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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Avoid inflationary use of terms - Less Wrong
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Can you give an example of the kind of usage of "Everett branch" that you consider to be inappropriately inflationary? I cannot think of an example. This either means that I have not cached the undesirable usages or that I disagree about when it is appropriate to use the phrase.
A possibility is that I actually think in terms of abstract decision theoretical concerns, Many Worlds and Big Worlds in general more than average. This would make me more likely to use the phrase as a literal description of thoughts about a scenario than as, say, just an attempt to make a preference sound a little bit cooler.
I would add "Prisoner's Dilemma" to the list. I've seen it used to describe basically any game theoretic scenario with payoffs rather than just one example of how (relative) payoffs could be set up in a symmetrical two person game.
I am loathe to point to a comment a user has actually made, but anything like "I decided to go to grad school because I'm better off in the Everett branch where I have a post-grad degree than the Everett branch in which I don't." No, Mr. Example, you are not going to turn into 1/sqrt(2)|grad student> + 1/sqrt(2)|not grad student>. To the extent to which you are able to choose at all, your decision algorithm is deterministic. What you really mean is "I'm better off in the counterfactual where I have a post-grad degree."
Do people around here say that? I think/hope I would've noticed that. There were a few comments like that during the QM sequence but they were corrected, I think.
Looking up the comments I remember, I can find two or three comments that are not quite as bad as the one I made up above, but still seem to confuse Everett branches with counterfactual choices. They're usually corrected by other users.