I think we have to clarify: the expected value of what?
For example, if I had a billion dollars and nothing else, I would not bet it on a coin flip even if winning would grant +2 billion dollars. This is because losing the billion dollars seems like a bigger loss than gaining 2 billion dollars seems like a gain. Obviously I’m not measuring in dollars, but in happiness, or quality of life, or some other vibe-metric, such that the EV of the coin flip is negative.
It may be hard to distinguish “invalid” emotions like a bias due to an instinctual fear of death, from a “valid” vibe-metric of value (which is just made up anyway). And if you make up a new metric specifically to agree with what you feel, you can’t then claim that your feelings make sense because the metric says so.
We could try to pin down “the expected value of what”, but no matter what utility function I tried to provide, I think I’ll run into one of two issues:
1. Fanaticism forces out weird results I wouldn’t want to accept 2. A sort of Sorites problem: I define a step function that says things like “Past a certain point, the value of physical torture becomes infinitely negative” that requires me to have hard breakpoints
I think we have to clarify: the expected value of what?
For example, if I had a billion dollars and nothing else, I would not bet it on a coin flip even if winning would grant +2 billion dollars. This is because losing the billion dollars seems like a bigger loss than gaining 2 billion dollars seems like a gain. Obviously I’m not measuring in dollars, but in happiness, or quality of life, or some other vibe-metric, such that the EV of the coin flip is negative.
It may be hard to distinguish “invalid” emotions like a bias due to an instinctual fear of death, from a “valid” vibe-metric of value (which is just made up anyway). And if you make up a new metric specifically to agree with what you feel, you can’t then claim that your feelings make sense because the metric says so.
We could try to pin down “the expected value of what”, but no matter what utility function I tried to provide, I think I’ll run into one of two issues:
1. Fanaticism forces out weird results I wouldn’t want to accept
2. A sort of Sorites problem: I define a step function that says things like “Past a certain point, the value of physical torture becomes infinitely negative” that requires me to have hard breakpoints