Okay, thanks. So it is the prior, not the posterior, which makes more sense (as the posterior will be in general changing while the utility function remains constant).
My objection to this is that, even though you do deal with the "typical" mugging scenario, you run into issues in other scenarios. For instance, suppose that your prior for X is 10^(-1000), and your utility for X is 10^750, which I believe fits your requirements. Now suppose that I manage to argue your posterior up to 10^(-500). Either you can get mugged (for huge amounts of money) in this circumstance, or your utility on X is actually smaller than 10^(500).
Getting "mugged" in such a scenario doesn't seem particularly objectionable when you consider the amount of work involved in raising the probability by a factor of 10^(500).
It would be money well earned, it seems to me.
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?