That would be a convenient resolution to the Mugging, but seems unlikely to in fact be true? By the time you get up to numbers around $1 million, the probability of you being paid is very low, but most of it is in situations like ‘Elon Musk is playing a prank on me,’ and in many of these situations you could also get paid $2 million.
It seems likely that ‘probability of payment given offer of $2 million’ is substantially more than half of ‘probability of payment given offer of $1 million’.
Pascal’s Mugging arguments are used to address two questions. One is “why can’t the mugger extract money from people by offering them arbitrarily large sums of money tomorrow in exchange for a small amount of money today?” This is the situation I have sketched.
The other is “why, when offered two propositions of equal expected value, do we prefer the one with a lower payoff and higher probability?” I think the situation you have articulated is more relevant to this question. What do you think?
That would be a convenient resolution to the Mugging, but seems unlikely to in fact be true? By the time you get up to numbers around $1 million, the probability of you being paid is very low, but most of it is in situations like ‘Elon Musk is playing a prank on me,’ and in many of these situations you could also get paid $2 million.
It seems likely that ‘probability of payment given offer of $2 million’ is substantially more than half of ‘probability of payment given offer of $1 million’.
Pascal’s Mugging arguments are used to address two questions. One is “why can’t the mugger extract money from people by offering them arbitrarily large sums of money tomorrow in exchange for a small amount of money today?” This is the situation I have sketched.
The other is “why, when offered two propositions of equal expected value, do we prefer the one with a lower payoff and higher probability?” I think the situation you have articulated is more relevant to this question. What do you think?