Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on When (Not) To Use Probabilities - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 July 2008 10:58AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 July 2008 04:57:32AM 0 points [-]

Unknown, describe the money pump. Also, are you the guy who converted to Christianity due to Pascal's Wager or am I thinking of someone else?

The tug-of-war in "How extreme a low probability to assign?" is driven, on the one hand, by the need for our probabilities to sum to 1 - so if you assign probabilities >> 10^-6 to unjustified statements of such complexity that more than a million of them could be produced, you will be inconsistent and Dutch-bookable. On the other hand, it's extremely hard to be right about anything a million times in a row.

My instinct is to look for a deontish human strategy for handling this class of problem, one that takes into account both human overconfidence and the desire-to-dismiss, and also the temptation for humans to make up silly things with huge consequences and claim "but you can't know I'm wrong".