The meteor doesn’t have to really flatten things out, there might be some actions that we think remain valuable (e.g. hedonism, saying tearful goodbyes).
And so if we have Knightian uncertainty about the meteor, maximin (as in Vanessa’s link) means we’ll spend a lot of time on tearful goodbyes.
Said actions or lack thereof cause a fairly low utility differential compared to the actions in other, non-doomy hypotheses. Also I want to draw a critical distinction between “full knightian uncertainty over meteor presence or absence”, where your analysis is correct, and “ordinary probabilistic uncertainty between a high-knightian-uncertainty hypotheses, and a low-knightian uncertainty one that says the meteor almost certainly won’t happen” (where the meteor hypothesis will be ignored unless there’s a meteor-inspired modification to what you do that’s also very cheap in the “ordinary uncertainty” world, like calling your parents, because the meteor hypothesis is suppressed in decision-making by the low expected utility differentials, and we’re maximin-ing expected utility)
The meteor doesn’t have to really flatten things out, there might be some actions that we think remain valuable (e.g. hedonism, saying tearful goodbyes).
And so if we have Knightian uncertainty about the meteor, maximin (as in Vanessa’s link) means we’ll spend a lot of time on tearful goodbyes.
Said actions or lack thereof cause a fairly low utility differential compared to the actions in other, non-doomy hypotheses. Also I want to draw a critical distinction between “full knightian uncertainty over meteor presence or absence”, where your analysis is correct, and “ordinary probabilistic uncertainty between a high-knightian-uncertainty hypotheses, and a low-knightian uncertainty one that says the meteor almost certainly won’t happen” (where the meteor hypothesis will be ignored unless there’s a meteor-inspired modification to what you do that’s also very cheap in the “ordinary uncertainty” world, like calling your parents, because the meteor hypothesis is suppressed in decision-making by the low expected utility differentials, and we’re maximin-ing expected utility)