The notion of a symmetric extension extends the usual notion of forcing by identifying a particular class of names which forms an intermediate model of $ZF$ between the ground model and the generic extension, and often the axiom of choice fails in these models. Symmetric extensions are generally used to prove choiceless consistency results. We develop a framework for iterating symmetric extensions in order to construct new models of $ZF$. We show how to obtain some well-known and lesser-known results using this framework. Specifically, we discuss Kinna–Wagner principles and obtain some results related to their failure.

We prove that a wide class of strongly proper forcing posets have quotients with strong properties. Specifically, we prove that quotients of forcing posets which have universal strongly generic conditions on a stationary set of models by certain nice regular suborders satisfy the ω1-approximation property. We prove that the existence of stationarily many ω1-guessing models in Pω2(H(θ)), for sufficiently large cardinals θ, is consistent with the continuum being arbitrarily large, solving a problem of Viale and Weiss [13].

We define the ideal with the property that a real omits all Borel sets in the ideal which are coded in a transitive model if and only if it is an amoeba real over this model. We investigate some other properties of this ideal. Strolling through the "amoeba forest" we gain as an application a modification of the proof of the inequality between the additivities of Lebesgue measure and Baire category.