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.

Princess_Stargirl 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.

Comment author: Princess_Stargirl 04 October 2015 05:20:08PM 1 point [-]

What if one considers the following approach: Let e be a probability small enough that if I were to accept all bets offered to me with probability p<= e then the expected number of such bets that I win is less than one. The approach is to ignore any bet where p <=e.

This solve's Yvain's problem with wearing seatbelts or eating unhealthy for example. It also solves the problem that "sub-dividing" a risk no longer changes whether you ignore the risk.