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lavalamp comments on The Lifespan Dilemma - Less Wrong
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Does the paradox go away if we set U(death) = -∞ utilons (making any increase in the chance of dying in the next hour impossible to overcome)? Does that introduce worse problems?
but U(death in bignum years) would also be - infinity utilions then, right?
This problem was explicitly constructed as "living a long time and then dying vs living a short time and then dying."
However, this doesn't describe people's actual utility functions- people crossing the road shows they're willing to take a small risk of death for other rewards.
I think this needs a bit of refinement, but it might work. Humans have a pretty strong immediacy bias; a greater than 0.1% chance of dying in the next hour really gets our attention. Infinity is way too strong; people do stand their ground on battlefields and such. But certainly you can assign a vast negative utility to that outcome as a practical description of how humans actually think, rather than as an ideal utility function describing how we ought to think.