It has been claimed on this site that the fundamental question of rationality is "What do you believe, and why do you believe it?".
A good question it is, but I claim there is another of equal importance. I ask you, Less Wrong...
What are you doing?
And why are you doing it?
If you assume that changing your belief is an available action (which is also questionable), then the idealized form is just expected utility maximization. The criticism is that Pascal incorrectly calculated the expected utility.
Right, one flaw in the idealized form is that it's not clear that you can simply choose the belief that maximizes utility. But in some cases a person can, and does.
I think that an incorrect calculation, because one person considered 2 cases instead of N cases, is very different from being flawed as an argument.
PeerInfinity was writing about applying Pascal's wager to atheism -- so he must have been referring to the general form of the argument, not a particular application. Matthew B wrote that "Pascal's Wager is a flawed argument for believing in AN... (read more)