It doesn’t matter whether you call your multiplier “probability” or “value” if it results in your decision to not care about low-measure branch. The only difference is that probability is supposed to be about knowledge, and Wallace’s argument involving arbitrary assumption, not only physics, means it’s not probability, but value—there is no reason to value knowledge of your low-measure instances less.
this makes decision theory and probably consequentialist ethics impossible in your framework
It doesn’t? Nothing stops you from making decisions in a world where you are constantly splitting. You can try to maximize splits of good experiences or something. It just wouldn’t be the same decisions you would make without knowledge of splits, but why new physical knowledge shouldn’t change your decisions?
OK ‘impossible’ is too strong, I should have said ‘extremely difficult’. That was my point in footnote 3 of the post. Most people would take the fact that it has implications like needing to “maximize splits of good experiences” (I assume you mean maximise the number of splits) as a reductio ad absurdum, due to the fact that this is massively different from our normal intuitions about what we should do. But some people have tried to take that approach, like in the article I mentioned in the footnote. If you or someone else can come up with a consistent and convincing decision approach that involves branch counting I would genuinely love to see it!
It doesn’t matter whether you call your multiplier “probability” or “value” if it results in your decision to not care about low-measure branch. The only difference is that probability is supposed to be about knowledge, and Wallace’s argument involving arbitrary assumption, not only physics, means it’s not probability, but value—there is no reason to value knowledge of your low-measure instances less.
It doesn’t? Nothing stops you from making decisions in a world where you are constantly splitting. You can try to maximize splits of good experiences or something. It just wouldn’t be the same decisions you would make without knowledge of splits, but why new physical knowledge shouldn’t change your decisions?
OK ‘impossible’ is too strong, I should have said ‘extremely difficult’. That was my point in footnote 3 of the post. Most people would take the fact that it has implications like needing to “maximize splits of good experiences” (I assume you mean maximise the number of splits) as a reductio ad absurdum, due to the fact that this is massively different from our normal intuitions about what we should do. But some people have tried to take that approach, like in the article I mentioned in the footnote. If you or someone else can come up with a consistent and convincing decision approach that involves branch counting I would genuinely love to see it!