= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Roko comments on I'm confused. Could someone help? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (10)
I don't think it is. The cause of the confusion is just that the sums are wrong (and the conclusion is wrong). Replace the opening statement with "I'm Bill Gates, I'm offering you a bet - the cost to take the bet is $1, the prize for winning is $58 billion. The odds of winning are 1 in 57.99999 billion".
Now we're no longer talking about unrealistic amounts of money, but it still isn't good bet for Bill to offer, because it's expected value is negative. You do need to invoke the fact that wealth is finite to explain why martingales) don't work, but this "system" isn't nearly as complicated as a martingale.
Well, technically you can offer a bet of a million billion zillion dollars, it's just that anybody who calculates it's expected utility as "chances of winning" x "one million billion zillion dollars" is a gullible fool.
If your premises go violate common sense, don't be surprised if your conclusions violate common sense too.
"10^100 dollars is like a promise to make one plus one equal three."
It's more like a promise to dilute the value-to-money ratio by a factor of 10^80. Even if that much money could be printed, all that would be accomplished would be to put all the world's wealth in one person's hands and reduce everyone else to beggars.
The correct response to the question is, of course, to lynch the person threatening to print/mint that much excess money as a danger to the well-being of human civilization. Even if you aren't a fan of human civilization, such a procedure is quite likely to damage everything else on the planet in the process of humanity's destruction.
OK, so in the least convenient possible world, where Crono said 10^100, he meant 10^20. It seems to me the real issue here is that if you cannot (nearly) cover your end of the bet, negative utility is flat for very large negative dollar values, so you become risk-seeking.