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

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

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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.