DanielLC comments on Pascal's Mugging Solved - Less Wrong

0 Post author: common_law 27 May 2014 03:28AM

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Comment author: DanielLC 28 May 2014 10:50:24PM 1 point [-]

Perhaps, but performing every action to prepare for Pascal's mugging hardly counts as avoiding Pascal's mugging. Quite the opposite: now you're constraining everything you do even if nobody threatens you.

There's actually a larger problem. If you don't have some way of avoiding Pascal's mugging, your expected utility is almost certainly divergent. You can find a risk with expected value of arbitrarily high magnitude in either direction.

Comment author: [deleted] 29 May 2014 12:48:03PM -1 points [-]

Thank you! This makes me glad that I had been going through my logic item by Item, because I had not not been considering that Pascal's mugging had mathematical similarities to the St. Petersburg Paradox.