Obviously you’re going to get wrong specific answers if you’re just pulling exponents out of thin air. The torture vs. specs example works because the answer would be the same if specs were worth the same as a year of torture or 10^-10 as much or 10^-1000 as much.
Getting approximate utilities is tricky; general practice is to come up with two situations you’re intuitively indifferent about, where one involves a small event, and the other involves a dice throw and then a big event only with a certain probability dependent on it. only AFTER you’ve come up with this kind of preference do you put number on anything, although often you’ll find this unnecessary as just thinking about it like this resolved your confusion.
Obviously you’re going to get wrong specific answers if you’re just pulling exponents out of thin air. The torture vs. specs example works because the answer would be the same if specs were worth the same as a year of torture or 10^-10 as much or 10^-1000 as much.
Getting approximate utilities is tricky; general practice is to come up with two situations you’re intuitively indifferent about, where one involves a small event, and the other involves a dice throw and then a big event only with a certain probability dependent on it. only AFTER you’ve come up with this kind of preference do you put number on anything, although often you’ll find this unnecessary as just thinking about it like this resolved your confusion.