[SEQ RERUN] New Improved Lottery

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Today's post, New Improved Lottery was originally publeslished on April 13, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):

If the opportunity to fantasize about winning was a rational justification for the lottery, we could design a "New Improved Lottery", where a single payment buys an epsilon chance of becoming a millionaire over the next five years. All your time could be spent thinking how you could become a millionaire at any moment.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments of the original post).

This post is part of a series rerunning Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts so those interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Lotteries: A Waste of Hope, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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Today's post, New Improved Lottery was originally publeslished on April 13, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):

If the opportunity to fantasize about winning was a rational justification for the lottery, we could design a "New Improved Lottery", where a single payment buys an epsilon chance of becoming a millionaire over the next five years. All your time could be spent thinking how you could become a millionaire at any moment.

Eliezer's point is that if you think you should play the lottery then you are wrong about your own values, you don't just have weird values. (And he's helpfully correcting you.)

If you want fuzzies more than to save beings, your current values are "fuzzies (important)", "saving beings (not important)", and (likely unknown to you) "change the weight of 'saving beings to 'super duper important' (super duper important)". (Either that or you're a serious jerk.)

I'm just not getting it. Do you really think people are never just stupid?

Eliezer's point is that if you think you should play the lottery then you are wrong about your own values, you don't just have weird values.

I thought I already explained what was wrong with that here:

Re: Seriously, why can't we just say that buying lottery tickets is stupid?
Buying a lottery ticket is not stupid - under some conditions.
Say you have two cents, and can't afford your train fare home (which is one stop away). If you can gamble those two cents in a game of chance, you may be able to convert them into a whole train fare.
The conditions of be

... (read more)

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No, people very often are just stupid. But I don't approve of the way the posts on lotteries have been written. Lotteries are not intrinsically irrational, only if one is confused about what it means to play the lottery. What Elezier is basically saying is that "you ought not to play lotteries because it is stupid." That's a pretty weak argument. [...] I haven't read the metaethics sequence, so maybe he has figured out some objective right that makes caring about beings more important than caring about oneself. I doubt it though, and I don't think that it has been proven that humans are not selfish. For me winning means to do what I want, the way I want it, when I want it. And I never regret anything, because at one time it was exactly what I wanted. [...] I don't buy the general point of being wrong about one's own values. I am not the same person as one that was smarter, knew more and had unlimited resources to think about decisions. If I adopt game and decision theoretic models, I discard my current values and replace them with some sort of equilibrium, between me and other agents that adopted the same strategies. But I don't want to play that game, I don't care. I care about my current values, not what I would do if I was able to run models of all other agents and extrapolate their values and strategies. If you asked a Cro-Magnon man about its goals and desires it would likely mention mating and hunting. Sure, if the Cro-Magnon was smarter and knew more, it would maybe care how to turn a sphere inside out. And if it knew even more? Where does this line of reasoning lead us? Rationality is instrumental, not a goal in and of itself. Rationality can't tell me what to value or how to allocate utility to my goals. If I want to cooperate when faced with the Prisoner's dilemma, then that is what I want.

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