Again, let's say by "but there's still a chance" you're saying the chance of CERN causing an apocalypse scenario is less than one in a billion. You say that "the argument" for this is that such collisions happen near Earth all the time.
Suppose I were to posit that black holes produced by cosmic rays have an acceleration that would lead them to fly through the Earth without harming it, but black holes produced by the LHC would be slower and thus able to destroy the Earth where their cosmic-ray-produced brethren could not.
Suppose I were to tell you that either this above paragraph was the view of a significant part of the relevant physicist community (say, greater than five percent) or that I was bluffing and totally made it up.
I offer you a bet. If I'm bluffing, I'll give you a dollar. If I'm not, you give me ten thousand dollars. No, you can't Google it to check. If your utility function isn't linear with respect to money, I'm happy to lower it to something like 1:1000 instead.
If you don't take the bet, it means you're not even sure to ten thousand to one odds that that particular argument holds, which makes it very iffy to use as the lynchpin of an argument for billion to one odds.
I offer you a bet. If I'm bluffing, I'll give you a dollar. If I'm not, you give me ten thousand dollars. No, you can't Google it to check. If your utility function isn't linear with respect to money, I'm happy to lower it to something like 1:1000 instead.
I have two dodges for this bet: first, the cost of obtaining a dollar from someone distant to me is higher than a dollar, and second, even if there were 5% of the community that believed that, they would be the mistaken 5% of the community, and so that has no bearing on my belief. I might believe to 1e...
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?