As long as this distribution drops off faster than 1/x as the offer increases, then arbitrarily large offers are overwhelmed by vast implausibility and their EV becomes arbitrarily small.
This has the problem that you have no assurance that the distribution does drop off sufficiently fast. It would be convenient if it did, but the world is not structured for anyone’s convenience.
Agree that there is no such guarantee. Minor nitpick that the distribution in question is in my mind, not out there in the world—if the world really did have a distribution of muggers’ cash that was slower than 1/x, the universe would be comprised almost entirely of muggers’ wallets (in expectation).
But even without any guarantee about my mental probability distribution, I think my argument does establish that not every possible EV agent is susceptible to Pascal’s Mugging. That suggests that in the search for a formalism of ideal decison-making algorithm, formulations of EV that meet this check are still on the table.
This has the problem that you have no assurance that the distribution does drop off sufficiently fast. It would be convenient if it did, but the world is not structured for anyone’s convenience.
Agree that there is no such guarantee. Minor nitpick that the distribution in question is in my mind, not out there in the world—if the world really did have a distribution of muggers’ cash that was slower than 1/x, the universe would be comprised almost entirely of muggers’ wallets (in expectation).
But even without any guarantee about my mental probability distribution, I think my argument does establish that not every possible EV agent is susceptible to Pascal’s Mugging. That suggests that in the search for a formalism of ideal decison-making algorithm, formulations of EV that meet this check are still on the table.