army1987 comments on Open Thread, July 16-31, 2012 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: OpenThreadGuy 16 July 2012 12:47PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 17 July 2012 11:46:24AM *  6 points [-]

It's not obvious that the ‘utilities’ for different people should add as sublinearly as those for one person do. So a better comparison would be whether you prefer to receive a dust speck in the eye with probability p or 50 years of torture with probability p/3^^^3. (This is essentially the veil-of-ignorance thing, where p is 3^^^3 divided by the total population.)

Wow, it sounds terribly like Pascal's Mugging now. Had anyone noticed that before?