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jimrandomh comments on What do you mean by Pascal's mugging? - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: XiXiDu 20 November 2014 04:38PM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 20 November 2014 05:44:56PM 13 points [-]

None of the above are Pacal's Mugging, as stated. While some people have taken to using Pascal's Mugging as a generic term for anything that's very-low-probability and very-high-impact, I think that's missing the point of the original thought experiment. Pascal's Mugging is a scenario in which the size of the impact and the smallness of the probability are entangled together. It shows that, if your utility function and epistemology are broken in a particular technical way, then no degree of improbability, no matter how astronomical, will suffice to let you ignore something.