I think you mean ordinals, not cardinals.

Decision theory with ordinals is actually well-studied and commonly used, specifically in language and grammar systems. See papers on Optimality Theory.

The resolution to this "tier" problems is assigning every "constraint" (thing that you value) an abstract variable, generating a polynomial algebra in some ungodly number of variables, and then assigning a weight function to that algebra, which is essentially assigning every variable an ordinal number, as you've been doing.

Just as perspective on the abstract problem there are two confounders that I don't see addressed

One is that every time you assign a value to something you should actually be assigning a distribution of possible values to it. It's certainly possible to tighten these distributions in theory but I don't think that human value systems actually do tighten them enough to reduce this to a mathematically tractable problem; and if they DO constrain things that much I'm certain we don't know it. Which is just saying that this problem is going to end up with people reaching different intuitive conclusions.

Two is that it tends to be the case that these systems are wildly underspecified. If you do the appropriate statistics to figure out how people rank constraints, you don't get an answer, you get some statistics about an answer, and the probability distributions on people's preferences are WIIIIIIDE. In order to solve this problem in linguistics people use subject- and problem-specific methods to throw together ad hoc conclusions. So I guess these are really the same complaint; you shouldn't be using single-value assignments and when you stop doing that you lose the computational precision that makes talking about ordinal numbers really interesting.

(for reference my OT knowledge comes entirely from casual conversations with people who do it professionally; I'm fairly confident in these statements but I'd be open to contradiction from a linguist)

I struggle to get through Yvain's posts; it's like trying to sit through a social psychology lecture delivered by Fluttershy. All ability to focus is blotted out by eeee I want to hug the author

Yes, but here the goal is to solve the general case.

I'm surprised nobody has yet written that the appropriate way for them to split it in this case is $10 each, because the transaction cost of working out something else in more detail and then making the appropriate change is greater than the difference between $10 and whatever the appropriate answer is.

I would be especially interested in subjects under part IV, or equally interested in a link to another source on this information with some significant vetting.

I'm currently in a situation (and I expect many other LW readers to be) where I am still a student but won't be for much longer. I know how to live rather cheaply and not make life-destroying decisions, but I don't know how to open a different kind of bank account, buy any kind of stocks, or appropriately munchkin the rules on student loans.

Put a human being in an environment which is novel to them. Say, empiricism doesn't hold - the laws of this environment are such that "That which has happened before is less likely to happen again" (a reference to an old Overcoming Bias post I can't locate).

Is that human being going to behave "stupidly" in this environment? Do -we- fail the intelligence test? You acknowledge that we could - but if you're defining intelligence in such a way that nothing actually satisfies that definition, what the heck are you achieving, here?

I'm not sure your criteria is all that useful. (And I'm not even sure it's that well defined, actually.)

I recently considered leaving graduate school to get a job. I talked to a number of friends who had jobs, revamped my CV into a resume, created a linkedin profile, and learned a lot about what the job market is like in my area, and about the interview process, and about what sorts of jobs I was interested in. I also talked to people in my department about it for the first time, though it had been on my mind for a while.

I decided that the remaining time that I have (probably two years) is a worthy investment for a number of reasons; including the experience itself, the value of having a PhD, and contingent circumstances about my social life.

After that I've been incredibly productive in my program, scheduling my qualifying exam and constructing a committee and preparing material much faster and more easily than I'd been working before, and I feel a lot less self-doubt about doing school work.

Not sure you can take repair time as damage time. Study was 3 months. Onset of vit c def I believe to be > 60 & < 90 days. Upper bound isn't necessarily consistent with study.

Does anyone know what the time-line is on vitamin deficiencies? I mean might this be like cigarettes - increases your risk of something going wrong massively but only becomes apparent years down the line when you're already screwed.