NancyLebovitz comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012) - Less Wrong

20 Post author: ciphergoth 18 July 2012 05:24PM

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Comment author: NancyLebovitz 05 December 2012 07:58:47PM 3 points [-]

"You can't predict how long you will live. So the best way to search for the (sub)optimal life was to utilize a greedy algorithm. That is, at every decision point, you have to select the best alternative that maximizes your utility at that time."

However, you can estimate how long you will live with fairly good accuracy. If you know you're very likely to live for some decades more, then I think it makes sense to optimize around the estimate rather than for the very small possibility that you'll be dead in the next hour.