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Will_Newsome comments on Taking Ideas Seriously - Less Wrong
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Hm, I wonder how many atheists have taken Pascal's wager seriously. If I'm not confident of the flaws of majoritarianism then failing to Aumann update on the testimony of a billion Christians would seem to be a bad idea. And if I think that the belief of a billion Christians is even small evidence that a Christian god is more likely to control most of the measure of computations that include myself than any other god then the atheist-god wager argument doesn't save me from having to disregard a possibility for infinite utility. But perhaps I forget the stronger arguments against Pascal's wager. At any rate, you're right that I don't go around looking for ridiculous religious claims to worry about, but I'm at least willing to take Pascal's wager a little bit seriously. (Failing to do so can also lead to falling into the Pascal's wager fallacy fallacy.)
You don't just have to worry about one specific atheist-god, but also any jealous gods, any singular god that would consider beliefs about a singular god beliefs about themself, and feel insulted by being thought to be like what JHWH is supposed to be like, any god that punishes giving in to imagined blackmail (hell) just to make blackmail less likely, and so on. These aren't symmetric because e. g. anti-jealous gods that reward worship of very different gods, including one particular very jealous god, seem less likely than jealous gods.
Hmuh, I'd never exactly thought of thinking about YHWH as a blackmailing simulator AI, but in an ensemble universe that description seems to fit. That's pretty funny. :)
Agreed - this is the usual response, and the one that works for me if I can't quite muster up the confidence to say "0% probability for infinite-torture JHWH (or variation)". I guess you can justify something like p=0 with a combination of: "you haven't defined what you mean by JHWH sufficiently for me to agree or disagree", "ok, you've told me enough that I see JHWH as a logical impossibility". Once a hypothetical god passes those bars, then you need recourse to all the possible god hypotheses. Priveleging the Hypothesis is a finite-scale version of the same objection.