This is a decent argument against appeasement in the specific Pascal’s Mugging case, but I think it falls for the pattern of people being too specific in trying to solve this problem.
Pascal’s Mugging is a special case of the phenomenon wherein absolute values of delta-utils are much higher than changes in probabilities. In English, you can always construct a positive expected-utility action simply by increasing the utility since the probability won’t go down fast enough, because it can’t.
I myself have privately postulated half a dozen ‘solutions’ to the specific Pascal’s Mugging scenario, and I think some of them might actually work for the specific scenario, but none of them resolve the general problem of probabilities not corresponding to utilities. (And I don’t want to share them, because explaining what’s wrong with them with respect to the specific form of Pascal’s Mugging is much more difficult than mentioning them.)
Since no one else in this thread or other threads seem to acknowledge this, I might be wrong.
This is a decent argument against appeasement in the specific Pascal’s Mugging case, but I think it falls for the pattern of people being too specific in trying to solve this problem.
Pascal’s Mugging is a special case of the phenomenon wherein absolute values of delta-utils are much higher than changes in probabilities. In English, you can always construct a positive expected-utility action simply by increasing the utility since the probability won’t go down fast enough, because it can’t.
I myself have privately postulated half a dozen ‘solutions’ to the specific Pascal’s Mugging scenario, and I think some of them might actually work for the specific scenario, but none of them resolve the general problem of probabilities not corresponding to utilities. (And I don’t want to share them, because explaining what’s wrong with them with respect to the specific form of Pascal’s Mugging is much more difficult than mentioning them.)
Since no one else in this thread or other threads seem to acknowledge this, I might be wrong.