memes

I do not understand the diatribe you included about religious cultists tricking me

was clearly talking specifically about people who mislead others about Bell's theorem. You seem to have interpreted what I said. It was not generally applicable statement regarding all of your viewpoints you hold, but a specific viewpoint which is misrepresented in the popular media. I think rather than taking my warning seriously, you misinterpreted my warning as a personal attack even though it wasn't talking about you but people who may mislead you with false claims like "Bell's theorem rules out hidden variables," which it doesn't, but is commonly statement as if it were fact.

I think the mathematical structure of these laws remains relevant to the debate though, because it negates the logical conclusion of our universe as a mechanical, pre-set system of events, at least by this level of understanding.

My only point was that is ultimately a philosophical position and is not "proven." Something like pilot wave theory makes all the same predictions as orthodox quantum mechanics yet is "mechanical." Yes, if you want to argue that we currently don't have a good reason to believe in anything beyond quantum mechanics and so we should take it as the final word for now, then the universe clearly is not "mechanical" but obeys certain stochastic laws (I guess unless someone believe in MWI but I have my own criticisms of that). My point was less that the orthodox formulation of QM is not stochastic but that it's not proven the universe cannot be deterministic in the Laplacian sense. There isn't a no-go theorem that rules it out as a possibility, so technically if someone was convinced for philosophical reasons that the universe is deterministic then you can't prove them wrong.

At best you could give philosophical arguments as to why you think that is a less reasonable belief, maybe by invoking Occam's razor or something, but they may have a rebuttal for that. Tim Maudlin for example is a major philosophy who upholds that the universe is mechanical and has rebuttals to the Occam's razor argument. For example, he criticizes how to count complexity so he argues pilot wave is not inherently more complicated, and he also criticizes other interpretations that stick with the orthodox formalism as not making philosophical sense and thus justifies the change in formalism based on logical consistency.

Not saying I agree with those arguments just pointing out that they exist, and so we should be more careful than to say it is definitely proven that there are no hidden variables.

I’d also like to point out that nomological determinism is not inherently at odds with free will. I think most modern philosophers are compatibilists on some level

Yes, you're right, I should have specified that I was talking about non-compatibilist free will. Personally, I think compatibilism is just word games. I don't like the idea of redefining free will to make it compatible with determinism. It just confuses the discussion. But that is just me, I guess.