Allais Hack -- Transform Your Decisions!
The Allais Paradox, though not actually a paradox, was a classic experiment which showed that decisions made by humans do not demonstrate consistent preferences. If you actually want to accomplish something, rather than simply feel good about your decisions, this is rather disturbing.
When something like the Allais Paradox is presented all in one go, it's fairly easy to see that the two cases are equivalent, and ensure that your decisions are consistent. But if I clone you right now, present one of you with gamble 1, and one of you with gamble 2, you might not fare so well. The question is how to consistently advance your own preferences even when you're only looking at one side of the problem.
Obviously, one solution is to actually construct a utility function in money, and apply it rigorously to all decisions. Logarithmic in your total net worth is usually a good place to start. Next you can assign a number of utilons to each year you live, a negative number to each day you are sick, a number for each sunrise you witness...
I would humbly suggest that a less drastic strategy might be to familiarize yourself with the ways in which you can transform a decision which should make no difference unto decision theory, and actually get in the habit of applying these transformations to decisions you make in real life.
So, let us say that I present you with Allais Gamble #2: choose between A: 34% chance of winning $24,000, and 66% chance of winning nothing, and B: 33% chance of winning $27,000, and 67% chance of winning nothing.
Before snapping to a judgment, try some of the following transforms:
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