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wedrifid comments on Cryonics without freezers: resurrection possibilities in a Big World - Less Wrong
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Let us suppose you are forced to play a quantum roulette (assume the payoffs are along the lines of those described here). The next day, someone asked you whether you were glad that you were forced to play quantum roulette. Do you answer:
I ask because while from the perspective of evaluating expected payoffs in the future your two assertions are compatible but from the perspective of evaluating outcomes that have happened they are not.
I guess my answer would be like: "It's too bad they 50% killed me... but now, I'm not going to cry for my parallel dead bodies (they are a sunk cost) and I'll enjoy the money." So I would be both happy that I am in the winning branch, but also aware of the cost, so I would not be retrospectively happy about being forced to play.
Does this make sense? I would be both happy and unhappy about two different aspects of the situation. The part that makes me worry about the death of non-me's is that they were killed by something that was a threat for me too. (Something like when terrorists capture 16 prisoners and kill 15 of them and you are the one they release, and then somehow illogically they also pay you a lot of money. They did not kill you, and you even profited from the action, but that was not a personal decision on their side, just a random choice. So in some sense, they wanted to kill you too, and almost succeeded.)
Thanks, the illustration with the terrorists nailed the meaning down.
The answer is that I just had a 50% chance of dying. Assholes.
This should be pretty obvious considering the pile of corpses the quantum murderers are leaving behind as they repeat their game.
That actually isn't an answer to the clarification I asked of Viliam. If you (are sane and so) consider quantum roulette undesirable then naturally you consider the folks who forced it upon you to be assholes. Yet you are the (measure of the) guy that won the lottery, didn't die and got the $300k. If Viliam considers parallel copies not-me then after the coin is tossed he doesn't care (in the direct personal sense) about the other 'not-me' guy who lost and got killed.
Mind you the language around this subject is ambiguous. It could be that Viliam's expression was intended to place parrallel-everett-branch selves into a qualitatively different class to other forms of parallel selves.
I see what you are saying now. Thanks for clarifying.
Glad to hear it. I hope my inclusion of parenthetical 'sanity' claims conveyed that I essentially agree with what you were saying too.
Yea, that helped.