Adam Elga

Great.

I agree with you, actually, that they are not very descriptive.

But just in case someone's looking this stuff up, the thing we've been calling the third position or the many duplicates get a boost position, that's called SIA, self-indication assumption in the literature.

I think the terminology goes back to Bostrom.

And the view that I believe you were just gesturing at is sometimes called SSA, self-sampling assumption.

And

I would like to add another tag to it.

So if the first view is favor the possibilities with many copies of me or people like me gets a boost, think of this other view as possibilities in which most people are like me get a boost.

In other words, we can think of that as giving a boost to possibilities in which a high fraction of observers

have experiences that are similar to mine.

Now, as many people have pointed out that second view

requires us to answer the question, what does it mean for an observer to be sufficiently like you?

That's a kind of free parameter within the theory, and you can fix it in various different ways.

But I think for the big picture, the best way to think about it is, is it that many get a boost or most get a boost?

Is it about absolute numbers or is it about frequencies?

And those are two of the main views in this area.

There's a third main view, which we haven't talked about yet, but I just want to mention that there's another view around too.

The label of the third view is compartmentalized conditionalizing, sometimes called CC.

I learned about it from the work of Chris Meacham.

And it's the view that generalizes the half-halfer view in a sleeping beauty problem.