and psychology is all we’re talking about when assessing “normality”
I have always taken “it all adds up to normality” to mean not “you should expect everything to feel normal” but “actually, when you work out the physics, all this counterintuitive weird-feeling stuff produces the world you’re already used to, and if it feels weird then you should try to adjust your intuitions if possible”.
I’m not sure there’s much I can say to help—it’s clear from your comments that you understand in theory what’s going on, and it’s just that your “naive branch-counting brain” is naive and cares about the wrong things :-).
Maybe this will help: Suppose you’re visiting a big city. Consider the following two propositions. (1) There is one person in this city who would cheerfully knock you on the head and steal your wallet. (2) Half the people in this city would cheerfully knock you on the head and steal your wallet. I don’t know about you, but I would be really scared to learn #2 and totally unsurprised and unmoved by #1. Similarly: “there are branches in which you jump in front of the train”—well, sure there are, and there are branches where I abruptly decide to declare myself Emperor of the World and get taken off to a mental hospital, and branches where the earth is about to get hit by an asteroid that miraculously got missed by everyone’s observations and we all die. But there aren’t “a lot” of any of these sorts of branch (i.e., the measure is very small). What would worry me is to find that a substantial fraction of branches (reckoned by measure) have me jumping in front of the train. But what it takes to make that true is exactly the same thing as it takes to make it true that “with high probability, you will jump in front of the train”.
I have always taken “it all adds up to normality” to mean not “you should expect everything to feel normal” but “actually, when you work out the physics, all this counterintuitive weird-feeling stuff produces the world you’re already used to, and if it feels weird then you should try to adjust your intuitions if possible”.
I’m not sure there’s much I can say to help—it’s clear from your comments that you understand in theory what’s going on, and it’s just that your “naive branch-counting brain” is naive and cares about the wrong things :-).
Maybe this will help: Suppose you’re visiting a big city. Consider the following two propositions. (1) There is one person in this city who would cheerfully knock you on the head and steal your wallet. (2) Half the people in this city would cheerfully knock you on the head and steal your wallet. I don’t know about you, but I would be really scared to learn #2 and totally unsurprised and unmoved by #1. Similarly: “there are branches in which you jump in front of the train”—well, sure there are, and there are branches where I abruptly decide to declare myself Emperor of the World and get taken off to a mental hospital, and branches where the earth is about to get hit by an asteroid that miraculously got missed by everyone’s observations and we all die. But there aren’t “a lot” of any of these sorts of branch (i.e., the measure is very small). What would worry me is to find that a substantial fraction of branches (reckoned by measure) have me jumping in front of the train. But what it takes to make that true is exactly the same thing as it takes to make it true that “with high probability, you will jump in front of the train”.