PhilGoetz comments on Pascal's Muggle: Infinitesimal Priors and Strong Evidence - Less Wrong

43 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 May 2013 12:43AM

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Comment author: PhilGoetz 15 May 2013 10:48:34PM 1 point [-]

This would mean that all our decisions were dominated by tiny-seeming probabilities (on the order of 2-100 and less) of scenarios where our lightest action affected 3↑↑4 people... which would in turn be dominated by even more remote probabilities of affecting 3↑↑5 people...

I'm pretty ignorant of quantum mechanics, but I gather there was a similar problem, in that the probability function for some path appeared to be dominated by an infinite number of infinitessimally-unlikely paths, and Feynman solved the problem by showing that those paths cancelled each other out.

Comment author: shminux 15 May 2013 11:00:56PM 1 point [-]