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khafra comments on The Fundamental Question - Less Wrong
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A couple of points:
I could not tell from your post if you understood that Pascal's Wager is a flawed argument for believing in ANY belief system. You do understand this don't you (That Pascal's Wager is horribly flawed as an argument for believing in anything)?
Also, as Counsin it seems to be implying (And I would suspect as well), you seem to be exhibiting signs of the True Believer complex.
This is what I alluded to when I discussed friends of mine who would swing back and forth between Born-Again Christian and Satanists. Don't make the same mistake with a belief in the Singularity. One needn't have "Faith" in the Singularity as one would God in a religious setting, as there are clear and predictable signs that a Singularity is possible (highly possible), yet there exists NO SUCH EVIDENCE for any supernatural God figure.
Forming beliefs is about evidence, not about blindly following something due to a feel good that one gets from a belief.
In chapter five of Jaynes, "Queer Uses for Probability Theory," he explains that although a claimed telepath tested 25.8 standard deviations away from chance guessing, that isn't the probability we should assign to the hypothesis that she's actually a telepath, because there are many simpler hypotheses that fit the data (for instance, various forms of cheating).
This example is instructive when using Pascal's Wager to minimax expected utility. Pascal's Wager is a losing bet for a Christian, because even though expecting positive infinity utility with infitesimal probability seems like a good bet, there are many likelier ways of getting negative infinity utility from that choice. Doing what you can to promote a friendly singularity can still be called "Pascal's Wager" because it's betting on a very good outcome with a low probability, but the low probability is so many orders of magnitude better than Christianity's that it's actually a rather good bet.
Obviously, you don't want to let wishful thinking guide your epistemology, but I don't think that's what PI's talking about.