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benelliott comments on St. Petersburg Mugging Implies You Have Bounded Utility - Less Wrong
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Okay, that is definitely more reasonable. It's now essentially become analogous to a Pascal's mugging, where a guy comes up to me in the street and says that if I give him £5 then he will give me whatever I ask in the unlikely event that he is God. So why waste time with a lottery, why not just say that?
I don't have a really convincing answer, Pascal's Mugging is a problem that needs to be solved, but I suspect I can find a decision-theory answer without needing to give up on what I want just because its not convenient.
The best I can manage right now is that there is a limit to how much I can specify in my lifetime, and the probability of Tim being God multiplied by that limit is too low to be worthwhile.
The reason the lottery is there is that you don't have to specify N. Sure, if you do, it makes the scary infinities go away, but it seems natural that you shouldn't improve your expected outcome by adding a limit on how much you can win, so it seems that the outcome you get is at least as good as any outcome you could specify by specifying N.
True, "seems natural" isn't a good guideline, and in any case it's obvious that there's something fishy going on with our intuitions. However, if I had to point to something that's probably wrong, it probably wouldn't be the intuition that the infinite lottery is at least as good as any finite version.