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prase comments on Late Great Filter Is Not Bad News - Less Wrong
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This is the point at which believing in many worlds and caring about other branches leads to very suspicious way to perceive reality. I know, absurdity heuristic isn't that much reliable, but still - would it make you really sad or angry or desperate if you realised that you have won a billion (in any currency) under described circumstances? Would you really celebrate if you realised that the great filter, which wipes out a species 90% of the time, and which you previously believed we have already passed, is going to happen in the next 50 years?
I am ready to change my opinion about this style of reasoning, but probably I need some more powerful intuition pump.
Caring about other branches doesn't imply having congruent emotional reactions to beliefs about them. Emotions aren't preferences.
Emotions are not preferences, but I believe they can't be completely disentangled. There is something wrong with a person who feels unhappy after learning that the world has changed towards his/her prefered state.
I don't see how you can effectively apply social standards like "something wrong" to a mind that implements UDT. There are no human minds or non-human minds that I am aware of that perfectly implement UDT. There are no known societies of beings that do. It stands to reason that such a society would seem very other if judged by the social standards of a society composed of standard human minds.
When discussing UDT outcomes you have to work around that part of you that wants to immediately "correct" the outcome by applying non-UDT reasoning.
That "something wrong" was not as much of a social standard, as rather an expression of an intuitive feeling of a contradiction, which I wasn't able to specify more explicitly. I could anticipate general objections such as yours, however, it would help if you can be more concrete here. The question is whether one can say he prefers the state of world where he dies soon with 99% probability, even if he would be in fact disappointed after realising that it was really going to happen. I think we are now at risk of redefining few words (like preference) to mean something quite different from what they used to mean, which I don't find good at all.
And by the way, why is this a question of decision theory? There is no decision in the discussed scenario, only a question whether some news can be considered good or bad.
I don't know if this is exactly the kind of thing you're looking for, but you might like this paper arguing for why many-worlds doesn't imply quantum immortality and like-minded conclusions based on jumping between branches. (I saw someone cite this a few days ago somewhere on Less Wrong, and I'd give them props here, but can't remember who they were!)
It was Mallah, probably.
You're probably right - going through Mallah's comment history, I think it might have been this post of his that turned me on to his paper. Thanks Mallah!