“Evaluating the Infinite” by Toby_Ord

(Link-post to https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19389 ) I've written a new paper some of you may be interested in. It was written in response to the problems arising in decision theory, economics, and ethics where standard approaches to evaluating an option leads to divergent sums or integrals. This makes it hard to evaluate and compare things like unending streams of value, when each option under consideration would standardly be assigned the value <span>_+infty_</span>. This leads theorists to develop a variety of conflicting approaches to making these comparisons and often even leads them to modify their theory of finite cases — adding things like a requirement for bounded utility or discounting of future utility in order to make the infinities go away. I believe this problem is mainly caused by the use of the extended reals, which are an impoverished system of infinite numbers which is obviously not expressive enough to solve the [...] --- First published: September 25th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4FxCr3iqZPYa62pdM/evaluating-the-infinite --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.