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timtyler comments on Rationality is Systematized Winning - Less Wrong
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Does that mean that I should mechanically overwrite my beliefs about the chance of a lottery ticket winning, in order to maximize my expectation of the payout? As Nesov says, rationality is about utility; which is why a rational agent in fact maximizes their expectation of utility, while trying to maximize utility (not their expectation of utility!).
It may help to understand this and some of the conversations below if you realize that the word "try" behaves a lot like "quotation marks" and that having an extra "pair" of quotation "marks" can really make "your" sentences seem a bit odd.
Re: Does that mean that I should mechanically overwrite my beliefs about the chance of a lottery ticket winning, in order to maximize my expectation of the payout?
No, it doesn't. It means that the process going on in the brains of intelligent agents can be well modelled as calculating expected utilities - and then selecting the action that corresponds to the largest one.
Intelligent agents are better modelled as Expected Utility Maximisers than Utility Maximisers. Whether they actually maximise utility depends on whether they are in an environment where their expectations pan out.
By definition, intelligent agents want to maximize total utility. In the absence of perfect knowledge, they act on expected utility calculations. Is this not a meaningful distinction?