What I’m wondering is: is there a general rule underlying this about the follies of allowing causally-indistinguishable-in-retrospect effects to differently affect our anticipation? Can somebody formalize this?
I think Cromwell’s rule (0 and 1 are not probabilities) is relevant here. While it may be unlikely that if two copies of you fought, that both would die, they are ‘evenly matched’ and if we do this too many times—serially - (with the winner of a 1v1 round going to the next box to do it again), there is nonzero chance no one walks out on the other side. On the other hand, if 1023 identical copies are made of you, and then everyone fights it out, it still sounds like a riskier procedure than keeping a ‘just in case’ copy, and if you must, having it fight the victor. (Or the backup could be the original, if you think that sort of thing’s important. Just because someone can make something that seems like an exact copy of you doesn’t mean that it is. This ‘duplicate and fight yourself for a prize’ sounds like a great way to alter say, the genetic makeup of the world’s population, without people noticing, because they never experience the procedure—just appearing somewhere they’d never been.)
That being said, I’ve always wondered why people always want their duplicates dead. It’s not exactly immortality, but it might improve your odds… and since I was already wondering what you do with all the dead bodies from the Duplicate Games, preserving them sounds like an idea (though they did get murdered by themselves, which might be traumatic), although the resources involved might make that prohibitively expensive. (Would you play these games with the knowledge that the people running the game would keep the bodies? Use them as fertilizer? Reuse the atoms and molecules because humans are made out of similar compounds? I’m slightly wary of someone else getting even a damaged exact copy of my brain, let alone 1023.)
I’ve seen similar stuff with people doing the Monty Hall problem. In some cases, not everyone agrees on the answer—like the Sleeping Beauty problem.
Other thoughts:
I think Cromwell’s rule (0 and 1 are not probabilities) is relevant here. While it may be unlikely that if two copies of you fought, that both would die, they are ‘evenly matched’ and if we do this too many times—serially - (with the winner of a 1v1 round going to the next box to do it again), there is nonzero chance no one walks out on the other side. On the other hand, if 1023 identical copies are made of you, and then everyone fights it out, it still sounds like a riskier procedure than keeping a ‘just in case’ copy, and if you must, having it fight the victor. (Or the backup could be the original, if you think that sort of thing’s important. Just because someone can make something that seems like an exact copy of you doesn’t mean that it is. This ‘duplicate and fight yourself for a prize’ sounds like a great way to alter say, the genetic makeup of the world’s population, without people noticing, because they never experience the procedure—just appearing somewhere they’d never been.)
That being said, I’ve always wondered why people always want their duplicates dead. It’s not exactly immortality, but it might improve your odds… and since I was already wondering what you do with all the dead bodies from the Duplicate Games, preserving them sounds like an idea (though they did get murdered by themselves, which might be traumatic), although the resources involved might make that prohibitively expensive. (Would you play these games with the knowledge that the people running the game would keep the bodies? Use them as fertilizer? Reuse the atoms and molecules because humans are made out of similar compounds? I’m slightly wary of someone else getting even a damaged exact copy of my brain, let alone 1023.)