

Because I think if conditional theoreming true, it's extremely likely I'd see this and I did.

Conditional on the theory being false, it's extremely unlikely I'd see this, but I did.

Uh and so my decision, if you like, is to, you know, publish the paper, claim the result is true, defend it at conferences, you know.

Build technology that relies on it.

Um so

In a sense there's a decision theoretic component in just scientific theory testing.

Um and if you could show

that it would be decision theoretically sensible to accept quantum theory if you got a large amount of data that confirm quantum mechanics' predictions and reject it if you didn't, even if quantum mechanics should be understood in many worlds terms, that would be a very large step towards establishing that the probability like things in Everetting quantum mechanics really are probabilities.

So so that's the answer to the like wh why care about it?

Th in terms of the slightly more biographical question.

So David Deutsch did some work on this in the

Well, I guess it wasn't published till ninety nine, it was in circ it was sort of being circulated informally in the mid nineties, where what he basically does is he takes um

very simplified piece of decision theory and he says if you assume the axioms of this decision theory, but without assuming anything about probability,

And if you assume the axioms of quantum mechanics, but without assuming anything about probability, and you put them together, you derive the fact that the decision theoretic agent bets according to the mods grand attitudes.

So effectively you derive the born rule.

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