I don’t understand or disagree with a lot in your comment, but I don’t think I’d say much different from Joe. However, my meta-level principles say I should respond to
I also am generally under the impression that a post like this should be classified as a cognitohazard, as I am under the impression that the post will cause net harm under the premise that it attempts to update people in the direction of susceptibility to arguments of the nature of Pascal’s Wager.
I disagree for two independently dispositive reasons:
I think that if anything, readers would update in the opposite direction, realizing that the bullets to utility-maximizing are harder to swallow than they thought. Joe shows that infinity makes decision theory really weird, making it more appealing (on the margin) to just do prosaic stuff. (I’m relatively fanatical, but I would be much more fanatical and much more comfortable in my fanaticism if not for issues Joe mentions.) And Joe doesn’t advocate, e.g., pressing the red button here, and his last section has good nuanced discussion of this in practice.
Discussions related to this topic have expected benefits in figuring out how to deal with Pascal’s Wager/Mugging outweighing expected costs (if they existed) in individuals making worse decisions (and this “expectation” is robust to non-fanaticism, or something).
I don’t understand or disagree with a lot in your comment, but I don’t think I’d say much different from Joe. However, my meta-level principles say I should respond to
I disagree for two independently dispositive reasons:
I think that if anything, readers would update in the opposite direction, realizing that the bullets to utility-maximizing are harder to swallow than they thought. Joe shows that infinity makes decision theory really weird, making it more appealing (on the margin) to just do prosaic stuff. (I’m relatively fanatical, but I would be much more fanatical and much more comfortable in my fanaticism if not for issues Joe mentions.) And Joe doesn’t advocate, e.g., pressing the red button here, and his last section has good nuanced discussion of this in practice.
Discussions related to this topic have expected benefits in figuring out how to deal with Pascal’s Wager/Mugging outweighing expected costs (if they existed) in individuals making worse decisions (and this “expectation” is robust to non-fanaticism, or something).