“But here’s the twist. Unlike the mathematical theory of probability, this quantum recipe requires us to make different possible stories cancel each other out, or fully or partially reinforce each other.”
This shouldn’t be a “twist”. Really, it’s just a verification of deBroglie’s ideas that everything essentially has a wave nature. Any time you have interacting waves, you have to take into account wave harmonics, and wave harmonics describe exactly the kinds of situations that they are talking about here.
Waves that interact, having the same frequency and amplitude, while “in phase” with each other will form one wave with twice the amplitude. Waves that are out of phase cancel each other out. If one wave has half the frequency of the other, they can partially reinforce (every other wave peak is doubled) or partially cancel (every other peak canceled).
So, a lot of these seemingly strange consequences of quantum physics are easily resolved conceptually if you just remember that we are dealing with waves, and not little pinballs whizzing around. In QM, this is tacitly acknowledged by describing everything by its “wave equation” or “probability wave”, but conceptually, I think people still don’t really accept all the implications of it.
Interesting.