It’s in Nick Bostrom’s Infinite Ethics paper, which has been discussed repeatedly here, and has been floating around in various versions since 2003. He uses the term “empirical stabilizing assumption.”
I bring this up routinely in such discussions because of the misleading intuitions you elicit by using an example like a mugging that sets off many “no-go heuristics” that track chances of payoffs, large or small. But just because ordinary things may have a higher chance of producing huge payoffs than paying off a Pascal’s Mugger (who doesn’t do demonstrations), doesn’t mean your activities will be completely unchanged by taking huge payoffs into account.
It’s in Nick Bostrom’s Infinite Ethics paper, which has been discussed repeatedly here, and has been floating around in various versions since 2003. He uses the term “empirical stabilizing assumption.”
I bring this up routinely in such discussions because of the misleading intuitions you elicit by using an example like a mugging that sets off many “no-go heuristics” that track chances of payoffs, large or small. But just because ordinary things may have a higher chance of producing huge payoffs than paying off a Pascal’s Mugger (who doesn’t do demonstrations), doesn’t mean your activities will be completely unchanged by taking huge payoffs into account.