The idea is that you can't change whether a mind exists but you can, possibly, change how much of it exists, or perhaps, how much of different futures it has. By multiply instantiating it? I guess so. It doesn't seem to make much sense, but if I don't presume something like this, I have to weight Boltzmann brains the same as myself.

I'm not trying to rest this argument on the details of the anthropics. Something more along the lines of - in a Big World, I don't have to worry as much about creating diversity or giving possibilities a chance to exist, relative to how much I worry about average quality of life for sentients. If we create a comfortable number of diverse people with high standards of living in our own Everett branch, we can rely on other diverse people being realized elsewhere.

I have confessed my own confusion about anthropics; I do not at present have any non-paradoxical visualization of this problem in hand. Still - in a Big World, it sounds a little more okay to have fewer people locally with a higher quality of life; do you see the intuitive appeal?

We're not talking about "few people" in any absolute sense; there's six billion of us already. But say that, as we spread across galaxies, that number goes up to six quadrillion (10^15) instead of six decillion (10^30) and everyone has 10^15 times the standard of living, or however that scales.

When the vast majority of orders of magnitude in the diversity of realized possibilities, 10^something orders of magnitude, come from quantum branching, isn't it okay to just take fifteen orders of magnitude for the standard of living improvement?