shinoteki 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: Zaq 27 September 2013 05:11:40PM *  1 point [-]

Edit: Looks like I was assuming probability distributions for which Lim (Y -> infinity) of Y*P(Y) is well defined. This turns out to be monotonic series or some similar class (thanks shinoteki).

I think it's still the case that a probability distribution that would lead to TraderJoe's claim of P(Y)*Y tending to infinity as Y grows would be un-normalizable. You can of course have a distribution for which this limit is undefined, but that's a different story.

Comment author: shinoteki 27 September 2013 05:52:07PM 5 points [-]

Counterexample: P(3^^^...3)(n "^"s) = 1/2^n P(anything else) = 0 This is normalized because the sum of a geometric series with decreasing terms is finite. You might have been thinking of the fact that if a probability distribution on the integers is monotone decreasing (i.e. if P(n)>P(m) then n <m) then P(n) must decrease faster than 1/n. However, a complexity-based distribution will not be monotone because some big numbers are simple while most of them are complex.