Luke_Grecki comments on Pascal's Mugging as an epistemic problem - Less Wrong Discussion
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Sorry for not responding earlier; I had to think about this a bit. Whether the presence of astronomically large numbers can make you vulnerable to Pascal's Mugging seems to be a property of the interaction between the method you use to assign probabilities from evidence, and your utility function. Call the probability-assignment method P(X), which takes a statement X and returns a probability; and the utility function U(X), which assigns a utility to something (such as the decision to pay the mugger) based on the assumption that X is true.
P and U are vulnerable to Pascal's Mugging if and only if you can construct sets of evidence X(n), which differ only by a single number n, such that for any utility value u, there exists n such that P(X(n))U(X(n)) > u.
Now, I really don't know of any reason apart from Pascal's Mugging why utility function-predictor pairs should have this property. But being vulnerable to Pascal's Mugging is such a serious flaw, I'm tempted to say that it's just a necessary requirement for mental stability, so any utility function and predictor which don't guarantee this when they're combined should be considered incompatible.
Is the wording of this correct? Did you mean to say that vulnerability to Pascal's mugging is a necessary requirement for mental stability or the opposite?
No, I meant to say that immunity to Pascal's mugging is required.