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JGWeissman comments on Rationality Quotes January 2013 - Less Wrong
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In this case you try harder to figure out a way to calculate the impact on your chance of death. The value of information of such an effort is worth infinite sparrow lives. Lower tier utility functions just don't matter.
What if you've already estimated that calculating excessively (e.g. beyond a minute) on this matter will have near-definite negative impact on your well-being?
Then you go do something else that's relevant to your top-tier utility function.
You can contrive a situation where the lower tier matters, but it looks like someone holding a gun to your head, and threatening to kill you if you don't choose in the next 5 seconds whether or not they shoot the sparrow. That sort of thing generally doesn't happen.
And even then, if you have the ability to self-modify, the costs of maintaining a physical representation of the lower tier utility functions is greater than the marginal benefit of choosing to save the sparrow automatically because you lower tier utility function says so over choosing alphabetically.