You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

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

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (24)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Manfred 21 November 2014 02:37:29AM *  5 points [-]

Well, there's small and then there's small. Sadly, human brains are bad at handling this sort of distinction. One in 10,000 is only 13 or 14 coin flips in a row (note that 'number of coin flips' is a log scale, which is useful to help humans conceptualize big or small numbers). 14 coin flips is more like 1 coin flip than it's like a thousand coin flips.