solipsist 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: solipsist 22 September 2015 09:23:35PM *  0 points [-]

I don't think the consensus of physicists is good enough for you to place that much faith in it. As I understand modern day cosmology, the consensus view holds that universe once grew by a factor of 10^78 for no reason. Would you pass up a 1 penny to $10,000,000,000 bet that cosmologists of the future will believe creating 10^100 happy humans is physically possible?

what criteria do you use to rule out solutions?

I don't know :-(. Certainly I like physics as a darn good heuristic, but I don't think I should reject bets with super-exponentially good odd based on my understanding of physics. A few bits of information from an expert would be enough to convince me that I'm wrong about physics, and I don't think I should reject a bet with a payout better than 1 / the odds I will see those bits.