Emily Adlam

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1,263 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 20 Jul

Emily Adlam’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal · Jacob Barandes and Emily Adlam: Why Many Worlds Is Nonsensical · 25 Jun 2025 podcast

So there's never going to be, you can't sort of go to a scientific theory and look at a description of a process and try to get probabilities from that.

So wherever those probabilities come from, or those credences that you're assigning, they have to come from somewhere quite different than how they would come from in the superficial case.

So that's why I think it's important to to see those as different types of cases because the reasoning for those cases is going to be quite different either way.

Um and then the second pa part of the paper was about trying to understand uh for th these pure cases, can there ever be any any way of assigning credences which you are sort of rationally obliged to to take or which is at least rationally convincing or compelling?

Um and I sort of went through some

Some reasons you might try to try to say that there are rationally compelling ways of doing this and argue that none of them succeed.

So in particular, one thing people will often do in these kinds of cases is try to make an argument that if you imagine sort of m making bets about where you're located in the world, uh then certain strategies will be more successful.

And so those are the ones that that you should have.

Um but the problem with that approach is that you know before you can say this strategy is more

More successful, you have to define what counts as success.

And so in the self-self-location case, that's going to look like saying something like, I want to maximize the winnings over this whole set of individuals, or I just want this one to win and the rest I don't care about them.

Some some choice like that has to be made.

And what you can see is that as soon as you've made that choice, that just immediately dictates what the credences are that you should have.

That you should, if you what if you want to maximize winnings over all of the

assign equal probability or credence to all of them.

If you want to just make this person over here win, then you should assign probability one to this person and zero to the rest of them.

Uh so so in this case there's kind of no room between what your goal is and what your credences should be.

So for me what that what that tells us is that

Th these credences aren't really beliefs, they're not really probabilities.

What they are is just a sort of measure of a way of expressing what your your practical goal is or how much you care about these different observers.

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