Unknown comments on Anthropomorphic Optimism - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 August 2008 08:17PM

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Comment author: Unknown 05 August 2008 06:20:48PM 1 point [-]

Nick, can you explain how that happens with bounded utility functions? I was thinking basically something like this: if your maximum utility is 1000, then something that has a probability of one in a million can't have a high expected value or disvalue, because it can't be multiplied by more than 1000, and so the expected value can't be more than 0.001.

This seems to me the way humans naturally think, and the reason that sufficiently low-probability events are simply ignored.