Eisegetes comments on The "Intuitions" Behind "Utilitarianism" - Less Wrong

29 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 January 2008 04:29PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (193)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Eisegetes 28 January 2008 09:45:36PM 0 points [-]

Eliezer: would you torture a person for fifty years, if you lived in a large enough universe to contain 3^^^3 people, and if the omnipotent and omniscient ruler of that universe informed you that if you did not do so, he would carry out the dust-speck operation?

Seriously, would you pick up the blow torch and use it for the rest of your life, for the sake of the dust-specks?

Comment author: wedrifid 10 May 2013 01:14:45AM 4 points [-]

Eliezer: would you torture a person for fifty years, if you lived in a large enough universe to contain 3^^^3 people, and if the omnipotent and omniscient ruler of that universe informed you that if you did not do so, he would carry out the dust-speck operation?

Hey, that's an actual Pascal's Mugging! As opposed to "Pascal's generous offer that at worst can be refused for no negative consequences beyond the time spent listening to it". Come to think of it, we probably should be using "Pascal's Spam" for the exciting yet implausible offer.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 May 2013 01:48:44AM 1 point [-]

Yeah, if we're going to bastardize the terms anyway, we should definitely distinguish Pascal's Spamming from Pascal's Mugging, where Spamming is any Mugging of a type that has a thousand easily generated variants without loss of plausibility ('plausibility' to a reasonable non-troll not committing the noncentral fallacy). (For emotional purposes, not decision-theory purposes.)