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selylindi comments on Pascal's Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities - Less Wrong
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I'm hereby anti-mugging you all. If any of you give in to a Pascal's Mugging scenario, I'll do something much worse than whatever the mugger threatened. Consider yourself warned!
hnnnngggg. does that apply to your own mugging?
mu.
It applies to ordinary (Pascalian) muggings, not metamuggings.
This doesn't work (even in the since that this kind of mugging works) unless you instantiate the 'much' with a ridiculous factor, preferably involving up arrows or busybeaver. The credibility of your anti-mugging is quite likely to be significantly lower than that of a specific, personal mugging because you've made it generic, sound half-hearted and would have to be even aware of the mugging events that take place when the reader doesn't have any good reason to expect you to be. This difference in credibility will usually dwarf something merely 'much' worse, as much is commonly used. You need to throw in an extra level of stupidly large numbers in place of 'much' for pascals-mugging logic to apply to your anti-mugging.
My "much" is too big for puny Conway chained-arrow notation on this world's paper supply. And the threat isn't generic, it's universal. Perhaps I "would have to even be aware of the mugging events", but I have my ways, and you can't afford to take the risk I might find out. I'm not being half-hearted -- I'm being heartless. Your failure of imagination in comprehending the muchness may be your undoing.
The first sentence is all that was required. (Although for reference note that the already mentioned BusyBeaver already trumps Conway so you could perhaps aim your hyperbole more effectively.)
That seems unlikely, your mugging threat was to those who give in to pascals muggings, which I already don't take particularly seriously. In fact I am not especially predisposed to give in to conventional threats, even though there are situations in which I do concede. In this case I was merely offering a suggestion on how to repair your mugging so that it would actually work on hypothesized individuals vulnerable to such things.
This is neutralized by the possibility of Pascal's Agent Who Just Likes Messing With You, who has arranged things such that any time an agent A is motivated by infinitesimal probability P1 of vast utility-shift dU, a utility shift of (P2xP1x-dU) is created, where P2 is A's probability of PAWJLMWY's existence.