I’ve recently heard a number of people arguing for “fanaticism“ when it comes to longtermism. Basically, if a cause area has even a minuscule probability of positively affecting the long-term future of humanity (and thus influencing an effectively unbounded number of lives), we should fund/support that cause even at the expense of near-term projects with high probability of success. If this is so, I have trouble seeing why Pascal’s Wager (or the even less probable Pascal’s Mugging) shouldn’t hold. I know most people (even religious people) don’t believe Pascal’s argument is valid, but most arguments against it I’ve read would seem to also exclude low-probability longtermist causes from being valid. What am I missing here?
Agree that there is no such guarantee. Minor nitpick that the distribution in question is in my mind, not out there in the world - if the world really did have a distribution of muggers' cash that was slower than 1/x, the universe would be comprised almost entirely of muggers' wallets (in expectation).
But even without any guarantee about my mental probability distribution, I think my argument does establish that not every possible EV agent is susceptible to Pascal's Mugging. That suggests that in the search for a formalism of ideal decison-making algorithm, formulations of EV that meet this check are still on the table.