There is the issue whether one believes the stated chances are real or whether one is in error about it. If you believed that there was a 1/4th chance of heads when in fact the coin was fair then your betting will be lead astray. However if the odds are correct and the math says you end up with more money there is no way to argue that you can forgo the option and claim to be a money grabbing agent.
We could think of some agent wanting to not buy a payout biased lottery ticket where they think they wil save the cost of the ticket and get to keep to call themselfs as a good decision maker. If the odds are 10% of 1000$ for 1 $ ticket and the agent thinks they expect to lose on money they have made a math error. You don’t get to call yourself being able to calculate odds correctly if you make a limited amount of mistakes. And certainly you don’t end up going “over the limit” of “all accruable winnings” by the price of ticket. Either the ticket price is part of the accruable winnings, or the total is some subtotal that doesn’t actually represent everything achievable.
The usual worry about what would be the policy implication of accepting the pascal wager would be that you would be prone to be pascal mugged. Anyone can fabricate a very remote very low comfortability threat and ask for finite compensation to not do it. But a website saying you are the 1000000000th visitor to the website is not a very good evidence of those chances being real. And in a way very higly tuned chances need very much data to be well founded. That way almost anyone can make 50:50 claims but very few people can plausibly state any 0.00000001% odds. Thus in a finite aged universe none can have the inductive support for any infinidesimal chance.
There can be many dimensions of asking indecidably low odds of what could happen. An agent that systematically excused each of the questions to be a one-off exception could be totally prey to rare events.But one has to distinguish doing well in a the model and doing well in fact. You don’t get to not get victimised by supernovas if you lack the capacity to model supernovas. It can make sense to focus on what you can model and stay silent on what you can’t model but pushing the edge on what you can model can be critical.
Thanks for your comment. I’ve thought through the issue cerafully and I’m no longer so confident about this topic. Now I’m planning to read more about the Pascal’s wager and about the decision theory in general. I want to think about it more, and do my best to come up with a good enough solution for this problem.
Thank you for the whole disccusion and the time devoted for responding to my arguemnts.
There is the issue whether one believes the stated chances are real or whether one is in error about it. If you believed that there was a 1/4th chance of heads when in fact the coin was fair then your betting will be lead astray. However if the odds are correct and the math says you end up with more money there is no way to argue that you can forgo the option and claim to be a money grabbing agent.
We could think of some agent wanting to not buy a payout biased lottery ticket where they think they wil save the cost of the ticket and get to keep to call themselfs as a good decision maker. If the odds are 10% of 1000$ for 1 $ ticket and the agent thinks they expect to lose on money they have made a math error. You don’t get to call yourself being able to calculate odds correctly if you make a limited amount of mistakes. And certainly you don’t end up going “over the limit” of “all accruable winnings” by the price of ticket. Either the ticket price is part of the accruable winnings, or the total is some subtotal that doesn’t actually represent everything achievable.
The usual worry about what would be the policy implication of accepting the pascal wager would be that you would be prone to be pascal mugged. Anyone can fabricate a very remote very low comfortability threat and ask for finite compensation to not do it. But a website saying you are the 1000000000th visitor to the website is not a very good evidence of those chances being real. And in a way very higly tuned chances need very much data to be well founded. That way almost anyone can make 50:50 claims but very few people can plausibly state any 0.00000001% odds. Thus in a finite aged universe none can have the inductive support for any infinidesimal chance.
There can be many dimensions of asking indecidably low odds of what could happen. An agent that systematically excused each of the questions to be a one-off exception could be totally prey to rare events.But one has to distinguish doing well in a the model and doing well in fact. You don’t get to not get victimised by supernovas if you lack the capacity to model supernovas. It can make sense to focus on what you can model and stay silent on what you can’t model but pushing the edge on what you can model can be critical.
Thanks for your comment. I’ve thought through the issue cerafully and I’m no longer so confident about this topic. Now I’m planning to read more about the Pascal’s wager and about the decision theory in general. I want to think about it more, and do my best to come up with a good enough solution for this problem.
Thank you for the whole disccusion and the time devoted for responding to my arguemnts.