Why do some humans buy lottery tickets and others not? If humans don’t all have the same utility function how do they get one? Isn’t the process of acquisition and change of utility function (or whatever we use to approximate one) more important to our understanding of intelligence and the future of intelligence than the function itself?
People buy lottery tickets because no one can accurately “feel” or intuit incredibly small probabilities. We (by definition) experience very few or no events with those probabilities, so we have nothing on which to build that intuition. Thus we approximate negligible but non zero probabilities as small but non negligible. And that “feeling” is worth the price of the lottery ticket for some people. Some people learn to calibrate their intuitions over time so negligible probabilities “feel” like zero, and so they don’t buy lottery tickets. The problem is less about utility functions and more about accurate processing of small probabilities.
I’m not sure you noticed but I bought up lotteries because it directly contradicts “it could instead be based on the expected payout where higher probabilities are given greater weight, for example” because we see an example of a very very low probability be given a high weight (if our brains even do that).
Why buy lottery tickets?
Why stop buying lottery tickets?
Why do some humans buy lottery tickets and others not? If humans don’t all have the same utility function how do they get one? Isn’t the process of acquisition and change of utility function (or whatever we use to approximate one) more important to our understanding of intelligence and the future of intelligence than the function itself?
People buy lottery tickets because no one can accurately “feel” or intuit incredibly small probabilities. We (by definition) experience very few or no events with those probabilities, so we have nothing on which to build that intuition. Thus we approximate negligible but non zero probabilities as small but non negligible. And that “feeling” is worth the price of the lottery ticket for some people. Some people learn to calibrate their intuitions over time so negligible probabilities “feel” like zero, and so they don’t buy lottery tickets. The problem is less about utility functions and more about accurate processing of small probabilities.
I’m not sure you noticed but I bought up lotteries because it directly contradicts “it could instead be based on the expected payout where higher probabilities are given greater weight, for example” because we see an example of a very very low probability be given a high weight (if our brains even do that).