Now suppose you ask me, before this disintegration, "what are the odds that a randomly selected future duplicate of yours will be one that is gunned down?" The answer is 50%.
This is true, but irrelevant. There is no random selection going on. By the same token I could say that if you asked "What are the odds that a future self selected according to the Born rule will observe spin-up in this experiment?" you'd recover quantum statistics. But then you'd rightly challenge me by asking why this particular question should matter. Well, I can ask the same of your random selection question.
Here's one way random selection might be relevant in the fission case. Perhaps, pre-split, the agent should reason as if in a position of complete subjective uncertainty about which future branch is him. If this is right, then it seems reasonable that in a classical world he should assign a maximum entropy distribution over future selves, and so he should reason as if his future self is being randomly selected from all the future duplicates. This sort of argument might justify the random selection assumption. But Wallace makes exactly this sort of argument for the quantum case, except he claims that there are symmetry considerations involved in that case which make it more reasonable to use the Born distribution when one is in a state of complete subjective uncertainty.
The other potential justification I can see for the random selection assumption is that you are using some anthropic selection rule like Bostrom's Self Sampling Assumption. I think it is far from clear that the SSA is the right way to reason anthropically. In any case, Bostrom himself modifies the SSA to fit Born statistics in his discussion of MWI in his book.
My question was constructed in order to completely sidestep questions of persistent identity (i.e., which future duplicate, if any, is me?). It could have been phrased as follows: "What percentage of my future duplicates will be gunned down?" The answer is 50%, because by hypothesis, there are two duplicates, one is shot, the other isn't. There is nothing there about random selection or any other sort of selection. There is also no uncertainty about which future copy "is me"; that's not what I'm asking; a future entity counts for such a...
The subject has already been raised in this thread, but in a clumsy fashion. So here is a fresh new thread, where we can discuss, calmly and objectively, the pros and cons of the "Oxford" version of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
This version of MWI is distinguished by two propositions. First, there is no definite number of "worlds" or "branches". They have a fuzzy, vague, approximate, definition-dependent existence. Second, the probability law of quantum mechanics (the Born rule) is to be obtained, not by counting the frequencies of events in the multiverse, but by an analysis of rational behavior in the multiverse. Normally, a prescription for rational behavior is obtained by maximizing expected utility, a quantity which is calculated by averaging "probability x utility" for each possible outcome of an action. In the Oxford school's "decision-theoretic" derivation of the Born rule, we somehow start with a ranking of actions that is deemed rational, then we "divide out" by the utilities, and obtain probabilities that were implicit in the original ranking.
I reject the two propositions. "Worlds" or "branches" can't be vague if they are to correspond to observed reality, because vagueness results from an object being dependent on observer definition, and the local portion of reality does not owe its existence to how we define anything; and the upside-down decision-theoretic derivation, if it ever works, must implicitly smuggle in the premises of probability theory in order to obtain its original rationality ranking.
Some references:
"Decoherence and Ontology: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love FAPP" by David Wallace. In this paper, Wallace says, for example, that the question "how many branches are there?" "does not... make sense", that the question "how many branches are there in which it is sunny?" is "a question which has no answer", "it is a non-question to ask how many [worlds]", etc.
"Quantum Probability from Decision Theory?" by Barnum et al. This is a rebuttal of the original argument (due to David Deutsch) that the Born rule can be justified by an analysis of multiverse rationality.