SneerClub

A reminder that Rationalists have absolutely No Fucking Clue what they're talking about when it comes to quantum mechanics, and this is evident from the very top.

Here is their prophet's, Eliezer Yudkowsky's, brilliant writings on QM: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5vZD32EynD9n94dhr/configurations-and-amplitude

In this stunning vindication of Dunning-Kruger, EY sets up a thought experiment of a photon being ejected at a half-silvered mirror. Then, he realizes that QM is formulated with complex numbers, so he decides to shoehorn them by imagining a "computer program" that computes the result of the experiment and using the complex numbers as the internal state (because he read somewhere that a wave function is a complex-valued function). From there, he goes on to realize that he needs to actually justify the use of complex numbers, so he drops the fact that multiplying the "internal state" by i represents the photon turning 90 degrees (what?! yes, multiplying by i rotates complex numbers by 90 degrees but this has literally nothing to do with the direction the photon travels, what the ACTUAL fuck am I reading?)

I seriously want to pull my hair out after reading this asinine nonsense. MIT OCW's QM course is extremely accessible to anyone with a decent high-school math education but these chucklefucks' need to prove to themselves that they're smart supercedes any process of actual learning.

edit because I can't stop sneering: "wave function collapse" is purely born of the Copenhagen interpretation which EY rails against as ridiculous (which, admittedly, isn't a totally unpopular opinion for real physicists to have). This is, of course, 100% lost on SBF.