Wei_Dai comments on Why We Can't Take Expected Value Estimates Literally (Even When They're Unbiased) - Less Wrong

75 Post author: HoldenKarnofsky 18 August 2011 11:34PM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 18 August 2011 10:11:32PM 6 points [-]

It's intuitively plausible that a Solomonoff type prior would (at least approximately) yield such an assumption.

But even if "intuitively plausible" equates to, say, 0.9999 probability, that's insufficient to disarm Pascal's Mugging. I think there's at least 0.0001 chance that a better approximate prior distribution for "value of an action" is one with a "heavy tail", e.g., one with infinite variance.

Comment author: multifoliaterose 18 August 2011 10:50:30PM *  0 points [-]

Sure, the present post deals only with the case where the value that one assigns to an action obeys a (log)-normal distribution over actions. In the case that you describe, there may (or may not) be a different way to disarm Pascal Mugging.