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Kindly comments on Cryonics: Can I Take Door No. 3? - Less Wrong
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Isn't it closer to "take a certain loss over a risk of the same exact loss, plus a whole lot of money"?
Yes, that is part of it. I don't think that the flat financial loss is the killer issue in many cases where an unproven method could work, or not. When doing nothing is acceptable, trying something becomes fraught with the risk of being blamed for the failure.
That's a Pascal's wager argument.
What? No. Pascal's wager is when you apply the rules of instrumental rationality to epistemic rationality.
Simply being willing to take risks to possibly get a better outcome, without warping your beliefs, is not the same thing at all.
"Pascal's wager" denotes several different fallacies, which are present in Pascal's original argument.
Instrumentally, it refers to estimating expected utility based only on a possible outcome with an extremely large (positive or negative) payoff, without taking into account the fact that said outcome has an extremely small probability.