komponisto comments on St. Petersburg Mugging Implies You Have Bounded Utility - Less Wrong

10 Post author: TimFreeman 07 June 2011 03:06PM

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Comment author: JoshuaZ 07 June 2011 06:25:53PM 2 points [-]

Yes, assigning GOD(infinity) a probability of zero means that no finite amount of evidence will shift that. For this particular infinite claim I don't see a problem with that.

So how do you determine which claims you are giving a prior probability of zero and which you don't?

Thoroughgoing rejection of 0 and 1 as probabilities means that you have to assign positive probability to P(A & ~A).

This connects to a deep open problem- how do we assign probabilities to the chances that we've made a logical error or miscalculated. However, even if one is willing to assign zero probability to events that contain inherent logical contradictions, that's not at all the same as assigning zero probability to a claim about the empirical world.

Comment author: komponisto 08 June 2011 02:01:36AM 2 points [-]

However, even if one is willing to assign zero probability to events that contain inherent logical contradictions, that's not at all the same as assigning zero probability to a claim about the empirical world.

If claims about the empirical world can have arbitrarily small probability, then a suitable infinite conjunction of such claims has probability zero, just as surely as P(A&~A) does.