The flaws in Pascal’s wager are the lack of strong justification for giving Christianity a significantly greater probability than anti-Christianity (in which only non-Christians are saved),
No, that doesn’t work. If I’m hungry and have an apple in my hand and am deciding whether to eat it, and the only flaw in Pascal’s wager is that it doesn’t distinguish Christianity from anti-Christianity, then the decision to eat the apple will be based on my ongoing guesses about whether Christianity is true and Jehovah wants me to eat the apple, or perhaps Jehovah doesn’t want me to eat the apple, or perhaps Zeus is the real one in control and I have to use an entirely different procedure to guess whether Zeus wants me to eat the apple, and maybe the existence of the apple is evidence for Jehovah and not Zeus because it was mentioned in Jehovah’s book but not Zeus’s, and so forth. Since all the utilities are likely infinite, and the probabilities of some deity or another caring even slightly about whether I eat the apple are nonzero, all those considerations dominate.
That’s a crazy way to decide whether to eat the apple. I should decide whether to eat the apple based on the short-term consequences of eating the apple and the short-term consequences of having an uneaten apple, given the normal circumstances where there are no interesting likely long-term consequences. Saying that Pascal’s Wager doesn’t separate Christianity from anti-Christianity doesn’t say how to do that.
...and the considerable cost of a policy that makes you vulnerable to any parasitic meme claiming high utility.
I agree that Pascal’s Wager makes you vulnerable to arbitrary parasitic memes, but that doesn’t make it the wrong thing to do. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong because of the structure of the argument, not because the argument leads to conclusions that you do not like.
IMO the right solution is to reject the assumption that Heaven has infinite utility and instead have a limited maximum utility. If the utility of getting to Heaven and experiencing eternal bliss (vs doing nothing) is less than a trillion times greater than the utility of eating the apple (vs doing nothing), and the odds of Jehovah or Zeus are significantly less than one in a trillion, then I can ignore the gods when I’m deciding whether to eat the apple. However, my point isn’t that I have the right solution to Pascal’s Wager; my point is that the argument that Pascal’s Wager is wrong because of the problem of considering the wrong Heaven changes the problem but does not solve it.
Neither is a problem for FAI.
I disagree. Some people here are incapacitated by considerations about what an AI might do in the future, just as though they were trying to game out Jehovah vs Zeus when deciding whether to eat the apple. A significant fraction of SIAI employees and volunteers fall into this category. That is a problem for FAI. I have been asked not to give out a pointer to the relevant conversation because somebody who doesn’t get this (but I otherwise respect) thinks the AI-gods might disapprove. You’ll have to find it yourself. In fairness, I don’t know if the relevant conversation happened before or after the comment I’m responding to, so I may have more evidence now than you did then.
No, that doesn’t work. If I’m hungry and have an apple in my hand and am deciding whether to eat it, and the only flaw in Pascal’s wager is that it doesn’t distinguish Christianity from anti-Christianity, then the decision to eat the apple will be based on my ongoing guesses about whether Christianity is true and Jehovah wants me to eat the apple, or perhaps Jehovah doesn’t want me to eat the apple, or perhaps Zeus is the real one in control and I have to use an entirely different procedure to guess whether Zeus wants me to eat the apple, and maybe the existence of the apple is evidence for Jehovah and not Zeus because it was mentioned in Jehovah’s book but not Zeus’s, and so forth. Since all the utilities are likely infinite, and the probabilities of some deity or another caring even slightly about whether I eat the apple are nonzero, all those considerations dominate.
That’s a crazy way to decide whether to eat the apple. I should decide whether to eat the apple based on the short-term consequences of eating the apple and the short-term consequences of having an uneaten apple, given the normal circumstances where there are no interesting likely long-term consequences. Saying that Pascal’s Wager doesn’t separate Christianity from anti-Christianity doesn’t say how to do that.
I agree that Pascal’s Wager makes you vulnerable to arbitrary parasitic memes, but that doesn’t make it the wrong thing to do. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong because of the structure of the argument, not because the argument leads to conclusions that you do not like.
IMO the right solution is to reject the assumption that Heaven has infinite utility and instead have a limited maximum utility. If the utility of getting to Heaven and experiencing eternal bliss (vs doing nothing) is less than a trillion times greater than the utility of eating the apple (vs doing nothing), and the odds of Jehovah or Zeus are significantly less than one in a trillion, then I can ignore the gods when I’m deciding whether to eat the apple. However, my point isn’t that I have the right solution to Pascal’s Wager; my point is that the argument that Pascal’s Wager is wrong because of the problem of considering the wrong Heaven changes the problem but does not solve it.
I disagree. Some people here are incapacitated by considerations about what an AI might do in the future, just as though they were trying to game out Jehovah vs Zeus when deciding whether to eat the apple. A significant fraction of SIAI employees and volunteers fall into this category. That is a problem for FAI. I have been asked not to give out a pointer to the relevant conversation because somebody who doesn’t get this (but I otherwise respect) thinks the AI-gods might disapprove. You’ll have to find it yourself. In fairness, I don’t know if the relevant conversation happened before or after the comment I’m responding to, so I may have more evidence now than you did then.