Does my entire post boil down to this seeming paradox?
(Yes, I assume Omega can actually double utility.)
The use of U1 and U0 is needlessly confusing. And it changes the game, because now, U0 is a utility associated with a single draw, and the analysis of doing repeated draws will give different answers. There’s also too much change in going from “you die” to “you get utility U0″. There’s some semantic trickiness there.
Pretty much. And I should mention at this point that experiments show that, contrary to instructions, subjects nearly always interpret utility as having diminishing marginal utility.
Well, that leaves me even less optimistic than before. As long as it’s just me saying, “We have options A, B, and C, but I don’t think any of them work,” there are a thousand possible ways I could turn out to be wrong. But if it reduces to a math problem, and we can’t figure out a way around that math problem, hope is harder.
Does my entire post boil down to this seeming paradox?
(Yes, I assume Omega can actually double utility.)
The use of U1 and U0 is needlessly confusing. And it changes the game, because now, U0 is a utility associated with a single draw, and the analysis of doing repeated draws will give different answers. There’s also too much change in going from “you die” to “you get utility U0″. There’s some semantic trickiness there.
Pretty much. And I should mention at this point that experiments show that, contrary to instructions, subjects nearly always interpret utility as having diminishing marginal utility.
Well, that leaves me even less optimistic than before. As long as it’s just me saying, “We have options A, B, and C, but I don’t think any of them work,” there are a thousand possible ways I could turn out to be wrong. But if it reduces to a math problem, and we can’t figure out a way around that math problem, hope is harder.