It’s not like area of a rectangle. It’s like area under a curve. You’re x% sure that something will happen in f(x)% of Everett branches. The curve being a rectangle is just a special case. You’re not going to find an easy way to say it, because there’s an infinite number of ways you can end up with 5% probability, and you can’t quickly distinguish one way in particular.
If you had some reason you wanted to distinguish those two particular cases, you could make up a word for it, but since neither comes up often, I see no point.
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.
Logical probabilities. This is precisely the distinction between logical uncertainty and the kind you’re stuck with after achieving logical omniscience.
No, it’s not. It is the most obvious case of being 5% sure that something is true in every Everett branch, but it’s not the only one. For example, I think a particle has the same mass in every Everett branch, but not even logical omniscience will tell you the exact mass.
It’s not like area of a rectangle. It’s like area under a curve. You’re x% sure that something will happen in f(x)% of Everett branches. The curve being a rectangle is just a special case. You’re not going to find an easy way to say it, because there’s an infinite number of ways you can end up with 5% probability, and you can’t quickly distinguish one way in particular.
If you had some reason you wanted to distinguish those two particular cases, you could make up a word for it, but since neither comes up often, I see no point.
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.
Logical probabilities. This is precisely the distinction between logical uncertainty and the kind you’re stuck with after achieving logical omniscience.
No, it’s not. It is the most obvious case of being 5% sure that something is true in every Everett branch, but it’s not the only one. For example, I think a particle has the same mass in every Everett branch, but not even logical omniscience will tell you the exact mass.
Well, yes. The point is that there’s a set of common problems that distinguish between the extreme cases, and therefore justify names.