Comment by admoin
19 years ago
I read the union essay a while ago, but your failure to sufficiently consider risk-aversion in this one was a major hole. I don't mean to really criticize that much, you write consistently great stuff.
19 years ago
I read the union essay a while ago, but your failure to sufficiently consider risk-aversion in this one was a major hole. I don't mean to really criticize that much, you write consistently great stuff.
http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=35171
That works, except then I guess the hole was not making it clear enough that you were talking about utility rather than expected value. The problem with your response, and the reason that I don't really see it as a good explanation, is that your basic principle is far less useful if it requires the user to calculate their expected utility.
In practice it's not hard, because nearly all founders' utility functions are practically step functions.