DaFranker comments on When Science Can't Help - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 May 2008 07:24AM

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Comment author: DaFranker 10 December 2012 02:59:49PM 0 points [-]

Ah, yes, of course. I hadn't included any opportunity costs in the calculation, and (perhaps deliberately, though if so I can't remember why) framed the problem as a two-option dilemma when in real life it's obvious to most that this is a false dilemma.

As I stated in response to another comment, these were rough same-ballpark-expected-utility numbers. My response was attempting to make a closer-to-real-world referent available as contrast to the ambulance situation, and illustrate the other numbers of the equation as proportionally as possible (to the resulting EU; the individual numbers aren't nearly in the right orders of magnitude for real cryo).

I'm not claiming that I have an actual solution to the problem or know which is the right thing to do out of all the many options (there are more than the three we've said here, I'm rather confident we agree on that), even for my own utility function, partially because of the black box problem but also because of a lack of information and credence in my current estimates of the various numbers.