I agree that there’s been a phenomenon of people suddenly all agreeing that all of SBF’s opinions were wrong post-FTX collapse. So I appreciate the effort to make the case for taking the deal, and to portray the choice as not completely obvious.
To the extent that you’re hoping to save “maximizing utility via maximizing expected value,” I think it’s still an uphill battle. I like Beckstead and Thomas’s “A paradox for tiny probabilities and enormous values” on this, which runs essentially the same thought experiment as “flip the coin many times,” except with the coin weighted to 99.9% heads (and only your own life in play, not the universe). They point out that both positions, “timidity” and “recklessness”, have implausible conclusions.
I’m ultimately quite philosophically troubled by this “concentrating all the value into narrow regions of probability space” feature of EV maximization as a result (but I don’t have a better alternative on hand!). This makes me, in particular, not confident enough in EV-maximization to wager the universe on it. So while I’m more sympathetic than most to the position that the coin flip might be justifiable, I’m still pretty far from wanting to bite that bullet.
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 agree that there’s been a phenomenon of people suddenly all agreeing that all of SBF’s opinions were wrong post-FTX collapse. So I appreciate the effort to make the case for taking the deal, and to portray the choice as not completely obvious.
To the extent that you’re hoping to save “maximizing utility via maximizing expected value,” I think it’s still an uphill battle. I like Beckstead and Thomas’s “A paradox for tiny probabilities and enormous values” on this, which runs essentially the same thought experiment as “flip the coin many times,” except with the coin weighted to 99.9% heads (and only your own life in play, not the universe). They point out that both positions, “timidity” and “recklessness”, have implausible conclusions.
I’m ultimately quite philosophically troubled by this “concentrating all the value into narrow regions of probability space” feature of EV maximization as a result (but I don’t have a better alternative on hand!). This makes me, in particular, not confident enough in EV-maximization to wager the universe on it. So while I’m more sympathetic than most to the position that the coin flip might be justifiable, I’m still pretty far from wanting to bite that bullet.
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.