💭 Flipping Out: The Cosmic Coinflip Thought Experiment Is Bad Philosophy

Philosophy

Published on November 12, 2024 11:55 PM GMTTL;DR: People often use the thought experiment of flipping a coin, giving 50% chance of huge gain and 50% chance of losing everything, to say that maximizing utility is bad. But the real problem is that our intuitions on this topic are terrible, and there's no real paradox if you adopt the premise in full.Epistemic status: confident, but too lazy to write out the mathThere's a thought experiment that I've sometimes heard as a counterargument to strict utilitarianism. A god/alien/whatever offers to flip a coin. Heads, it slightly-more-than-doubles the expected utility in the world.

LessWrong     Nov 14, 2024