Emily Adlam
speaker
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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And then that seems to be inconsistent for these endoskeletal activity reasons.
The alternative is to, as you say, commit to the bit, but then that seems to fall into the problems I have with Everett.
So I worry that neither of those routes is going to satisfy me personally.
Oh, Jacob's Constanza observers, yes.
Yes, this is a reference to a television show, which I've never seen, so I can't explain the name.
But the concerns of observers are precisely supposed to be the low-weight ones, and in particular observers who are, I think, reasoning in ways that are not rational at all or not rational by any sort of constraints that we would consider to be normal constraints of rationality, but who nonetheless end up being successful because unlikely things keep happening on their branch.
So the concerns of observers were supposed to be an objection relating to the idea that there are sort of plausible constraints of rationality in every universe because there seem to be some sort of kind of confounding observers who act irrationally and nonetheless succeed.
And if you don't know, you're not one of those ones.
Why should you be rational?
Yeah, well, because there's some sense, there's some branch, admittedly, with very low weight in which basically anything will happen in the Everett story.
There's going to be some branches in which observers are doing things we would consider quintessentially irrational, but where they are nonetheless wildly successful in all their endeavours and it all works out very well for them.
So the thought was that the existence of such observers is supposed to put pressure on the idea that constraints of rationality can...
push us in the Everettian story to treat the weights as credences or as probabilities in certain senses, because the existence of those observers in the first place is going to undermine any constraints of rationality you might put forward.
Yes, that's true.
I think the thought is that
In the usual world, we would expect, maybe we're being optimistic, but we would expect that if you act irrationally a lot, you will be punished for your crimes against rationality and things will go badly for you, at least with some high probability.
And the worry is that if you don't have a pre-existing probability style interpretation of the branch weights, then you don't have any reason to sort of rule out those cases or think that they're unlikely in any sense.
And so therefore, it's not clear why you would expect any constraints of rationality to be relevant to you.
But it's a strange...
Yeah, no, I think the concern was more that if you take a Dutch book style argument, for example, the Dutch book argument is predicated on the thought that certain types of behavior are irrational because they will deterministically or with very high probability lead to bad losses.
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