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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Bayesian Adjustment Does Not Defeat Existential Risk Charity - Less Wrong
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No. The problem with Pascal's mugging doesn't lie merely in the particular hoped-for payoff, it's that in extreme combinations of small chance/large payoff, the complexity of certain hypotheses doesn't seem sufficient to adequately (as per our intuitions) penalize said hypotheses.
If I said "give me a dollar, and I'll use my Matrix Lord powers to have three dollars appear in your wallet", someone can simply respond that the chances of me being a Matrix Lord is less than one in three, so the expected payoff is less than the cost. But we don't yet to have a clear, mathematically precise way to explain why we should also respond negatively to "give me a dollar, and I'll use my Matrix Lord powers to save 3^^^3 lives.", even though our intuition says we should (and in this case we trust our intuition).
To put it in brief: Pascal's Mugging is a interesting problem regarding decision theory which LessWrongers should be hoping to solve (I have an idea towards that direction, which I'm writing a discusion post about, but I'd need mathematicians to tell me if it potentially leads to anything); not just a catchphrase you can use to bash someone else's calculations when their intuitions differs from yours.
To be really clear, the problem with Pascal's Mugging is that even after eliminating infinity as a coherent scenario, any simplicity prior which defines simplicity strictly over computational complexity will apparently yield divergent returns for aggregative utility functions when summed over all probable scenarios, because the material size of possible scenarios grows much faster than their computational complexity (Busy Beaver function or just tetration).
The problem with Pascal's Wager on the other hand is that it shuts down an ongoing conversation about plausibility by claiming that it doesn't matter how small the probability is, thus averting a logically polite duty to provide evidence and engage with counterarguments.
That seems overly specific. There are many other ways in which priors assigned to highly speculative propositions may not be low enough, or when impact of other available actions on a highly speculative scenario be under-evaluated.
To me, Pascal's Wager is defined by a speculative scenario for which there exist no evidence, which has high enough impact to result in actions which are not based on any evidence, despite the uncertainty towards speculative scenarios.
How THE HELL does the above (ok, I didn't originally include the second quotation, but still) constitute confusion of Pascal's Wager and Pascal's Mugging, let alone "willful misinterpretation" ?
Pascal's Mugging != Pascal's Wager. This is really clear in the grandparent which explicitly distinguishes them, so I'm interpreting the above as willful misinterpretation from a known troller and deleting it.