Sean Carroll

the episode I had with Daniel Harlow, where we talked in a semi-technical way about quantum mechanics, then got totally technical at the end just for fun.

And some people like that, some people were mildly amused and put up with it, but didn't want to have too much of it.

I'm not going to try to get at that level of technicality.

I'm not just going to give you a lecture

that I would give to professional physicists about this kind of stuff.

I'm going to try my best to make everything as understandable as I can.

But the issues we're talking about are not about like Schrodinger's cat or not about things that you're familiar with from popular discussions of quantum mechanics or many worlds or anything like that.

They're very, very specific research level questions that I'm going to have to try to explain as best as I can, but I may or may not succeed at that.

So there you go.

The other thing is I want to be clear that there's a certain way of construing what I'm doing here, and people ask for it in the responses to the AMA and so forth, which is, okay, steel man the objections to many worlds because you've always been telling us how many worlds is great, but you've never really told us why it's not so great.

And I have to confess that the whole idea of steel manning is not really my vibe.

I do think that if you understand or want to try to understand difficult issues, you should understand arguments on both sides.

That's fine.

But I'm not interested in sort of setting up a competition, like a prize fight between the best arguments for a theory and the best arguments against the theory, and then putting them in the arena and see who wins.

I don't think that's the way things work.

I think that rather than coming up with the steel man version of this argument or that argument, I want to come up with the correct version, the best version of every argument.

I'm not going to try to make an argument sound stronger than it is or weaker than it is.

So I'm more about just getting things right than about steel manning or straw manning or whatever.

Of course, your mileage may vary whether I actually succeed in that as well.

OK, with that throat clearing out of the way, let's remember what quantum mechanics says.