Kingreaper comments on Pascal's Mugging Solved - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: solipsist 27 May 2014 11:38:18PM *  2 points [-]

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?

Comment author: Kingreaper 09 June 2014 01:12:07PM 0 points [-]

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.

I don't see why this is necessarily a problem.

The claim that the mugger will torture 3^^^3 people, unless you give them $100, is so implausible that there should be no possible evidence that will convince you of it.

Any possible evidence is more plausibly explained by possibilities such as you being in a computer game, and the mugger being a player who's just being a dick because they find it funny.