I have the sense that much of this was written as a response to this paradox in which maximizing expected utility tells you to draw cards until you die.

Psychohistorian wrote:

There's a bigger problem causing that causes our intuition to reject this hypothetical as "just wrong:" it leads to major errors in both utilons and hedons. The mind cannot comprehend unlimited doubling of hedons. I doubt you can imagine being 260 times as happy as you are now; indeed, I doubt it is meaningfully possible to be so happy.

The paradox is stated in utilons, not hedons. But if your hedons were measured properly, your inability to imagine them now is not an argument. This is Omega we're talking about. Perhaps it will augment your mind to help you reach each doubling. Whatever. It's stipulated in the problem that Omega will double whatever the proper metric is. Futurists should never accept "but I can't imagine that" as an argument.

As for utilons, most people assign a much greater value to "not dying," compared with having more hedons. Thus, a hedonic reading of the problem returns an error because repeated doubling feels meaningless, and a utilon reading (may) return an error if we assign a significant enough negative value to death. But if we look at it purely in terms of numbers, we end up very, very happy right up until we end up very, very dead.

We need to look at it purely in terms of numbers if we are rationalists, or let us say "ratio-ists". Is your argument really that numeric analysis is the wrong thing to do?

Changing the value you assign life vs. death doesn't sidestep the paradox. We can rescale the problem by an affine transformation so that your present utility is 1 and the utility of death is 0. That will not change the results of expected utility maximization.