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SquirrelInHell comments on Morality of Doing Simulations Is Not Coherent [SOLVED, INVALID] - Less Wrong
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Sorry, I don't understand what you mean: "final state" - state of what? "how bad it is" - what is?
The world. You're assuming that the value of the world only depends on its state at the end of your simulation. But it doesn't: events that happen between now and then also matter. So if you want to check how bad the world will be if you do action X, you can't just use your trick to find out how the world will be after doing action X, because you also need to know what happened in between.
If you don't agree that states in between matter, consider whether torturing someone and then erasing their memory is morally problematic.
Oh. In this case, I agree with you. I never intended to claim otherwise, or even, the whole original point doesn't make sense without this.
My current view is that it's not possible to check how the world looks after torture without generating information that approximates simulation of torture itself; however this information can be arbitrarily diluted, and diluting it discounts the moral weight by an appropriate factor. We count this quantitatively.
Under this view, the "final state" automatically counts with the "in between" part.
I'm not sure how the original post makes sense if you agree. I understood the original point as:
This seems to imply that our evaluations don't need to take into account middle states. Value is definitely not linear, so you can't do subtraction of the trick states.
This is a problem even if your skip turns out to be possible.
More or less, and as you said the original point was about the possibility of circumventing the "instantiation of middle states". But if I assumed from the beginning the middle states are not important, it would make no sense to argue that such possibility exists. I saw this as a paradox in which on one hand intuitively, the middle matters, but on the other we can reduce it to something that intuitively seems morally OK (i.e. some unrelated abstract computation).
Your intuition that the middle matters seems to match my current information-theoretic understanding, even if you disagree on what exactly makes it so.