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.

V_V comments on Probabilities Small Enough To Ignore: An attack on Pascal's Mugging - Less Wrong Discussion

20 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 16 September 2015 10:45AM

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

Article Navigation

Comments (176)

Comments (176)

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

Comment author: V_V 17 September 2015 11:28:00PM 1 point [-]

We don't need an unbounded utility function to demonstrate Pascal's Mugging. Plain old large numbers like 10^100 are enough.

The scale is arbitrary. If your utility function is designed such that utility for common scenario are not very small compared to the maximum utility then you wouldn't have Pascal's Muggings.

It seems reasonable for utility to be linear in things we care about, e.g. human lives.

Does anybody really have linear preferences in anything? This seems at odds with empirical evidence.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit