You are quite right about a better analogy being the area under a curve.
Over in the Lotteries and MWI thread, there’s a few pages of discussion in which serious decisions about how to live one’s life—using the archetypical example of whether or not a lottery ticket could be worth buying—depend on the differences between those two cases. Even if nobody else sees any point in the exercise, I’m entirely willing to work with whatever mental tricks I can come up with to help my own imagination and intuition better handle the ideas involved.
If I do go for a new word again, then one possibility is a word meaning “X fraction of timelines in the future of the designated time; if no time is designated, then it is assumed to be the beginning of the sentence.”, and combine it with bei’e for the classical-probability measurement. This could make expressing, “If I’m cryonically preserved tomorrow, I’m 30% confident that I’ll be revived in 10% of future timelines, 60% confident that I’ll be revived in 1% of future timelines, and 10% confident that I’ll be revived in near-0% of future timelines” much easier.
You are quite right about a better analogy being the area under a curve.
Over in the Lotteries and MWI thread, there’s a few pages of discussion in which serious decisions about how to live one’s life—using the archetypical example of whether or not a lottery ticket could be worth buying—depend on the differences between those two cases. Even if nobody else sees any point in the exercise, I’m entirely willing to work with whatever mental tricks I can come up with to help my own imagination and intuition better handle the ideas involved.
If I do go for a new word again, then one possibility is a word meaning “X fraction of timelines in the future of the designated time; if no time is designated, then it is assumed to be the beginning of the sentence.”, and combine it with bei’e for the classical-probability measurement. This could make expressing, “If I’m cryonically preserved tomorrow, I’m 30% confident that I’ll be revived in 10% of future timelines, 60% confident that I’ll be revived in 1% of future timelines, and 10% confident that I’ll be revived in near-0% of future timelines” much easier.