Ok, so who's the other one living in Berlin?

The problem seems to vanish if you don't ask "What is the expectation value of utility for this decision, if I do X", but rather "If I changed my mental algorithms so that they do X in situations like this all the time, what utility would I plausibly accumulate over the course of my entire life?" ("How much utility do I get at the 50th percentile of the utility probability distribution?") This would have the following results:

• For the limit case of decisions where all possible outcomes happen infinitely often during your lifetime, you would decide exactly as if you wanted to maximize expectation value in an individual case.

• You would not decide to give money to Pascals' mugger, if you don't expect that there are many fundamentally different scenarios which a mugger could tell you about: If you give a 5 % chance to the scenario described by Pascals mugger and believe that this is the only scenario which, if true, would make you give 5 $ to some person, you would not give the money away.

• In contrast, if you believe that there are 50 different mugging scenarios which people will tell you during your life to pascal-mug you, and you assign an independent 5 % chance to all of them, you would give money to a mugger (and expect this to pay off occasionally).

Both seem to be interesting questions. Answer both?

In my last post, I showed that the brain does not encode concepts in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. So, any philosophical practice which assumes this — as much of 20th century conceptual analysis seems to do — is misguided.

This argument must be missing something crucial, because it fails to account for why the necessary-and-sufficient approach is so fantastically useful in mathematics. Mathematics deals with human concepts. Many of these concepts are very likely not stored in the brain as necessary and sufficient conditions. (Concepts learned in a formal setting might be stored that way, but there's little reason to think that a common concept like "triangle" is for most people.) And yet it proved incredibly fruitful to recast these concepts in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.

In the case of mathematics, it turns out to be worthwhile to think about concepts in the decidedly unnatural mode of necessary and sufficient conditions. One might reasonably have hoped that the same admittedly unnatural mode would prove similarly worthwhile for concepts like "democracy". After all, unnatural doesn't necessarily mean worse. Now, for concepts like "democracy", the unnatural approach does prove to be worse. But it can't be simply because the approach was unnatural.

Do you know similarly extraordinary claims made by respected institutions from the past? How often did they turn out to be right, how often did they turn out to be wrong?