Tom_McCabe2 suggests generalizing EY’s rebuttal of Pascal’s Wager to Pascal’s Mugging: it’s not actually obvious that someone claiming they’ll destroy 3^^^^3 people makes it more likely that 3^^^^3 people will die. The claim is arguably such weak evidence that it’s still about equally likely that handing over the $5 will kill 3^^^^3 people, and if the two probabilities are sufficiently equal, they’ll cancel out enough to make it not worth handing over the $5.
Personally, I always just figured that the probability of someone (a) threatening me with killing 3^^^^3 people, (b) having the ability to do so, and (c) not going ahead and killing the people anyway after I give them the $5, is going to be way less than 1/3^^^^3, so the expected utility of giving the mugger the $5 is almost certainly less than the $5 of utility I get by hanging on to it. In which case there is no problem to fix. EY claims that the Solomonoff-calculated probability of someone having ‘magic powers from outside the Matrix’ ‘isn’t anywhere near as small as 3^^^^3 is large,’ but to me that just suggests that the Solomonoff calculation is too credulous.
(Edited to try and improve paraphrase of Tom_McCabe2.)
This seems very similar to the “reference class fallback” approach to confidence set out in point 2, but I prefer to explicitly refer to reference classes when setting out that approach, otherwise the exactly even odds you apply to massively positive and massively negative utility here seem to come rather conveniently out of a hat...
Fair enough. Actually, looking at my comment again, I think I paraphrased Tom_McCabe2 really badly, so thanks for replying and making me take another look! I’ll try and edit my comment so it’s a better paraphrase.
Tom_McCabe2 suggests generalizing EY’s rebuttal of Pascal’s Wager to Pascal’s Mugging: it’s not actually obvious that someone claiming they’ll destroy 3^^^^3 people makes it more likely that 3^^^^3 people will die. The claim is arguably such weak evidence that it’s still about equally likely that handing over the $5 will kill 3^^^^3 people, and if the two probabilities are sufficiently equal, they’ll cancel out enough to make it not worth handing over the $5.
Personally, I always just figured that the probability of someone (a) threatening me with killing 3^^^^3 people, (b) having the ability to do so, and (c) not going ahead and killing the people anyway after I give them the $5, is going to be way less than 1/3^^^^3, so the expected utility of giving the mugger the $5 is almost certainly less than the $5 of utility I get by hanging on to it. In which case there is no problem to fix. EY claims that the Solomonoff-calculated probability of someone having ‘magic powers from outside the Matrix’ ‘isn’t anywhere near as small as 3^^^^3 is large,’ but to me that just suggests that the Solomonoff calculation is too credulous.
(Edited to try and improve paraphrase of Tom_McCabe2.)
This seems very similar to the “reference class fallback” approach to confidence set out in point 2, but I prefer to explicitly refer to reference classes when setting out that approach, otherwise the exactly even odds you apply to massively positive and massively negative utility here seem to come rather conveniently out of a hat...
Fair enough. Actually, looking at my comment again, I think I paraphrased Tom_McCabe2 really badly, so thanks for replying and making me take another look! I’ll try and edit my comment so it’s a better paraphrase.