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jkrause comments on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: Coscott 11 February 2014 06:08PM

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Comment author: jkrause 12 February 2014 07:16:37AM 9 points [-]

Here's one interesting way of viewing it that I once read:

Suppose that the option you chose, rather than being a single trial, were actually 1,000 trials. Then, risk averse or not, Option 5 is clearly the best approach. The only difficulty, then, is that we're considering a single trial in isolation. However, when you consider all such risks you might encounter in a long period of time (e.g. your life), then the situation becomes much closer to the 1,000 trial case, and so you should always take the highest expected value option (unless the amounts involved are absolutely huge, as others have pointed out).