Also, it's well possible that your utility function doesn't evaluate to +10000 for any value of its argument, i.e. it's bounded above.

There are versions of the VNM theorem that allow infinitely many possible outcomes, but they either

1) require additional continuity assumptions so strong that they force your utility function to be bounded

or

2) they apply only to some subset of the possible lotteries (i.e. there will be some lotteries for which your agent is not obliged to define a utility).

I might look it up on the original paper when I have time.

The original statement and proof given by VNM are messy and complicated. They have since been neatened up a lot. If you have access to it, try "Follmer H., and Schied A., Stochastic Finance: An Introduction in Discrete Time, de Gruyter, Berlin, 2004"

EDIT: It's online.

I bite my pills into thirds.

I dunno, in the context it sounds clearly tongue-in-cheek -- though you usually can't countersignal to people who don't know you (see also).

Ugh. I am generally in the unsympathetic-to-PUA thinking camp, so I offer the following not to bring up a controversial subject again, but because I think publicly acknowledging when one encounters inconvenient evidence for one's priors is a healthy habit to be in...

Recently I added the following (truthful) text to my OkCupid! profile:

Note, July 2013 -- I can't claim to be in a relationship yet, but I have had a couple of dates with a someone who had me totally enthralled within 30 minutes of meeting her. I'm flattered by the wave of other letters that have come in the past month, but I've put responding to anyone else on hold while I devote myself to worshiping the ground she walks on.

Having noted that I am a)unavailable and b)getting lots of competing offers, a high status combination, the result is... in three days, the number of women rating my profile highly has gone from 61 to 113.

I took an hour to draw up a list of personal bets I've made or tried to make with people. The list turns out to be surprisingly short and have resulted in next to no bets, implying that for all that people talk about bets, actual bets are far rarer than I had realized. This is a bit of a pity - so much cheap talk...

Yeah. The idea came when I was lying in a hammock half asleep after dinner, it really woke me up :-) Now I wonder what approach could overcome such problems, even in principle.

I think I understand X, and it seems like a legitimate problem, but the comment I think you're referring to here seems to contain (nearly) all of X and not just half of it. So I'm confused and think I don't completely understand X.

Edit: I think I found the missing part of X. Ouch.

Somewhat frequently while talking, either public speaking or just talking to a friend, my mind will suddenly go blank. I won't be able to remember what I'm talking about, and I have to retrace my thoughts to get back to where I was.

Is this something that dual n-back will help with?

(Isomorphic question: Is this a problem of working memory, or something else?)

I think this Noah Smith disquisition on "derp" might be a useful thing to refer people to when one gets tired of referring them to PITMK. It crystalizes for me why I find a lot of political commentary unbearable to read/listen to.