HopeFox 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: HopeFox 10 April 2011 12:45:17PM 1 point [-]

It does seem that the probability of someone being able to bring about the deaths of N people should scale as 1/N, or at least 1/f(N) for some monotonically increasing function f. 3^^^^3 may be a more simply specified number than 1697, but it seems "intuitively obvious" (as much as that means anything) that it's easier to kill 1697 people than 3^^^^3. Under this reasoning, the likely deaths caused by not giving the mugger $5 are something like N/f(N), which depends on what f is, but it seems likely that it converges to zero as N increases.

It is an awfully difficult question, though, because how do we know we don't live in a world where 3^^^^3 people could die at any moment? It seems unlikely, but then so do a lot of things that are real.

Perhaps the problem lies in the idea that a Turing machine can create entities that have the moral status of humans. If there's a machine out there that can create and destroy 3^^^^3 humans on a whim, then are human lives really worth that much? But, on the other hand, there are laws of physics out there that have been demonstrated to create almost 3^^3 humans, so what is one human life worth on that scale?

On another note, my girlfriend says that if someone tried this on her, she'd probably give them the $5 just for the laugh she got out of it. It would probably only work once, though.