Eugine_Nier 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: Eugine_Nier 08 June 2011 03:18:53AM 1 point [-]

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.

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?

Comment author: TimFreeman 09 June 2011 04:13:44PM 0 points [-]

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.