This steelman argument doesn’t address the main issue with Pascal’s mugging—anyone in real life who makes you such an offer is virtually certain to be lying or deluded.
This was my argument when I first encountered the problem in the Sequences. I didn’t post it here because I haven’t yet figured out what this post is about (gotta sit down and concentrate on the notation and the message of the author and I haven’t done that yet), but my first thoughts when I read Eliezer claiming that it’s a hard problem were that as the number of potential victims increases, the chance of the claim being actually true decreases (until it reaches a hard limit which equals the chance of the claimant having a machine that can produce infinite victims without consuming any resources). And the decrease in chance isn’t just due to the improbability of a random person having a million torture victims—it also comes from the condition that a random person with a million torture victims also for some reason wants $5 from you.
Where is the flaw here? What makes the mugging important, despite how correct my gut reaction appears to me?
This steelman argument doesn’t address the main issue with Pascal’s mugging—anyone in real life who makes you such an offer is virtually certain to be lying or deluded.
This was my argument when I first encountered the problem in the Sequences. I didn’t post it here because I haven’t yet figured out what this post is about (gotta sit down and concentrate on the notation and the message of the author and I haven’t done that yet), but my first thoughts when I read Eliezer claiming that it’s a hard problem were that as the number of potential victims increases, the chance of the claim being actually true decreases (until it reaches a hard limit which equals the chance of the claimant having a machine that can produce infinite victims without consuming any resources). And the decrease in chance isn’t just due to the improbability of a random person having a million torture victims—it also comes from the condition that a random person with a million torture victims also for some reason wants $5 from you.
Where is the flaw here? What makes the mugging important, despite how correct my gut reaction appears to me?