You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

jsteinhardt comments on A Thought on Pascal's Mugging - Less Wrong Discussion

12 Post author: komponisto 10 December 2010 06:08AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (159)

Comments (159)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: jsteinhardt 13 December 2010 02:35:16AM *  0 points [-]

From my reply to komponisto (incidentally, both you and he seem to be making the same objections in parallel, which suggests that I'm not doing a very good job of explaining myself, sorry):

Suppose that there is nothing so bad that you would pay $5 to stop it from happening with probability 10^(-100). Let X be a state of the universe. Then u(-$5) < 10^(-100) u(X), so u(X) > 10^(100) u(-$5). Since u(X) > 10^(100) u(-$5) for all X, u is bounded below.

Similarly, suppose that there is nothing so good that you would pay $5 to have a 10^(-100) chance of it happening. Then u($5) > 10^(100) u(X) for all X, so u(X) < 10^(100) u($5), hence u is also bounded above.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit