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Houshalter comments on Open thread, Mar. 2 - Mar. 8, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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In an infinite world, expected reproductions would be a good thing to maximize. An organism that had 3^^^^3 babies would vastly increase the spread of it's genes, and so it would be worth taking very very low probability bets. But in a finite world all such bets will lose, leaving behind only organisms which don't take such bets, in the vast majority of worlds.
Not quite, such an organism is likely to devastate its ecosystem in one generation and die out soon after that.
a reason why any amont of sustainable growth is preferable to a large oneshot.
Your argument seems to use expected amount of copies to argue in favour of forgetting about expected amount of copies. In a way this is illustrative, an organism that only cares about sex but not about defence is more naive than one that sometimes forgoes sex to meet defence needs. But in a way the defence option provides for more copies. In this way sex isn't choosing to make more copies, it is only one strategy path to it that might fail.
Arguing about finiteness is like knowing the maximum size of bets the universe can offer. But how can one be sure about the size of that limit? There is althought an argument that a species that has lived a finite time will have only finite amount of evidence and thus a limit on certainty that it can archieve. There are some propositions that might exceed this limit. However using any probability analysis to solve how to tune your behaviour to these propositions would be arbitrary. That is there is no way to calculate unexpected utility and expected utility doesn't take a stance on what grounds you expect that utility to take place.