Will_Sawin comments on Pascal's Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities - Less Wrong

39 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 October 2007 11:37PM

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Comment author: taryneast 01 January 2011 09:39:49PM 0 points [-]

So you're saying that the implausibility is that I'd run into a person that just happened to have that level of "power" ?

Is that different in kind to what I was saying?

If I find it implausible that the person I'm speaking to can actually do what they're claiming, is that not the same as it being implausible that I happen to have met a person that can do what this person is claiming/ (leaving aside the resource-question which is probably just my rationalisation as to why I think he couldn't pull it off).

Basically I'm trying to taboo the actual BigNum... and trying to fit the concepts around in my head.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 02 January 2011 12:12:02AM 0 points [-]

It's implausible that you're the person with that power. We could easily imagine a world in which everyone runs into a single absurdly powerful person. We could not imagine a world in which everyone was absurdly powerful (in their ability to control other people), because then multiple people would have control over the same thing.

If you knew that he had the power, but that his action wasn't going to depend on yours, then you wouldn't give him the money. So you're only concerned with the situation where you have the power.

Comment author: taryneast 02 January 2011 10:06:40AM 1 point [-]

Ok, sure thing. I get what you're saying. I managed to encompass that implausibility also into the arguments I made in my restatement anyway, but yeah, I agree that these are different kinds of "unlikely thing"