Douglas_Knight comments on Anticipating critical transitions - Less Wrong

17 Post author: PhilGoetz 09 June 2013 04:28PM

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Comment author: Douglas_Knight 10 June 2013 07:46:01PM *  4 points [-]

If you are a rational agent, you work with averages, because you want to maximize expected utility.

Caring about expected utility doesn't mean you should care about expected anything else. Don't take averages early. In particular, the expected ratio of girls to boy is not the ratio of expected boys to expected girls. Similarly, "expected rise in water level per year" is irrelevant because utility is not linear in sea level.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 17 June 2013 07:17:46PM 1 point [-]

True. Computing average utility is what's important. But just using the median as you suggested doesn't let you compute average utility.