magfrump comments on Why We Can't Take Expected Value Estimates Literally (Even When They're Unbiased) - Less Wrong
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Comments (249)
???
What precisely is the objection to Pascal's Mugging in the post? Just that the probability for the mugger being able to deliver goes down with N? This objection has been given thousands of times, and the counter response is that the probability can't go down fast enough to outweigh increase in utility. This is formalised here.
I mean that using a probability distribution rather than just saying numbers clearly dispels a naive pascal's mugging. I am open to the possibility that more heavily contrived Pascal's Muggings may exist that can still exploit an unbounded utility function but I'll read that paper and see what I think after that.
Edit: From the abstract:
What this sounds like it is saying is that literally any action under an unbounded utility function has undefined utility. In that case it just says that unbounded utility functions are useless from the perspective of decision theory. I'm not sure how it constitutes evidence that the problem of Pascal's Mugging is unresolved.