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Manfred comments on St. Petersburg Mugging Implies You Have Bounded Utility - Less Wrong
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Comments (163)
This doesn't seem to say anything about the boundedness of human utility functions (which I think is pretty likely) that Pascal's mugging doesn't. And heck, Pascal's mugger can just say "give me all your money."
Pascal's mugging requires the victim to say what probability he assigns to the mugger being honest, and this one doesn't, so with this one I can fleece people en masse without having to have a conversation with each one.
Also, Pascal's Wager as presented on LW involved creating other people, so this version avoids Hanson's suggestion of assuming that you don't control whether you're the preexisting person or one of the new persons. This version works with an unbounded utility function that does not involve creating other people to get large utilities.
Otherwise, I agree.
ETA: Another advantage of the scenario in the OP over Pascal's Mugging as presented on LessWrong is that the latter is extortion and the former is not, and people seem really keen on manipulating the extortioner when there is extortion. The OP managed not to trigger that.
So how about avoiding your version by saying that all the terms in my utility function are bounded except for the ones that scale linearly with the number of people?
That seems hackish, but given a mathematical definition of "person" it might be implementable. I don't know what that definition would be. Given that we don't have a clear definition for "person", Hanson's proposal (and anthropic arguments in general) seem like bunk to me.
Ah, true, because your promise is infinite expected utility without actually saying "infinite utility," which might put some people off.