The “isn’t that like Pascal’s wager?” response is plausibly an instance of dark side epistemology, and one that affects many aspiring rationalists.
Many of us came up against the Pascal’s wager argument at some point before we gained much rationality skill, disliked the conclusion, and hunted around for some means of disagreeing with its reasoning. The overcomingbias thread discussing Pascal’s wager strikes me as including a fair number of fallacious comments aimed at finding some rationale, any rationale, for dismissing Pascal’s wager.
If these arguments tended merely to be about factual matters (“Pascal’s wager can’t be true, because, um, the moon moves in such-and-such a manner”), attempts to dismiss Pascal’s wager without solid argument would perhaps not be all that problematic . But in the specific case of Pascal’s wager, ad hoc rationalizations for its dismissal tend to center around methodological claims: people dislike the conclusion, and so make claims against expected value calculations, expected value calculations’ applicability to high payoffs, or other inference or decision theoretic methodologies. This is exactly dark side epistemology; someone dislikes a conclusion, does not have a principled derivation of why the conclusion should be false, and so seizes on some methodology or other to bolster their dismissal—and then imports that methodology into the rest of their life, with harmful consequences (e.g., avoiding cryonics).
I’m not endorsing Pascal’s wager. Carl’s critique (above, and also in the original thread) strikes me as valid. It’s just that we need to be really really careful about making up rationalizations and importing those rationalized methodologies elsewhere; the rationalizations can hurt us even in cases where the rationalized conclusion turns out to be true. And Pascal’s wager is such an easy situation in which to make methodological rationalizations—it soundsabsurd, it involves religion, which is definitely uncool, and its claimed conclusion threatens things many of us care about, such as how we live our lives and form beliefs. We might need “be specially on guard!” routines for such situations.
The “isn’t that like Pascal’s wager?” response is plausibly an instance of dark side epistemology, and one that affects many aspiring rationalists.
Many of us came up against the Pascal’s wager argument at some point before we gained much rationality skill, disliked the conclusion, and hunted around for some means of disagreeing with its reasoning. The overcomingbias thread discussing Pascal’s wager strikes me as including a fair number of fallacious comments aimed at finding some rationale, any rationale, for dismissing Pascal’s wager.
If these arguments tended merely to be about factual matters (“Pascal’s wager can’t be true, because, um, the moon moves in such-and-such a manner”), attempts to dismiss Pascal’s wager without solid argument would perhaps not be all that problematic . But in the specific case of Pascal’s wager, ad hoc rationalizations for its dismissal tend to center around methodological claims: people dislike the conclusion, and so make claims against expected value calculations, expected value calculations’ applicability to high payoffs, or other inference or decision theoretic methodologies. This is exactly dark side epistemology; someone dislikes a conclusion, does not have a principled derivation of why the conclusion should be false, and so seizes on some methodology or other to bolster their dismissal—and then imports that methodology into the rest of their life, with harmful consequences (e.g., avoiding cryonics).
I’m not endorsing Pascal’s wager. Carl’s critique (above, and also in the original thread) strikes me as valid. It’s just that we need to be really really careful about making up rationalizations and importing those rationalized methodologies elsewhere; the rationalizations can hurt us even in cases where the rationalized conclusion turns out to be true. And Pascal’s wager is such an easy situation in which to make methodological rationalizations—it sounds absurd, it involves religion, which is definitely uncool, and its claimed conclusion threatens things many of us care about, such as how we live our lives and form beliefs. We might need “be specially on guard!” routines for such situations.