Hm, that solution seems like the one I gave (ironically, on a Clippy post), where I said that if you're allowed to posit these huge utilities from complex (and thus improbable) hypotheses, you also have to consider hypotheses that are just as complex but give the opposite utility. But in the link I gave, people seemed to find something wrong with it: specifically, that the mugger gives an epsilon of evidence favoring the "you should pay"-supporting hypotheses, making them come out ahead.
So ... what's the deal?
Arranging your probability estimates so that predictions of opposite utility cancel out is one way to satisfy the anti-mugging axiom. It's not the only way to do so, though; you can also require that the prior probabilities of statements (without corresponding opposite-utility statements) shrink at least as fast as utilities grow. There's no rule that says that similar statements with positive and negative utilities have to have the same prior probabilities, unless you introduce it specifically for the purpose of anti-mugging defense.
For background, see here.
In a comment on the original Pascal's mugging post, Nick Tarleton writes:
Coming across this again recently, it occurred to me that there might be a way to generalize Vassar's suggestion in such a way as to deal with Tarleton's more abstract formulation of the problem. I'm curious about the extent to which folks have thought about this. (Looking further through the comments on the original post, I found essentially the same idea in a comment by g, but it wasn't discussed further.)
The idea is that the Kolmogorov complexity of "3^^^^3 units of disutility" should be much higher than the Kolmogorov complexity of the number 3^^^^3. That is, the utility function should grow only according to the complexity of the scenario being evaluated, and not (say) linearly in the number of people involved. Furthermore, the domain of the utility function should consist of low-level descriptions of the state of the world, which won't refer directly to words uttered by muggers, in such a way that a mere discussion of "3^^^^3 units of disutility" by a mugger will not typically be (anywhere near) enough evidence to promote an actual "3^^^^3-disutilon" hypothesis to attention.
This seems to imply that the intuition responsible for the problem is a kind of fake simplicity, ignoring the complexity of value (negative value in this case). A confusion of levels also appears implicated (talking about utility does not itself significantly affect utility; you don't suddenly make 3^^^^3-disutilon scenarios probable by talking about "3^^^^3 disutilons").
What do folks think of this? Any obvious problems?