ike comments on Probabilities Small Enough To Ignore: An attack on Pascal's Mugging - Less Wrong

20 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 16 September 2015 10:45AM

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Comment author: ike 17 September 2015 01:19:50AM 0 points [-]

Theoretically, that's the question he's asking about Pascal's Mugging, since accepting the mugger's argument would tell you that expected utility never converges

Of course, and the paper cited in http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Pascal's_mugging makes that argument rigorous.

And since we could rephrase the problem in terms of (say) diamond creation for a diamond maximizer, it does look like an issue of probability rather than goals.

It's a problem of expected utility, not necessarily probability. And I still would like to know which axiom it ends up violating. I suspect Continuity.

Comment author: hairyfigment 17 September 2015 09:43:51AM 0 points [-]

We can replace Continuity with the Archimedean property (or, 'You would accept some chance of a bad outcome from crossing the street.') By my reading, this ELU idea trivially follows Archimedes by ignoring the part of a compound 'lottery' that involves a sufficiently small probability. In which case it would violate Independence, and would do so by treating the two sides as effectively equal when the differing outcomes have small enough probability.

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