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Kaj_Sotala comments on MWI, copies and probability - Less Wrong
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I'll bite this bullet. If the grenade is always reliable, and if MWI is true for certain, and if it's not just a mathematical formalism and the other worlds actually exist, and if I don't have any relatives or other people who'd care of me, and if my existing in this world doesn't produce any net good for the other residents of this world, and if I won't end up mangled... then I would accept the deal of having this grenade thrown at me in exchange for 100 dollars. Likewise, I would deem it legal to offer this trade for other people, if it could be ascertained, without any chance of corruption, coercion or abuse, that these same criteria also applied to all the people the trade was being offered to.
But for that purpose, you have to assume pretty much all of those conditions. Since we can't actually do that in real life, this isn't really as paradoxical a dilemma as you imply it to be. In order to make it a paradox, you'd have to tack on so many assumptions that it ceases to have nearly anything to do with the world we live in anymore.
It reminds me of the argument that utilitarianism is wrong, because utilitarianism says that doctors should kill healthy patients to get life-saving organ transplants for several other people. Yes, if you could institute this as a general policy with no chance of anyone ever finding out about that, and you could always kill the chosen people without them having a chance to escape, and a dozen other caveats, then this might be worth it... but in pretty much any conceivable real-life situation, even trying to institute such a policy would obviously just do more harm than good, so it isn't really an argument against utilitarianism. Likewise, your proposed scenario isn't really an argument against not valuing identical copies.
It almost sounds like you're saying:
If I thought my life was worthless anyway then sure, throw the grenade at me.
(I'm being a bit facetious, because there is a difference between "my existing in this world doesn't produce any net good for anyone" and "my existing in this world doesn't produce any net good for anyone besides myself". But in real life, how plausible is it that we would have one without the other?)
I never thought of it that way, but you're right.
Then grenade, please! I could help more person-moments in the one Everett branch with a hundred million dollars than I could in both branches with my current level of income. And what's more, my life would be more comfortable, averaging over all my person-moments.
Really? Can't I just make a deal with Fred, pool our finances and distribute our quantum probability of life in proportion to our financial contribution?
Or, reading again, are you referring to maximising "p(life) * money_if_you_live"? I suppose that just relies on trading with people who are desperate. For example if Fred requires $1,000,000 to cure his cancer and has far less money than that he will benefit from trading a far smaller slice of quantum_life at a worse price so that his slice of life actually involves living.
Incidentally Fred's situation there is one of very few cases where I would actually Quantum Suicide myself. I value my quantum slice extremely highly... but everything has a price (in utility if not dollars).
That's why you always make sure you're the house.
By the way, underscores work like asterisks do. Escape them with an \ if you want to use more than one.
Fair systems are good for the person who would otherwise be exploited. They aren't good for the one who is seeking advantage. The whole point in this branch is that you were considering the availability of finding deals that give you positive expected returns.
If you are looking for a way to ensure a real positive expectation from a deal you don't create a stock market, you create a black market.