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CellBioGuy comments on "Stupid" questions thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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If I take the outside view and account for the fact that thirty-something percent of people, including a lot of really smart people, believe in Christianity, and that at least personally I have radically changed my worldview a whole bunch of times, then it seems like I should assign at least a 5% or so probability to Christianity being true. How, therefore, does Pascal's Wager not apply to me? Even if we make it simpler by taking away the infinite utilities and merely treating Heaven as ten thousand years or so of the same level of happiness as the happiest day in my life, and treating Hell as ten thousand years or so of the same level of unhappiness as the unhappiest day in my life, the argument seems like it should still apply.
I should think that this is more likely to indicate that nobody, including really smart people, and including you, actually knows whats what and trying to chase after all these pascals muggings is pointless becuase you will always run into another one that seems convincing from someone else smart.
There's a bit of a problem with the claim that nobody knows what's what: the usual procedure when someone lacks knowledge is to assign an ignorance prior. The standard methods for generating ignorance priors, usually some formulation of Occam's razor, assign very low probability to claims as complex as common religions.