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buybuydandavis comments on Thoughts on a possible solution to Pascal's Mugging - Less Wrong Discussion
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Why even bother with a mugger?
H1 = X sentient creatures will be created and tortured unless you go to the nearest window and throw a quarter into the street.
It's a conceivable hypothesis. If you set the P(H1) >0, you're subject to the same mugging without a mugger as long as you "shut up and multiply". Who needs a mugger to be mugged? Mug yourself! There's almost nothing you can't accomplish by giving credence to arbitrary ideas!
H2 = X sentient creatures will be created and tortured unless you don't go to the nearest window and throw a quarter into the street.
Oh noes! What do I do now?
If you expose pidgeons to intermittent random reward, you can observe the birth of supersticion: the animal will try to correlate the most disparate things to the reward. I long thought this was the kind of mechanism underlying human supersticions, but now it seems more likely that it can also be a self counterfactual mugging: if I open an umbrella in the house, I'm inviting death inside (I don't know if this belief exists outside Italy). Inviting death has such a bigger disutility that even in the tiny probability that the supersticion is real you're better not opening an umbrella in your house.
I've always heard it said that it's "bad luck" to open an umbrella inside (and live in the US), though not specifically that it invites death inside.
I always assumed it originated as a tale to get children not to open umbrellas indoors.
Unless you have some reason to believe H1 over H2 (or vice versa), stop wasting time pondering whether to throw quarters in the street. Introducing spurious infinities that just cancel out doesn't help you reason any.
Or, in other words, a belief is only useful if you have evidence to support it over a belief in the opposite direction.