Surely an action is more likely to have an expected value of saving 3.2 lives than pi lives; the distribution of values of actions is probably not literally log normal partially for the reason that you just gave, but I think that a log-normal distribution is much closer to the truth than a distribution which assigns probabilities strictly by Kolmogorov complexity. Here I’d recur to my response to cousin it’s comment.
Surely an action is more likely to have an expected value of saving 3.2 lives than pi lives
I’m not so sure. Do you mean (3.2 lives|pi lives) to log(3^^^3) digits of precision? If you don’t, I think it misleads intuition to think about the probability of an action saving 3.2 lives, to two decimal places; vs. pi lives, to indefinite precision.
I can’t think of any right now, but I feel like if I really put my creativity to work for long enough, I could think of more ways to save 3.14159265358979323846264 lives than 3.20000000000000000000000 lives.
I meant 3.2 lives to arbitrary precision vs. pi lives to arbitrary precision. Anyway, my point was that there’s going to be some deviation from a log-normal distribution on account of contingent features of the universe that we live in (mathematical, physical, biological, etc.) but that probably a log-normal distribution is a closer approximation to the truth than what one would hope to come up with a systematic analysis of the complexity of the numbers involved.
Surely an action is more likely to have an expected value of saving 3.2 lives than pi lives; the distribution of values of actions is probably not literally log normal partially for the reason that you just gave, but I think that a log-normal distribution is much closer to the truth than a distribution which assigns probabilities strictly by Kolmogorov complexity. Here I’d recur to my response to cousin it’s comment.
I’m not so sure. Do you mean (3.2 lives|pi lives) to log(3^^^3) digits of precision? If you don’t, I think it misleads intuition to think about the probability of an action saving 3.2 lives, to two decimal places; vs. pi lives, to indefinite precision.
I can’t think of any right now, but I feel like if I really put my creativity to work for long enough, I could think of more ways to save 3.14159265358979323846264 lives than 3.20000000000000000000000 lives.
I meant 3.2 lives to arbitrary precision vs. pi lives to arbitrary precision. Anyway, my point was that there’s going to be some deviation from a log-normal distribution on account of contingent features of the universe that we live in (mathematical, physical, biological, etc.) but that probably a log-normal distribution is a closer approximation to the truth than what one would hope to come up with a systematic analysis of the complexity of the numbers involved.