The Shadow Question

There's also "All-in", aka "Go for broke", which picks high utility OR high disutility, with a distribution of probability that is less extreme than in the case of a lottery ticket (though not necessarily fifty-fifty chances). For instance "with all the hype and all the expectations I have formed, Watchmen-the-movie is either going to be a joyride or a horrible disappointment."

Assuming I understand what you're aiming at... These four don't quite seem to answer the question itself, but rather how you evaluate the possible answers to the question.

This seems to leave open the real issue, which is how you enumerate possible answers to the question.

To take a concrete example, suppose I am fed up with my job, so fed up that I'd take "something, anything, other than that". That's not literally true - it just feels that way. I'm not going to inquire at the nearest McDonald's, for instance.

In this particular case, which should count as a "problem" by your previous definition, I don't believe I would carve up the search space first in terms of approaches such as the four you offer in this post, i.e. asking what would be a big gain, or how do I guarantee no huge loss, etc.. My very first question would be something like "what are the things I would be trading off against one another ?"

My first pass at this, by the availability heuristic, might yield things that are salient properties of the current job (salary, location, etc.). Obviously because that's the most available thing of all, my first pass will include the reason I'm unhappy about the current job: that might be annoying coworkers, a horrible boss, etc.

One of the key skills in problem solving is to also include the less obvious attributes that (possibly) have an even greater weight in my utility function. So my second pass would be "what exactly am I trying to achieve here ?" This may start to yield non-obvious insights, such as why I need a job in the first place, and what acceptable substitutes may be.

Other than cryonics (I'm already a member of Alcor) what are some other accessible decisions that act as a lottery ticket: enabling high pay off -- if unlikely -- future outcomes?

"Accessible," to me, does not include abandoning my career to directly meddle -- yet.

I suppose donating to SIAI might be a lottery ticket, but I'm not entirely convinced that it is such. I honestly have no idea what the SIAI does in their day to day business and the material I can find on them doesn't provide much information. I also have no idea how credible the SIAI is among those who might be in a position to turn disasters off so its hard to determine how much to value an SIAI donation at compared to alternatives.

Supporting SENS could be a lottery ticket, although to some extent the same concerns with the SIAI apply to SENS -- I don't have enough information to evaluate it compared to alternatives.

Supporting existential risk research in some way seems like a good approach to turning disasters off, since this growing branch of research appears to be creating a solid basis for future risk mitigation methods. I might investigate that further.

I'm sure there are many options I don't know that I don't know.

A neat thing about cryonics is that the disaster (my death) can come to pass, but even after that point I still have a chance to survive. Should I look for things to invest in that share that insurance-like dynamic? It seems powerful. Is insurance against death a more effective investment than trying to resolve the causes of death? I suppose this depends on the amount of knowledge the civilization has at the time you go to make the bet.

Ok, we know that we can't just maximize expected utility, but the four strategies you give seem pretty arbitrary and unlikely to be even close to optimal. Why did you propose them?

Let me suggest another strategy that I think might make more sense. Start by considering what distributions of outcomes are feasible (intuitively). Then, among the set of seemingly feasible distributions, decide which one you most prefer, and try to work out a plan that results in that distribution. If it turns out (while trying to work out the plan) that you were wrong about its feasibility, then adjust your intuition, and reselect the most preferred feasible distribution of outcomes. Repeat this process until you end up with a plan.

This way, you get a plan that at least somewhat approximates optimality, given computational constraints and the fact that you don't know how to express your values as a utility function.

Only 20 geek points? Who do you think you are?

ETA: It was just a joke, but one which anyone who earned the geek points should get.

This post was very confusing to me. What is the Shadow Question? It was never explained in the post, and it's somewhat hard to understand without knowing. Like wware, I kept thinking "Who knows what evil lurks within the hearts of men?"

The other approach is to identify a good next step and to go with that. For example, if you're trying to improve your social skills, you may join meetup.com and go to a few events. Although this is unlikely to solve your problem, it'll probably give you more information as to what the nature of it is.

The Everglades aren't close enough to my sandwich for me to think they're worth explicitly acting to protect, even now that Everglades-destruction has occurred to me as an undesirable potential side effect.

As someone who grew up in Florida, I politely request that you not eat PB&J sandwiches made with jelly made with sugar grown in Florida by conventional means -- the pesticide runoff tends to ruin the Everglades. If it's just PB, the sugar's probably not a big deal, although some brands add a lot of sugar.

I wish that the third and fourth approaches had more “everyday” examples like the first two do.

This post could use an edit to include a link to the third part, especially as the series doesn't seem to have an easily Google'd title for "Foo, Part 3" searches :)

I did have to read (only) the first sentence before I got it. Do I get 15 geek points or 20?

Rot13 that sort of thing so it doesn't show up in the comments bar. It's a spoiler.