You should worry about things to the extent you can change your expected utility.
There’s maybe a million to one chance of drawing some particular hand at poker night, and there’s also a million to one chance that there will be some disaster (earthquake, zombies, flood). One of those doesn’t matter very much and you can’t do much about it anyway, the other you can do very much to prepare for and actually make a large expected difference.
Your rule will work if you are well-calibrated to one possible cause of death and you are wondering how much time to spend on another, given that you know the probabilities. If the events (and therefore utilities) are not as comparable, it’s best to just use decision theory in some form.
It may be ‘best’ to use decision theory—but I’ve found that it can take more time trying to figure out what a decision theory says about an everyday choice than that choice makes a difference of. So I’m hoping that some variation of this rule-of-thumb allows for a reasonable compromise—while it doesn’t always apply, the cases where it does allow you to reap most of the benefits that applying a full-fledged decision theory would, while requiring significantly less mental processing time.
Or maybe it’s not useful that way at all—in which case, I’d like to find that out here if I can, before I start relying on it too heavily.
Not quite.
You should worry about things to the extent you can change your expected utility.
There’s maybe a million to one chance of drawing some particular hand at poker night, and there’s also a million to one chance that there will be some disaster (earthquake, zombies, flood). One of those doesn’t matter very much and you can’t do much about it anyway, the other you can do very much to prepare for and actually make a large expected difference.
Your rule will work if you are well-calibrated to one possible cause of death and you are wondering how much time to spend on another, given that you know the probabilities. If the events (and therefore utilities) are not as comparable, it’s best to just use decision theory in some form.
It may be ‘best’ to use decision theory—but I’ve found that it can take more time trying to figure out what a decision theory says about an everyday choice than that choice makes a difference of. So I’m hoping that some variation of this rule-of-thumb allows for a reasonable compromise—while it doesn’t always apply, the cases where it does allow you to reap most of the benefits that applying a full-fledged decision theory would, while requiring significantly less mental processing time.
Or maybe it’s not useful that way at all—in which case, I’d like to find that out here if I can, before I start relying on it too heavily.