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Nick_Tarleton comments on The Fundamental Question - Less Wrong
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Pascal's wager is not such a horribly flawed argument. In fact, I wager we can't even agree on why its flawed.
Later edit: I assume I am getting voted down for trolling (that is, disrupting the flow of conversation), and I agree with that. An argument about Pascal's wager is not really relevant in this thread. However, especially in the context of being a 'true believer', it is interesting to me that statements are often made that something is 'obvious', when there are many difficult steps in the argument, or 'horrible flawed', when it's actually just a little bit flawed or even controversially flawed. If anyone wants to comment in a thread dedicated to Pascal's wager, we can move this to the open thread, which I hope ultimately makes this comment less trollish of me.
Partially seconded. (I think most people agree that the primary flaw is the symmetry argument, but I don't think that argument does what they think it does, and I do see people holding up other, minority flaws. I do think the classic wager is horribly flawed for other, related but less commonly mentioned, reasons.)
I'll write a top-level post about this today or tomorrow. (In the meantime, see Where Does Pascal's Wager Fail? and Carl Shulman's comments on The Pascal's Wager Fallacy Fallacy.)
Thanks for the link to the Overcoming Bias post. I read that and it clarified some things for me. If I had known about that post, above I would have just linked to it when I wrote that the fallacy behind Pascal's wager is probably actually unclear, minor or controversial.