I stumbled upon this 2010 post by Chad Orzel talking about the many worlds interpretation to quantum mechanics. Chad has this to say about his general feelings towards the field of interpretations:
My real view is, alas, kind of wishy-washy: I’m agnostic about quantum interpretations, mostly because as far as we know, they’re all meta-theories, not proper scientific theories. There is no experimental test known that clearly favors one interpretation over another, so which one you like is ultimately a question of taste. They’re kind of fun to talk about, but absent a way to distinguish between them, they’re not more than that.
Matt Leifer has a great reply in the comments section:
You know, I couldn’t disagree more about this. In fact, I find it truly bizarre that quantum theory is pretty much the ONLY scientific theory where people do not think the the interpretation of the theory is an integral part of the theory itself. At least, I can’t think of any other examples.
Whilst it is true that an interpretation must reproduce the confirmed predictions of QM, they can differ quite a bit outside of that. The obvious example is spontaneous collapse theories, but there is also nonequilibrium Bohmian mechanics. Some may argue that these are different theories rather than different interpretations, but I think the dividing line between different theories and interpretations is rather blurry. It is not guaranteed that the interpretations will all agree when we are outside the realms of established physics, e.g. in quantum gravity.
The other thing that I think interpretations do for you is that they give different intuitions for how to proceed theoretically on certain problems. For example, the approach one takes to the emergence of classicality or to quantum chaos depends heavily on whether you view the state vector as an epistemic state (state of knowledge) or an ontic state (state of reality). This is one of the key issues that interpretations differ on.
In other words, interpretations CAN make a very real difference to how one does physics, and on controversial issues they probably SHOULD make a difference.
I like the way Matt puts this. Different interpretations provide different perspectives and approaches to a problem. I have found this to be true in my own work.
I still do not have a preferred interpretation, but that is because I know enough now to know that I still do not know enough to make an informed decision. There are to many nitty gritty subtleties that remain. I wish that someone would write a clear textbook on the subject. The quantum foundations version of Michael Nielsen's and Isaac Chuang's Quantum Computation and Quantum Information. I think such a text would help the field communicate and share with other branches of physics more effectively. I would certainly buy it. Is anyone working on such a project currently?