Question for the day: what do libertarianism and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics have in common? Interest in the two worldviews seems to be positively correlated: think of quantum computing pioneer David Deutsch, or several prominent posters over at Overcoming Bias, or … oh, alright, my sample size is admittedly pretty small.

Some connections are obvious: libertarianism and MWI are both grand philosophical theories that start from premises that almost all educated people accept (quantum mechanics in the one case, Econ 101 in the other), and claim to reach conclusions that most educated people reject, or are at least puzzled by (the existence of parallel universes / the desirability of eliminating fire departments). Both theories seem to have a strong following with nerds who read science fiction and post to Internet discussion groups, but a relatively poorer following with both John Q. Public and Alistair K. Intellectual. (Needless to say, these stereotypes tell us almost nothing about the theories’ validity.)

My own hypothesis has to do with bullet-dodgers versus bullet-swallowers. A bullet-dodger is a person who says things like:

Sure, obviously if you pursued that particular line of reasoning to an extreme, then you’d get such-and-such an absurd-seeming conclusion. But that very fact suggests that other forces might come into play that we don’t understand yet or haven’t accounted for. So let’s just make a mental note of it and move on.

Faced with exactly the same situation, a bullet-swallower will exclaim:

The entire world should follow the line of reasoning to precisely this extreme, and this is the conclusion, and if a ‘consensus of educated opinion’ finds it disagreeable or absurd, then so much the worse for educated opinion! Those who accept this are intellectual heroes; those who don’t are cowards.

In a lifetime of websurfing, I don’t think I’ve ever read an argument by a libertarian or a Many-Worlds proponent that didn’t sound like the latter.

We know plenty of historical examples where the bullet-swallowers were gloriously right: Moore’s Law, Darwinism, the abolition of slavery, women’s rights. On the other hand, at various points within the last 150 years, extremely smart people also reasoned themselves to the inescapable conclusions that aether had to exist for light to be a wave in, that capitalism was reaching its final crisis, that only a world government could prevent imminent nuclear war, and that space colonies would surely exist by 2000. In those cases, even if you couldn’t spot any flaws in the arguments, you still would’ve been wise to doubt their conclusions. (Or are you sure you would have spotted the flaws where Maxwell and Kelvin, Russell and Einstein did not?)

Here’s a favorite analogy. The world is a real-valued function that’s almost completely unknown to us, and that we only observe in the vicinity of a single point x 0 . To our surprise, we find that, within that tiny vicinity, we can approximate the function extremely well by a Taylor series.

“Aha!” exclaim the bullet-swallowers. “So then the function must be the infinite series, neither more nor less.”

“Not so fast,” reply the bullet-dodgers. “All we know is that we can approximate the function in a small open interval around x 0 . Who knows what unsuspected phenomena might be lurking beyond it?”

“Intellectual cowardice!” the first group snorts. “You’re just like the Jesuit schoolmen, who dismissed the Copernican system as a mere calculational device! Why can’t you accept what our best theory is clearly telling us?”

So who’s right: the bullet-swallowing libertarian Many-Worlders, or the bullet-dodging intellectual kibitzers? Well, that depends on whether the function is sin(x) or log(x).