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?
All of your objections to PW seem to be about Pascal's application of the argument (the probabilities he inputted, the number of cases cases he considered) in which case we can agree that his conclusion wouldn't be correct.
When I read that Pascal's Wager is flawed as an argument, I interpret this as 'the argument does not have good form'. Did people just mean, all along, that they disagreed with the conclusion of the argument because they didn't agree with the numbers he used?
I think what they mean is, "If an argument allows you to claim an unreasonably huge amount of utility from actions not seemingly capable of that, then you have a complex enough hypothesis that you can find others with the same complexity and opposite conclusion".
PW-type arguments, then, refer to the class of arguments in which someone tries to justify a course of action through (following the action suggested by) an improbable hypothesis by claiming high enough expected utility. That class of arguments has the flaw that when you allow yourself t... (read more)