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Houshalter comments on Probabilities Small Enough To Ignore: An attack on Pascal's Mugging - Less Wrong
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You probably couldn't verify it. There's always the possibility that any evidence you see is made up. For all you know you are just in a computer simulation and the entire thing is virtual.
I'm just saying he can show you evidence which increases the probability. Show you the racks of servers, show you the computer system, explain the physics that allows it, lets you do the experiments that shows those physics are correct. You could solve any NP complete problem on the computer. And you could run programs that take known numbers of steps to compute. Like actually calculating 3^^^3, etc.
Sure. But I think there are generally going to be more parsimonious explanations than any that involve him having the power to torture 3^^^3 people, let alone having that power and caring about whether I give him some money.
Parsimonious, sure. The possibility is very unlikely. But it doesn't just need to be "very unlikely", it needs to have smaller than 1/3^^^3 probability.
Sure. But if you have an argument that some guy who shows me apparent magical powers has the power to torture 3^^^3 people with probability substantially over 1/3^^^3, then I bet I can turn it into an argument that anyone, with or without a demonstration of magical powers, with or without any sort of claim that they have such powers, has the power to torture 3^^^3 people with probability nearly as substantially over 1/3^^^3. Because surely for anyone under any circumstances, Pr(I experience what seems to be a convincing demonstration that they have such powers) is much larger than 1/3^^^3, whether they actually have such powers or not.
Correct. That still doesn't solve the decision theory problem, it makes it worse. Since you have to take into account the possibility that anyone you meet might have the power to torture (or reward with utopia) 3^^^3 people.
It makes it worse or better, depending on whether you decide (1) that everyone has the power to do that with probability >~ 1/3^^^3 or (2) that no one has. I think #2 rather than #1 is correct.
Well, doing basic Bayes with a Kolmogorov priot gives you (1).