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multifoliaterose comments on Model Uncertainty, Pascalian Reasoning and Utilitarianism - Less Wrong
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Thanks.
My life satisfaction certainly does not scale linearly with DALYs (e.g. averting the destruction of 1000 DALYs does not make me ten times as happy as averting the destruction of 100 DALYs). but does seem to be very much influenced by whether I have a sense that I'm "doing the right thing" (whatever that means).
But maybe you mean utility in some other sense than life satisfaction.
If I had the choice of pushing one of 10 buttons, each of which had different distribution of probabilities attached to magnitudes of impact, I think I would push the aggregate utility maximizing one regardless of how small the probabilities were. Would this run against my values? Maybe, I'm not sure.
I agree; I've been trying to formulate this intuition in quasi-rigorous terms and have not yet succeeded in doing so.
Well I am talking about the utility defined in the VNM utility theorem, which I assumed is what the term was generally taken to mean on LW, but perhaps I am mistaken. If you mean something else by utility, then I'm unsure why you would "push the aggregate utility maximizing one" as that choice seems a bit arbitrary to me to be a hard and fast rule (except for VNM utility, since VNM utility is by definition the thing whose expected value you maximize).
Would you care to share your intuitions as to why you would push the utility maximizing button, and what you mean by utility in this case (a partial definition / example is fine if you don't have a precise definition).