There’s something very counterintuitive about the notion that Pascal’s Muggle is perfectly rational. But I think we need to do a lot more intuition-pump research before we’ll have finished picking apart where that counterintuitiveness comes from. I take it your suggestion is that Pascal’s Muggle seems unreasonable because he’s overly confident in his own logical consistency and ability to construct priors that accurately reflect his credence levels. But he also seems unreasonable because he doesn’t take into account that the likeliest explanations for the Hole In The Sky datum either trivialize the loss from forking over $5 (e.g., ‘It’s All A Dream’) or provide much more credible generalized reasons to fork over the $5 (e.g., ‘He Really Is A Matrix Lord, So You Should Do What He Seems To Want You To Do Even If Not For The Reasons He Suggests’). Your response to the Holy In The Sky seems more safe and pragmatic because it leaves open that the decision might be made for those reasons, whereas the other two muggees were explicitly concerned only with whether the Lord’s claims were generically right or generically wrong.
Noting these complications doesn’t help solve the underlying problem, but it does suggest that the intuitively right answer may be overdetermined, complicating the task of isolating our relevant intuitions from our irrelevant ones.
There’s something very counterintuitive about the notion that Pascal’s Muggle is perfectly rational. But I think we need to do a lot more intuition-pump research before we’ll have finished picking apart where that counterintuitiveness comes from. I take it your suggestion is that Pascal’s Muggle seems unreasonable because he’s overly confident in his own logical consistency and ability to construct priors that accurately reflect his credence levels. But he also seems unreasonable because he doesn’t take into account that the likeliest explanations for the Hole In The Sky datum either trivialize the loss from forking over $5 (e.g., ‘It’s All A Dream’) or provide much more credible generalized reasons to fork over the $5 (e.g., ‘He Really Is A Matrix Lord, So You Should Do What He Seems To Want You To Do Even If Not For The Reasons He Suggests’). Your response to the Holy In The Sky seems more safe and pragmatic because it leaves open that the decision might be made for those reasons, whereas the other two muggees were explicitly concerned only with whether the Lord’s claims were generically right or generically wrong.
Noting these complications doesn’t help solve the underlying problem, but it does suggest that the intuitively right answer may be overdetermined, complicating the task of isolating our relevant intuitions from our irrelevant ones.