Simon, anthropic probabilities are not necessarily the same probabilities you plug into the expected utility formula. When anthropic games are being played, it can be consistent to have a ~1 subjective probability of getting a cookie whether a coin comes up heads or tails, but you value the tails outcome twice as much. E.g., a computer duplicates you if the coin comes up tails, so two copies of you get cookies instead of one. Either way you expect to get a cookie, but in the second case, twice as much utility occurs from the standpoint of a third-party onlooker… at least under some assumptions.
I admit that, to the extent I believe in anthropics at all, I sometimes try to do a sum over the personal subjective probabilities of observers. This leads to paradoxes, but so does everything else I try when people are being copied (and possibly merged).
Regardless, the question of what we expect to see when the world-crusher is turned on, and how much utility we assign to that, are distinct at least conceptually.
And if turning on the LHC or other world-smasher causes other probabilities to behave oddly, we care a great deal even if we survive.
Simon, anthropic probabilities are not necessarily the same probabilities you plug into the expected utility formula. When anthropic games are being played, it can be consistent to have a ~1 subjective probability of getting a cookie whether a coin comes up heads or tails, but you value the tails outcome twice as much. E.g., a computer duplicates you if the coin comes up tails, so two copies of you get cookies instead of one. Either way you expect to get a cookie, but in the second case, twice as much utility occurs from the standpoint of a third-party onlooker… at least under some assumptions.
I admit that, to the extent I believe in anthropics at all, I sometimes try to do a sum over the personal subjective probabilities of observers. This leads to paradoxes, but so does everything else I try when people are being copied (and possibly merged).
Regardless, the question of what we expect to see when the world-crusher is turned on, and how much utility we assign to that, are distinct at least conceptually.
And if turning on the LHC or other world-smasher causes other probabilities to behave oddly, we care a great deal even if we survive.