You are deciding whether or not to pull the lever. The probability of a past event, known to be in the past, depends on your actions now.
To use your analogy, it’s you deciding whether to label a scientific paper inaccurate or not—your choice of label, not anything else, makes it inaccurate or not.
Oh, actually I think what I wrote above was wrong. The self-sampling assumption is supposed to preserve probabilities like this. It’s the self-indicative assumption that is relative to agents.
That said, I have a different objection. I’m confused about why pulling the lever would change the odds though. Your reference class is all copies that were the <last copy that was originally created>. So any further clones you create fall outside the reference class.
If you want to set your reference class to <the last copy that was created at any point> then:
Heads case—first round: if you pull the lever then you fall outside the reference class
Heads case—second round: lever doesn’t do anything anymore as it has already been used
Tails case: pulling the lever does nothing
So you don’t really have the option to pull the lever to create clones. If you were using a different reference class, what was it.
You are deciding whether or not to pull the lever. The probability of a past event, known to be in the past, depends on your actions now.
To use your analogy, it’s you deciding whether to label a scientific paper inaccurate or not—your choice of label, not anything else, makes it inaccurate or not.
Oh, actually I think what I wrote above was wrong. The self-sampling assumption is supposed to preserve probabilities like this. It’s the self-indicative assumption that is relative to agents.
That said, I have a different objection. I’m confused about why pulling the lever would change the odds though. Your reference class is all copies that were the <last copy that was originally created>. So any further clones you create fall outside the reference class.
If you want to set your reference class to <the last copy that was created at any point> then:
Heads case—first round: if you pull the lever then you fall outside the reference class
Heads case—second round: lever doesn’t do anything anymore as it has already been used
Tails case: pulling the lever does nothing
So you don’t really have the option to pull the lever to create clones. If you were using a different reference class, what was it.