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Wei_Dai comments on Savulescu: "Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction" - Less Wrong
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No, I'm not claiming that. I think people avoid quantum suicide because they fear death. Perhaps we can interpret that as caring about measure, or maybe not. In either case there is still a question of why do we fear death, and whether it makes sense to care about measure. As I said, I don't know the answers, but I think I do have a clue that others don't seem to have noticed yet.
ETA: Or perhaps we should take the fear of death as a hint that we should care about measure, much like how Eliezer considers his altruistic feelings to be a good reason for adopting utilitarianism.
If quantum suicide works, then there's little hurry to use it, since it's not possible to die before getting the chance. Anyone who does have quantum immortality should expect to have it proven to them, by going far enough over the record age if nothing else. So attempting quantum suicide without such proof would be wrong.
Um, what? Why did we evolve to fear death? I suspect I'm missing something here.
You're converting an "is" to an "ought" there with no explanation, or else I don't know in what sense you're using "should".
That the way we fear death has the effect of maximizing our measure, but not the number of branches we are in, is perhaps a puzzle. See also http://lesswrong.com/lw/19d/the_anthropic_trilemma/14r8 starting at "But a problem with that".
I'm pointing out a possible position one might take, not one that I agree with myself. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/196/boredom_vs_scope_insensitivity/14jn
Yes, but you didn't explain why anyone would want to take that position, and I didn't manage to infer why. One obvious reason, that the fear of death (the fear of a decrease in measure) is some sort of legitimate signal about what matters to many people, prompts the question of why I should care about what evolution has programmed into me. Or perhaps, more subtly, the question of why my morality function should (logically) similarly weight two quite different things--a huge extrinsic decrease in my measure (involuntary death) vs. an self-imposed selective decrease in measure--that were not at all separate as far as evolution is concerned, where only the former was possible in the EEA, and perhaps where upon reflection only the reasons for the former seem intuitively clear.
ETA: Also, I totally don't understand why you think that it's a puzzle that evolution optimized us solely for the branches of reality with the greatest measure.
Have you looked at Jacques Mallah's papers?
Yes, and I had a discussion with him last year at http://old.nabble.com/language%2C-cloning-and-thought-experiments-tt22185985.html#a22189232 (Thanks for the reminder.)
If you follow the above link, you'll see that I actually took a position that's opposite of my position here: I said that people mostly don't care about measure. I think the lesson here is that A) I have a very bad memory :-) and B) I don't know how to formalize human preferences.