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nyan_sandwich comments on Pinpointing Utility - Less Wrong
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There's something missing here, which is that "1/400 chance of a whale day" means "1/400 chance of whale + 399/400 chance of normal day". To calculate the value of "1/400 chance of a whale day" you need to assign a utility for both a whale day and a normal day. Then you can compare the resulting expectation of utility to the utility of a sandwhich = 1/500 (by which we mean a sandwich day, I guess?), no sweat.
The absolute magnitudes of the utilities don't make any difference. If you add N to all utility values, that just adds N to both sides of the comparison. (And you're not allowed to compare utilities to magic numbers like 0, since that would be numerology.)
Unless you rescale everything so that magic numbers like 0 and 1 are actually utilities of possibilities under consideration.
But that's like cutting corners in the lab; dangerous if you don't know what you are doing, but useful if you do.