TheOtherDave comments on How many people here agree with Holden? [Actually, who agrees with Holden?] - Less Wrong

4 Post author: private_messaging 14 May 2012 11:44AM

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Comment author: TheOtherDave 14 May 2012 02:14:07PM *  4 points [-]

I am >.9 confident that donating money to SI doesn't significantly increase human existential risk.

(Edit: Which, on second read, I guess means I agree with Holden as you summarize him here. At least, the difference between "A doesn't significantly affect B" and "A insignificantly affects B" seems like a difference I ought not care about.)

I also think Pascal's Wager type arguments are silly. More precisely, given how unreliable human intuition is when dealing with very low probabilities and when dealing with very large utilities/disutilities, I think lines of reasoning that rely on human intuitions about very large very-low-probability utility shifts are unlikely to be truth-preserving.

Why do you want to know?