thomblake comments on Pascal's Mugging - Penalizing the prior probability? - Less Wrong

8 Post author: XiXiDu 17 May 2011 02:44PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (29)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: thomblake 17 May 2011 07:09:36PM *  0 points [-]

It occurs to me that this problem shouldn't crop up - you could make the effective limits on calculated utility be the same as the effective limits on calculated probability (and MAX = 1/MIN) - thus VERY HIGH utility times VERY LOW probability = MAX*MIN = 1, which is probably lower than the expected utility for whatever it was doing in the first place.

I'll have to go re-read the original discussion.

ETA: Oh right, the whole point was that there needs to be some justification for the symmetrically-low probability, because it is not obvious from the structure of the problem like in Pascal's Wager. Duh.