Irony, thy name is...

learn history first. ... stalin died before 1950.

Stalin died in 1953.

I know my Soviet history (or at least the history of premiers) better than you do, apparently, and I think you're overdue for your Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Duranty.

In point of fact, there's a good sushi restaurant in Iowa City -- Takanami, just east of the University of Iowa's Pentacrest. There's also the Drunken Fish on Laclede's Landing in St. Louis, which has the best sushi I've ever had anywhere: better than California, better than Oregon, better than anywhere out East.

The rest, though, seems like exactly the kind of vitriol I have no interest in engaging in. Sorry.

Who participates in the caucuses? It's a banner year if ten percent of eligible voters make it to a caucus. (In fact, I wonder if Iowa has ever broken ten percent.)

So, yeah, if ten percent of eligible voters care, and the other ninety percent are all "I'm going to take a long nap, wake me up on January 4" -- which seems to be the case -- then I think it's inappropriate to say that Iowans as a whole demand our caucuses be first, or that they deserve some kind of special prominence.

Don't think that the loudest voices actually represent Iowans. They represent themselves. Most Iowans just want the day after to come as quickly as possible.

Iowa and New Hampshire, small population states that they are, are legends of importance only in their own minds.

Hi. I'm an Iowan. I'd like to point out that we're not the ones who are telling CNN to keep our caucuses in the 24/7 news cycle. That's the rest of the United States. We just want to hold our caucus and be done with it. The unrelenting campaigning is something that pretty much every Iowan finds quite distasteful. Our own electoral campaigns tend to be much nicer by comparison. When Jim Leach, representing eastern Iowa's interests to the House of Representatives, lost to Jim Loebsack, the two of them parted with a handshake, as friends, and with mutual respect. When was the last time you saw a race for national office end that way? True, by Iowa standards the Leach-Loebsack race was quite a nice and pleasant one, but it wasn't unusually so or without precedent. Compare that to how the current crop of GOP candidates is going after each other, and ... well. You might begin to get an idea of why so many Iowans are so looking forward to these caucuses being over. And that's just the half of it, really. What's as bad as the very un-Iowan nature of presidential campaigns is the two-faced condescension we face every four years from people who come into the state to butter us up to our faces just to tear us down in private.

I grew up in a town of 1500 people. My high school graduating class had fifty people. And every four years, like clockwork, a whole lot of people from out East and out West would converge on our small towns, filling up small motels that sat mostly-vacant all other times, and they'd converge on our diners and try to strike up conversations with people. Then, as soon as they thought we weren't listening, we'd hear them snigger about how uncultured we are, or grouse about how impossible it was to find good sushi or Ethiopian or what-have-you, or mock our religious beliefs. When they think nobody's listening they tell their friends back Somewhere Else about how they're "lost in flyover country" and how backwards it is.

And yet, while the rest of the country is arguing about gay marriage, Iowa is actually doing it, having decided that it is required by our State constitution. (Sure, there's been political fallout over that. But that doesn't change the fact it's what we decided.) While the rest of the country is lamenting the collapse of education, Iowa quietly continues its tradition of excellence. While the rest of the country is fearful of crime, we don't bother locking our doors at night. While children nationwide are being overprotected by parents terrified of stranger danger, we let elementary-age kids walk half-a-mile or more to school, alone and unattended.

You say we're "legends of importance only in our own minds." That's exactly the sort of thing I've heard from a lot of other people. Heard it before, and I've heard it again. I don't expect anything I've said to convince you that you want to live in Iowa. You probably don't, and I understand that. But if you want to know what I think Iowa deserves to be legendary for, it's those things. The caucuses are honestly a sideshow that's a lot more trouble than they're worth, and bring a whole lot of people into the state that I'm quite comfortable them staying away from the state.

No: in fact, very few runtime-typed languages support type inference. What happens instead is that the value gets tagged with a type. E.g., in Python, when I type "x = 3", the variable x has no type attached to it, but the value 3 has the type 'int' attached to it. When the system needs to know type information, it queries the value.

Type inference is a little bit of a hard thing to do in runtime-typed languages. Not impossible, but ... interestingly wacky. Basically, the runtime environment has to be able to make a formal mathematical proof that "there is no code path in which this variable can point to any type of value except an 'int'", or what-have-you. If it's able to do that, then it might be able to optimize access to that value in ways that normal runtime typing can't. E.g., if you know something is always going to be a 32-bit integer, why not store it as a native primitive, rather than wrap it up in an object and have all the associated object overhead? That sort of thing.

Hope this helps!

Arrgh. I'm sorry, I was thinking you were the fellow who was dismissing Copenhagen as "superstitious nonsense" that few people had taken seriously in the last 50 years. My bad. I apologize.

With respect to the null hypothesis, I've heard several respectable physicists use it in the context I've given. I'm not a physicist, but I did spend a good bit of time lurking around their neck of the university during my Ph.D. program (the overlap between digital physics and computer science being fairly strong, I wound up collaborating with Ph.D. graduate students in physics a fair bit) and heard it used that way in conversation a great deal.

With respect to failure to reject the null hypothesis not being evidence in favor of the null hypothesis, this is just a recasting of "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Which is, as I've said several times by now, true. But that statement by itself does not absolve you of the responsibility for presenting extraordinary evidence for your extraordinary claims -- and claiming that the universe follows Goedel is an extraordinary claim.

Sorry, but at this point I no longer believe that you're a scientist, or even that you've taken an undergraduate-level course in QMech. Writing off Copenhagen as superstitious nonsense, claiming it hasn't been taken seriously in 50+ years, and so forth, are the sorts of errors that make me think quite the opposite of you. Had you taken one, you would almost certainly know how popular the interpretation is among physicists.

Likewise, insistence on failure to reject the null hypothesis being some kind of "fallacy" shows a willful blindness. Nobody is saying absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Instead, what I'm saying is absence of evidence means your claim is unproven and can be discarded. Which is exactly what I've done here with your claim that MWI is "scientifically plausible."

I'm finished.

Whether Copenhagen is correct is not at issue. What's at issue is whether it's nonsense. The overwhelming opinion of working physicists, as evidenced by surveys asking which interpretation they subscribe to, is that Copenhagen is not nonsense.

The professor who taught me quantum mechanics summed it up like this: interpretations are our attempt to pretend that we know what the structure of knowledge is, and that we can use that metaknowledge to interpret the confusing world of quantum mechanics. The history of epistemology gives us very little cause to hope that we know anything useful about the structure of knowledge, though. Frankly, the only reason why physicists can philosophize on par with professional philosophers is that the whole of epistemology is bunk, and everyone operates on more or less the same level of bunk. Physicists should do physics and let philosophy attend to itself.

Now, I'm not saying I agree with his entire position... but I've definitely seen enough to make me sympathize with it. If I had to declare myself as an adherent of one interpretation or another, I'd say I belong to the Epistemology Is Bunk Interpretation.

It's an argument from Bayesian statistics, actually. Werner Heisenberg has a long, distinguished track record of highly creditable contributions to physics.

Your track record is unknown, but is exceedingly unlikely to match Heisenberg's. Doesn't take a genius to figure out which side I'm going to side on.

But, hey, being a philosopher makes you much better than a Nobel Laureate physicist who invented quantum mechanics, I guess, so -- bully for you.

With respect to Copenhagen having fallen out of favor, per Max Tegmark's paper "The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: Many Worlds or Many Words?", Copenhagen is the overwhelmingly preferred interpretation among working physicists, with MWI coming second. This is from a 1997 survey, so -- your claim that it's been out of favor for 50+ years is simply not true.

Oh -- also, scientists don't use the phrase "null hypothesis" in the way statisticians do. Ask Richard Feynman, who seriously proposed a Journal of the Null Hypothesis which would publish good ideas that have been shown not to be the way the world works, in order to help keep other scientists from going down those same blind alleys.

If you want to say Feynman was falling into a fallacy, go right ahead. Me, I'm going to side with Feynman.