heredami comments on Lotteries & MWI - Less Wrong

0 Post author: DataPacRat 18 November 2013 10:46PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (65)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: JoshuaFox 19 November 2013 07:33:24AM 4 points [-]

Diminishing marginal returns.

The utility of your gaining a $1,000,000 is not a thousand times the disutility of your losing $1000.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 November 2013 05:59:58PM 2 points [-]

There are some special cases. If someone thinks his life is worthless if he doesn't have something that could be bought or done with a $1,000,000, then the gamble could be justified. The thing that he buys pumps up the utility so much that it's more than thousands times the utility of $1000. But this is probably a really rare case.

Comment author: bogdanb 25 November 2013 07:17:33AM 2 points [-]

Medical issues that make life miserable but can be fixed with ~1M$ would be a (bit more concrete) example. Relatively rare, as you said.