That pre-determined value idea is exactly local hidden variables, and Bell's inequality rules it out, Aspect's 1982 CHSH experiment measured the violation.
Superdeterminism and retrocausality both allow for local hidden variables - it’s just that they don’t satisfy Bell’s assumptions.
Similarly, superdeterminism is simply the application of the determinism that was believed to apply to physics before QM, to QM itself. In a way, one might have expected it to be the default interpretation.
Laplace expressed this in "A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities" in 1814: "We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of that which is to follow. [...] For [an intelligence that has sufficient information] nothing would be uncertain, and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes."
Superdeterminism essentially extends this idea of deterministic physical evolution to quantum mechanics. It could be considered an appropriate default simply because it was previously considered to be, not only the default, but the strongly believed truth.
> Superdeterminism says that there’s no way to pick your experimental choices in a way that reveals things because any possible random number sources you could use have contrived correlations that prevent that
You're arguing against a consequence of superdeterminism, not its motivation. Its motivation is as I've described.
The word "contrived" is doing some heavy lifting in your statement. Nothing needs to be contrived in superdeterminism, even if it seems that way to an observer within the universe.
The explanatory problem you've alluded to only arises because we're trying to understand the universe from within the universe. The universe is under no obligation to make itself sensible to us.
Essentially, you're saying little more than that you don't like the idea of superdeterminism.
(And yeah, preference for any of these interpretations will essentially boil down to what idea you like the most, or more likely what idea you dislike the least. With QM you pick your reasonable base assumptions and then take the uncomfortable conclusions that result)
Right, but we're talking about alternative interpretations here - something that is not MWI, Bohmian, or a collapse theory like Copenhagen, GRW, CSL. So without many worlds or pilot waves, we want to explain how measurement outcomes could be deterministic.
Conceptually, superdeterminism does that simply by positing that as part of a deterministic universe themselves, measurement settings are not independent of the systems being measured.
Actual models of superdeterminism (e.g. Donadi–Hossenfelder (2022)) seem inelegant and mathematically more complex than MWI. Which doesn't mean it's physically wrong or "weirder than MWI".
A theory that says that unicorns exist but only go places where no one will discover them (even though they aren’t invisible), is dumb.
A scientific theory should be compatible with experimentation.
It doesn't require a contrivance or a conspiracy. It simply requires determinism, which before QM, is something that was assumed to be true.
If superdeterminism is true, we'll have difficulty demonstrating that scientifically. Searching under a streetlight for the truth, because that's the only place you can see, isn't going to save you from that.
Perhaps we've got it backwards and quantum entanglement is what defines "locality" rather than mysteriously existing in the face of it.
Superdeterminism implies that things are fixed in advance in such a way that the things we "choose" to measure always looks as if there are no local hidden variables (e.g. Bell's inequality) even though there are.
This is a metaphor and not the state or experiment that superdeterminism seeks to answer. I am also speaking well outside the areas of physics I was trained in. So huge grain of salt.
In classical determinism, the trajectories of all billard balls can be derived precisely from their initial conditions. Due to sensitivity to initial conditions and our ability to know them precisely, we can see chaotic mixing behavior where the trajectory of even two billiard balls that start at nearly the same place become more and more uncorrelated as time goes on as they bounce around and into each other. One expects that many accessible observables and functions loose detectable correlations as this billiard ball universe goes on and the billiard balls go on to roughly fill the full 6D state space up to conservation of momentum.
Now imagine the weirder scenario, that there exists some function and statistical comparison you can make between state variables from sets of billiard balls. Although these state variables themselves seem uncorrelated after enough time has passed, there are these properties that always hold with perfect correlation even after infinite chaotic time bouncing around. The points in state space that the balls cover is restricted to some manifold where these statistical properties are true when checked. The system cannot evolve in a way where those correlations of bulk quantities would disappear.
In this toy metaphor it’s not so horrifically odd. Superdetermism gets more flak because: (i) the state space and property in question is so much weirder and more complicated than the kinematic example, the correlations are between objects that measure and the objects being measured! (ii) if these properties are always true under any check we can make there is no way to falsify. Then it doesn’t matter if the behavior is from some unimaginable underlying universal state space geometry or local quantum effects. This same argument could also be applied more generally and inappropriately to reduce any experiment to “that’s just the way the structure of the universe is”.
Meanwhile, superdeterminism is the idea that you can still have realism and locality by claiming that Bell's Inequality experiments are invalid because the universe could somehow "know" you are performing a Bell's Inequality experiment and rig it to get the "wrong" answer. Superdeterminism is equivalent to saying that we can't prove smoking causes lung cancer, because the universe might rig any science experiments to make it look like smoking causes cancer. Anytime you ask why the universe would do that or how you can prove anything in such a universe, they shrug their shoulders. It's a completely BS idea that got traction because specific people pushed it and others don't understand quantum physics enough to know how unserious of an idea it is.