This solutions seems to implicitly assume that all real needs are pretty moderate. That is the only plausible reason to state a meganumber class high utility is to beat someone elses number. A matrix lord could have a different sense of time in their "home dimension" and for all I know what I do might be the culmination of bet involving the creation and destruction of whole classes of universes.
Also why what the mugger says have anythinhg to do how big of a threat the conversation is? If someone would come up to me and say "give me 5$ or I will do everything in my power to screw with you" without saying how much screwage would happen or what their power level is, it wouldn't seem that problematic. Why would the threat be more potent with stating that information? It seems it should limit the threat it poses. It would appear to me that what people say only has relevance in the limits on how I have established agenthood, ie it maxes out. If I would really be on the look out for freaky eldrich gods I should worry that the sky would fall on me - ie there is no need for the sky/might to state any threat for them to be one.
That is [it is assumed that] the only plausible reason to state a meganumber class high utility is to beat someone elses number.
It's the only reason that doesn't cancel out because it's the only one about which we have any knowledge. The higher the number, the more likely it is that the mugger is playing the "pick the highest number" game. You can imagine scenarios in which picking the highest number has some unknown significance, they cancel out, in the same way as Pascal's God is canceled by the possibility of contrary gods.
...Also why what t
Since Pascal’s Mugging is well known on LW, I won’t describe it at length. Suffice to say that a mugger tries to blackmail you by threatening enormous harm by a completely mysterious mechanism. If the harm is great enough, a sufficiently large threat eventually dominates doubts about the mechanism.
I have a reasonably simple solution to Pascal’s Mugging. In four steps, here it is:
Pascal’s Mugging induces us to look at the likelihood of the claim in abstraction from the fact that the claim is made. The paradox can be solved by breaking the probability that the mugger’s claim is true into two parts: the probability of the claim itself (its simplicity) and the probability that the mugger is truthful. Even if the probability of magical harm doesn’t decrease when the amount of harm increases, the probability that the mugger is truthful decreases continuously as the amount of harm predicted increases.
Solving the paradox in Pascal’s Mugging depends on recognizing that, if the logic were sound, it would engage muggers in a game where they try to pick the highest practicable number to represent the amount of harm. But this means that the higher the number, the more likely they are to be playing this game (undermining the logic believed sound).
But solving Pascal’s Mugging also depends on recognizing that the evidence that the mugger is maximizing can lower the probability below that of the same harm when no mugger has claimed it. It involves recognizing that, when it is almost certain that the claim is motivated by something unrelated to the claim’s truth, the claim can become less believable than if it hadn’t been expressed. The mugger’s maximizing motivation is evidence against his claim.
If someone presents you with a number representing the amount of threatened harm 3^3^3..., continued as long as a computer can print out when the printer is allowed for run for, say, a decade, you should think this result less probable than if someone had never presented you with the tome. While people are more likely to be telling the truth than to be lying, if you are sufficiently sure they are lying, their testimony counts against their claim.
The proof is the same as the proof of the (also counter-intuitive) proposition that failure to find (some definite amount of) evidence for a theory constitutes negative evidence. The mugger has elicited your search for evidence, but because of the mugger’s clear interest in falsehood, you find that evidence wanting.