Well, there is no necessary reason why all claimed mechanisms must be equally probable. The mugger could say “I’ll heal the sick with my psychic powers” or “when I get to the bank on Monday, I’ll donate $$$ to medical research”; even if the potential utilities were the same and both probabilities were small, we would not consider the probabilities equal.
Also, the utility of money doesn’t scale indefinitely; if nothing else, it levels off once the amount starts being comparable to all the money in the world, so adding more just creates additional inflation.
Nonetheless, since the purpose of money is to positively affect lives, we can indeed use similar reasoning to say the improbability of receiving a large amount of money scales linearly with the amount. Note that this reasoning would correctly dismiss get-rich-quick schemes like pyramids and lotteries, even if we were ignorant of the mechanics involved.
Well, there is no necessary reason why all claimed mechanisms must be equally probable.
That’s why I don’t think we can defuse Pascal’s Mugging, since we can potentially imagine a mechanism for which our probability that the mugger is honest doesn’t scale with the amount of utility the mugger promises to give. That would imply that there is no fully general solution to Bostrom’s formulation of Pascal’s Mugging. And that worries me greatly.
However:
Nonetheless, since the purpose of money is to positively affect lives, we can indeed use similar reasoning to say the improbability of receiving a large amount of money scales linearly with the amount. Note that this reasoning would correctly dismiss get-rich-quick schemes like pyramids and lotteries, even if we were ignorant of the mechanics involved.
This gives me a little bit of hope, since we might be able to use it as a heuristic when dealing with situations like these. That’s not as good as a proof, but it’s not bad.
Also:
The mugger could say “I’ll heal the sick with my psychic powers” or “when I get to the bank on Monday, I’ll donate $$$ to medical research”
Only on LessWrong does that sentence make sense and not sound funny :)
Well, there is no necessary reason why all claimed mechanisms must be equally probable. The mugger could say “I’ll heal the sick with my psychic powers” or “when I get to the bank on Monday, I’ll donate $$$ to medical research”; even if the potential utilities were the same and both probabilities were small, we would not consider the probabilities equal.
Also, the utility of money doesn’t scale indefinitely; if nothing else, it levels off once the amount starts being comparable to all the money in the world, so adding more just creates additional inflation.
Nonetheless, since the purpose of money is to positively affect lives, we can indeed use similar reasoning to say the improbability of receiving a large amount of money scales linearly with the amount. Note that this reasoning would correctly dismiss get-rich-quick schemes like pyramids and lotteries, even if we were ignorant of the mechanics involved.
That’s why I don’t think we can defuse Pascal’s Mugging, since we can potentially imagine a mechanism for which our probability that the mugger is honest doesn’t scale with the amount of utility the mugger promises to give. That would imply that there is no fully general solution to Bostrom’s formulation of Pascal’s Mugging. And that worries me greatly.
However:
This gives me a little bit of hope, since we might be able to use it as a heuristic when dealing with situations like these. That’s not as good as a proof, but it’s not bad.
Also:
Only on LessWrong does that sentence make sense and not sound funny :)