All of Steve4's Comments + Replies

Yes, but I think the point of his lottery article was that it was a bad deal for the individual player, and not just because it had a negative expected value; he was making the point that the actual existence of the (slim) possibility of riches was itself harmful. And he was not focusing on whether one actually won the lotto, he was focusing on the utility of actually having the chance of winning (as opposed to the utility of actually winning).

The last line really helped me see where you are coming from: You take the expectation of the utility of the money, not the utility of the expectation of the money.

However, at http://lesswrong.com/lw/hl/lotteries_a_waste_of_hope/, you argue against playing the lotto because the utility of the expectation itself is very bad. Now granted, the expectation of the utility is also not great, but let's say the lotto offered enough of a jackpot (with the same long odds) to offer an appropriate expectation of utility. Wouldn't you still be arguing that it is a "hope sink", thus focusing on the utility of the expectation?

1TheWakalix
Most mathematically-competent commenters agreed that the expected utility of lotteries was bad. Some people disagreed that the utility of expectation was bad, though. Yudkowsky was arguing against these commenters, saying that both expected utility and utility of expectation are bad. The arguments in the post you linked are not the main reasons Yudkowsky does not play the lottery, but rather the arguments that convey the most new information about the lottery (and whatever the lottery is being used to illustrate).

Hmmm.... I thought the point of your article at http://lesswrong.com/lw/mp/0_and_1_are_not_probabilities/ was that the difference between 1 and .99 was indeed much larger than, say, .48 and .49.

Anyway, what if we try this one on for size: let's say you are going to play a hand of Texas Hold 'em and you can choose one of the following three hands (none of them are suited): AK, JT, or 22. If we say that hand X > Y if hand X will win against hand Y more that 50% of the time, then AK > JT > 22 > AK > JT ..... etc. So in this case couldn't one choose rationally and yet still be a "money pump"?