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sixes_and_sevens comments on Open thread, August 19-25, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: David_Gerard 19 August 2013 06:58AM

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Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 20 August 2013 04:34:49PM 3 points [-]

If you have some concept of "3^^^3 disutility" as a tractable measure of units of disutility, it seems unlikely you don't also have a reasonable idea of the upper and lower bounds of your utility function. If the values are known this becomes trivial to solve.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that VNM-utility is a poor tool for ad-hoc decision-theoretics, not because of dubious assumptions or inapplicability, but because finding corner-cases where it appears to break down is somehow ridiculously appealing.