As far as I know the strongest version of this argument is Benja’s, here (which incidentally seems to deserve many more upvotes than it got).
Benja’s scenario isn’t a problem for normal people though, who are not reflectively consistent and whose preferences manifestly change over time.
Beyond that, it seems like people’s preferences regarding the lifespan dilemma are somewhat confusing and probably inconsistent, much like their preferences regarding the repugnant conclusion. But that seems mostly orthogonal to pascal’s mugging, and the basic point—having unbounded utility by definition means you are willing to accept negligible chances of sufficiently good outcomes against probability nearly 1 of any fixed bad outcome, so if you object to the latter you are just objecting to unbounded utility.
I agree I was being uncharitable towards Eliezer. But it is true that at the end of this post he was suggesting giving up on unbounded utility, and that everyone in this crowd seems to ultimately take that route.
As far as I know the strongest version of this argument is Benja’s, here (which incidentally seems to deserve many more upvotes than it got).
Benja’s scenario isn’t a problem for normal people though, who are not reflectively consistent and whose preferences manifestly change over time.
Beyond that, it seems like people’s preferences regarding the lifespan dilemma are somewhat confusing and probably inconsistent, much like their preferences regarding the repugnant conclusion. But that seems mostly orthogonal to pascal’s mugging, and the basic point—having unbounded utility by definition means you are willing to accept negligible chances of sufficiently good outcomes against probability nearly 1 of any fixed bad outcome, so if you object to the latter you are just objecting to unbounded utility.
I agree I was being uncharitable towards Eliezer. But it is true that at the end of this post he was suggesting giving up on unbounded utility, and that everyone in this crowd seems to ultimately take that route.