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UnholySmoke comments on The Lifespan Dilemma - Less Wrong
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Please stop allowing your practical considerations get in the way of the pure, beautiful counterfactual!
Seriously though, either you allow yourself to suspend practicalities and consider pure decision theory, or you don't. This is a pure maths problem, you can't equate it to 'John has 4 apples.' John has 3^^^3 apples here, causing your mind to break. Forget the apples and years, consider utility!
As I said somewhere earlier (points vaguely upward), my impression was that this was not actually intended as a pure mathematical problem but rather an example of how our innate decisionmaking abilities (morality? intuition?) don't do well with big numbers.
If this is not the case, then why phrase the question as a word problem with a moral decision to be made? Why not simply ask it in pure mathematical terms?