# Category Archives: Uncategorised

## Why I am unhappy about all derivations of the Born rule (including mine)

There are a lot of derivations of the Born rule in the literature. To cite just a few that I’m most familiar with, and illustrate different strategies: by Everett, Deutsch, Wallace, Żurek, Vaidman, Carroll and Sebens, me, and Mandolesi. I’m … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorised | 11 Comments

## P-values and Bayes factors

I’m feeling bad about having used $p$-values in my paper about Bell inequalities, despite considering them bullshit. The reason we decided to do it is because we wanted the paper to be useful for experimentalists, and all of them use … Continue reading

## Hilbert’s Hotel and Gödel’s Freezer

A friend of mine, Flavien Hirsch, invented a fascinating paradox in probability, called Hilbert’s Hotel and Gödel’s Freezer. Technically speaking it is the same thing as the Sleeping Beauty problem, which I’ve written about here, but I find it much … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorised | 1 Comment

## Beautiful angles with beautiful cosines

I’ve recently proved a theorem that is probably well-known to anyone that studied number theory. I didn’t know it before, though, and it was a lot of fun, so I decided to write it up here in case there are … Continue reading

## Implementing impossible functions via tomography

A long time ago I had a conversation with Daniel Nagaj about the following problem: given access to an unknown unitary gate $U$, is it possible to build the gate control-$U$ out of it? Nagaj argued that it was impossible, … Continue reading

## Explicitly local quantum mechanics

I’ve just attended a nice online talk by Charles Bédard about his somewhat recent paper, where he studies the explicitly local model of quantum mechanics developed by Deutsch and Hayden, with a twist by Raymond-Robichaud. I think it’s a neat … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorised | 6 Comments

## Why QBism is completely empty

A good friend of mine, Jacques Pienaar, has recently converted to QBism, as often happens to people that spend too much time around Chris Fuchs. Saddened by these news, I’ve decided to write a blog post explaining why QBism doesn’t … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorised | 44 Comments

## Mistakes, mistakes, mitsakes

When I write someone to tell them there’s a mistake in their paper, I usually get one of these five reactions, ordered from best to worst: “It’s not a mistake.” (and they’re right) “Indeed, that’s wrong, I’ll correct it.” “It’s … Continue reading

A colleague of mine, Simon Morelli, told me about a fascinating puzzle, the two-envelope paradox: you can take one of two envelopes with money inside them, promised to contain one $x$ and the other $2x$ for some $x > 0$. … Continue reading