joeteicher comments on Exterminating life is rational - Less Wrong
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Here's a possible problem with my analysis:
Suppose Omega or one of its ilk says to you, "Here's a game we can play. I have an infinitely large deck of cards here. Half of them have a star on them, and one-tenth of them have a skull on them. Every time you draw a card with a star, I'll double your utility for the rest of your life. If you draw a card with a skull, I'll kill you."
How many cards do you draw?
I'm pretty sure that someone who believes in many worlds will keep drawing cards until they die. But even if you don't believe in many worlds, I think you do the same thing, unless you are not maximizing expected utility. (Unless chance is quantized so that there is a minimum possible possibility. I don't think that would help much anyway.)
So this whole post may boil down to "maximizing expected utility" not actually being the right thing to do. Also see my earlier, equally unpopular post on why expectation maximization implies average utilitarianism. If you agree that average utilitarianism seems wrong, that's another piece of evidence that maximizing expected utility is wrong.
It seems like you are assuming that the only effect of dying is that it brings your utility to 0. I agree that after you are dead your utility is 0, but before you are dead you have to die, and I think that is a strongly negative utility event. When I picture my utility playing this game, I think that if I start with X, then I draw a start and have 2X. Then I draw a skull, I look at the skull, my utility drops to -10000X as I shit my pants and beg omega to let me live, and then he kills me and my utility is 0.
I don't know how much sense that makes mathematically. But it certainly feels to me like fear of death makes dying a more negative event than just a drop to utility 0.
The skull cards are electrocuted, and will kill you instantly and painlessly as soon as you touch them.
(Be careful to touch only the cards you take.)