I agree that it would be weird to accept the lottery with a positive EU only if you take it some specific number of times. In the normal, everyday decision making I wouldn’t argue for this. Indeed, I think the EU is the right approach to making decisions under uncertainty. I’m willing to follow it, even if chances of success are low, but the stakes are high enough to make the EU positive. What I argue for, is the justification why I’m willing to follow the EU. I don’t think that this is self-evident, that I should choose the option with the highest EU. I think that what makes following the EU... (read 519 more words →)
You’ve written that ,,In standard utility theory you really need the numbers to answer which one is better for “really bad outcome” and “moderate good outcome’’’’ I agree, probably I should have put there some numbers to be more precise.
,,The scheme you are proposing is more of "maximising the value of the expected outcome" rather than maximing the expected utility.”
If I understood correctly what you mean by that, then I would say that I agree also with that. But, with one important remark. I regard the decision as rational if from the set of all possible acts it selects first those acts which have probability equal or higher than... (read 435 more words →)
Thanks for your comment
In some sense I would agree that foregoing a finite chance of infinite payoff for finite chance of finite payoff needs infinite risk aversion. Nevertheless, I think that even such extreme risk aversion could be justified in some specific cases. When I consider this issue, I usually do it in terms of a thought experiment, similar to this with Sue, which I presented in my post.
Imagine you are the only being in the entire universe. You know with certainty that you have just one decision to make and after that you will magically disappear. You are faced with a choice between option A, which gives you 0,001... (read 484 more words →)
Thanks for your comment. I’ll try to express myself more clearly.
You’ve asked ,, in what sense it's the right choice/rational/achieving best result?”
This is what I had in mind.
I regard the decision as rational if from the set of all possible acts it selects first those acts which have probability equal or higher than 0,5 of achieving a net positive result, and then from those acts, the act which has the highest upside. Let’s call this approach the ,,first order” approach (I’m still uncertain about this exact formulation and I may revise it in the future, but let’s stick with this at the moment).
For example: I... (read 632 more words →)
During the last few weeks I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about ,,Pascalian” themes, like the paradoxes generated by introducing infinities in ethics or decision theory. In this post I want to focus on Pascal’s wager (Hajek, 2018), and why it is (ir)rational to accept it.
Firstly, it seems to me that a huge part of responses to Pascal’s wager are just unsuccessful rationalizations, which people create to avoid the conclusion. It is common to see people who (a) claim that this conclusion is plainly absurd and just dismiss it without argument, or (b) people who try to give an argument which at first glance seems to work, but at the second... (read 1037 more words →)
Thanks for your comment. I've thought through the issue cerafully and I'm no longer so confident about this topic. Now I'm planning to read more about the Pascal's wager and about the decision theory in general. I want to think about it more, and do my best to come up with a good enough solution for this problem.
Thank you for the whole disccusion and the time devoted for responding to my arguemnts.