It’s often in the nature of thought experiments to try to reduce complicated things to simple choices. In reality, humans rarely know enough to do an explicit EV calculation about a decision correctly. It can still be an ideal that can help guide our decisions, such that “this seems like a poor trade of EV” is a red flag the same way “oh, I notice I could be Dutch booked by this set of preferences” is a good way to notice there may be a flaw in our thinking somewhere.
I take your claim in the post not to be “the fact that an offer is +EV is one strong reason to be in favor of it,” but rather “you ought to take the cosmic coin flip, risking the universe, just because it is +EV.” (Because being +EV definitionally means the good scenario is super unbelievably good, much better than most people considering the thought experiment are probably imagining.)
But even within the thought experiment, abstracting away all empirical uncertainties, I have enough philosophical uncertainty about EV maximization that I don’t want to take the bet.
It’s often in the nature of thought experiments to try to reduce complicated things to simple choices. In reality, humans rarely know enough to do an explicit EV calculation about a decision correctly. It can still be an ideal that can help guide our decisions, such that “this seems like a poor trade of EV” is a red flag the same way “oh, I notice I could be Dutch booked by this set of preferences” is a good way to notice there may be a flaw in our thinking somewhere.
I take your claim in the post not to be “the fact that an offer is +EV is one strong reason to be in favor of it,” but rather “you ought to take the cosmic coin flip, risking the universe, just because it is +EV.” (Because being +EV definitionally means the good scenario is super unbelievably good, much better than most people considering the thought experiment are probably imagining.)
But even within the thought experiment, abstracting away all empirical uncertainties, I have enough philosophical uncertainty about EV maximization that I don’t want to take the bet.