Adam Elga

And that's not quite as concessive as a more extreme version of view, which says, really, just always go 50-50.

Yes.

And that's why the relevant question you have to be asking your past self is something less than the fully specified original question and the full situation.

One way to motivate the view is to think about a David Christensen case in which the equal weight view or this kind of view is very intuitive.

It's called the split the check case.

And the case is you're out to dinner with your friends.

The bill comes in, people do the arithmetic on their own, and then they get different answers.

Now you think, okay, how confident should I be that my answer was right, their answer was right, given this disagreement?

It's very intuitive that the answer to that question should match the answer to the question of if you'd asked yourself at the beginning of the meal, look, suppose we later split the check and you get this, blah, blah, blah, you get this answer.

How likely do you think that you'll be the one who's right?

That seems to align.

And actually, notice that that even handles a slightly more general case than the one we were talking about before, because that actually nicely handles the case in which, for example, I think I'm not so great at math.

I think I'm just like, you know, probably 90-10 that they're the ones, right?

That seems intuitively like the thing to do when that scenario actually happens.

And in order for that test to work, you can't be giving the full math question to your past self.

Yeah, and you want to tell them something about the circumstances.

For example, there's a difference between you get $20 and your friend gets $23 and you get $20 and your friend says it's

negative $18.

Then you think like, so the relevant question you'd ask your, your past self in that case would be, Hey, what if I get an answer that seems kind of reasonable to me and they get an answer that seems like totally bonkers off the wall, you know, couldn't possibly write in that case.

What do you think?