Comment on Pascal's Mugging Solved

Tue, 27 May 2014 23:38:18 GMT

But after a point of increasing threat, increasing it further should decrease your expectation.

OK, so after a certain point, the mugger increasing his threat will cause you to decrease your belief faster. After a certain point, the mugger increasing his threat will cause (threat badness * probability) to go decrease.

That implies that if he threatens you with a super-exponentially bad outcome, you will assign a super-exponentially small probability to his threat.

But super-exponentially small probabilities are a tricky thing. Once you've assigned a super-exponentially small probability to an event, no amount of evidence in the visible universe can make you change your mind. It doesn't matter if the mugger grows wings of fire or turns passers by into goats; no amount of evidence your eyes and ears are capable of receiving can sway a super-exponentially small probability. If the city around you melts into lava, should you believe the mugger then? How do you quantify whether you should or should not?

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