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PhilGoetz comments on Exterminating life is rational - Less Wrong
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Reformulation to weed out uninteresting objections: Omega knows expected utility according to your preference if you go on without its intervention U1 and utility if it kills you U0<U1. It presents a choice between walking away, that is deciding expected utility U1, and playing a lottery that gives you with equal (50%) probability either U0 or U1+3*(U1-U0). Then, expected utility of the lottery is 0.5*(4*U1-2*U0)=U1+(U1-U0)>U1.
My answer: even in a deterministic world, I take the lottery as many times as Omega has to offer, knowing that the probability of death tends to certainty as I go on. This example is only invalid for money because of diminishing returns. If you really do possess the ability to double utility, low probability of positive outcome gets squashed by high utility of that outcome.
Does my entire post boil down to this seeming paradox?
(Yes, I assume Omega can actually double utility.)
The use of U1 and U0 is needlessly confusing. And it changes the game, because now, U0 is a utility associated with a single draw, and the analysis of doing repeated draws will give different answers. There's also too much change in going from "you die" to "you get utility U0". There's some semantic trickiness there.
Pretty much. And I should mention at this point that experiments show that, contrary to instructions, subjects nearly always interpret utility as having diminishing marginal utility.
Well, that leaves me even less optimistic than before. As long as it's just me saying, "We have options A, B, and C, but I don't think any of them work," there are a thousand possible ways I could turn out to be wrong. But if it reduces to a math problem, and we can't figure out a way around that math problem, hope is harder.