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.

Pentashagon 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.

Comments (176)

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

Comment author: Pentashagon 19 September 2015 06:09:43AM -1 points [-]

Which particular event has P = 10^-21? It seems like part of the pascal's mugging problem is a type error: We have a utility function U(W) over physical worlds but we're trying to calculate expected utility over strings of English words instead.

Pascal's Mugging is a constructive proof that trying to maximize expected utility over logically possible worlds doesn't work in any particular world, at least with the theories we've got now. Anything that doesn't solve reflective reasoning under probabilistic uncertainty won't help against Muggings promising things from other possible worlds unless we just ignore the other worlds.