CarlShulman comments on St. Petersburg Mugging Implies You Have Bounded Utility - Less Wrong

10 Post author: TimFreeman 07 June 2011 03:06PM

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Comment author: AlephNeil 08 June 2011 04:23:22PM 0 points [-]

Hyperreals or some other modification to the standard framework (see discussion of "infinity shades" in Bostrom) are necessary in order to say that a 50% chance of infinite utility is better than a 1/3^^^3 chance of infinite utility.

No it isn't, unless like Hayek you think there's something 'not blindingly obvious' about the 'modification to the standard framework' that consists of stipulating that probability p of infinite utility is better than probability q of infinite utility whenever p > q.

This sort of 'move' doesn't need a name. (What does he call it? "Vector valued utilities" or something like that?) It doesn't need to have a paper written about it. It certainly shouldn't be pretended that we're somehow 'improving on' or 'fixing the flaws in' Pascal's original argument by explicitly writing this move down.

Comment author: CarlShulman 08 June 2011 07:34:37PM 0 points [-]

A system which selects actions so as to maximize the probability of receiving infinitely many units of some good, without differences in the valuation of different infinite payouts, approximates to a bounded utility function, e.g. assigning utility 1 to world-histories with an infinite payout of the good, and 0 to all other world-histories.