“Nick, can you explain how that happens with bounded utility functions? I was thinking basically something like this: if your maximum utility is 1000, then something that has a probability of one in a million can’t have a high expected value or disvalue, because it can’t be multiplied by more than 1000, and so the expected value can’t be more than 0.001.”
Suppose that your utility function is U=1-1/X where X is the number of cheesecakes produced, so your utility is bounded between 0 and 1. Quantum physics, modal realism, and other ‘Big World’ theories indicate that X approaches infinity. Therefore, conditional on the world being anything like it appears to be, the utility of any action is infinitesimal. If there is a one in a million subjective probability that no cheesecakes exist and you can create some (because of weird, probably false physical theories, claims about the Dark Lords of the Matrix, etc) then the expected value of pursuing the routes conditional on those weird theories will be ~1/1,000,000, absurdly greater than any course of action conditional on ‘normal’ understanding.
“Nick, can you explain how that happens with bounded utility functions? I was thinking basically something like this: if your maximum utility is 1000, then something that has a probability of one in a million can’t have a high expected value or disvalue, because it can’t be multiplied by more than 1000, and so the expected value can’t be more than 0.001.” Suppose that your utility function is U=1-1/X where X is the number of cheesecakes produced, so your utility is bounded between 0 and 1. Quantum physics, modal realism, and other ‘Big World’ theories indicate that X approaches infinity. Therefore, conditional on the world being anything like it appears to be, the utility of any action is infinitesimal. If there is a one in a million subjective probability that no cheesecakes exist and you can create some (because of weird, probably false physical theories, claims about the Dark Lords of the Matrix, etc) then the expected value of pursuing the routes conditional on those weird theories will be ~1/1,000,000, absurdly greater than any course of action conditional on ‘normal’ understanding.