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?
That is still fine, because we know how to handle the hypotheses with negative utility. You just optimize over the net utilities of each belief weighted by their probabilities.The fact that there are positive and negative terms together doesn't invalidate the whole argument. You just do the calculation, if you can, and see what you get.
If you have the right numbers, and a simple enough case to do the computation, would you find PW an acceptable argument?
I'm still having trouble understanding your objection.
When you decide to have faith based on PW, you're using some epistemology that allows you to pick out the "faith causes infinite utility" hypothesis out of the universe-generating functionspace, and deem it to have some finite probability. The problem is that that epistemology -- whatever it is -- also allows you to pick out numerous other hypotheses, in which some assert the opposite utility from faith (and their existence is provable by inversion of the faith = utility hypothesis elements).... (read more)