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Oscar_Cunningham comments on Extreme risks: when not to use expected utility - Less Wrong
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I don't like utility theory at all except for making small fairly immediate choices, it is too much like the old joke about the physicist who says, "Assume a spherical cow...". If anyone could direct me to something that isn't vague and handwavey about converting real goals and desires to "utils" I would be interested. Until then, I am getting really tired of it.
In the same way, it's hopeless to try to assign probabilities to events and do a Bayesian update on everything. But you can still take advice from theorems like "Conservation of expected evidence" and the like. Formalisations might not be good for specifics, but they're good for telling you if you're going wrong in some more general manner.