Wonderful post! As I mentioned in the comments on Against the Linear Utility Hypothesis and the Leverage Penalty I am in the process of writing a reply to this as well, and about half of what I had planned to write was this. Thank you for writing this up better than I would have!
I would like to add that not paying the muggler before the rift in the sky, but paying him afterwards, might not be a sole result of the decision theory (although it’s certainly very related): there is also something interesting going on with the probabilities. It is a priori pretty likely that given that a poorly-dressed person walks up to you on the street, you are about to hear some outlandish claim and a request for money. Therefore your updated probability of this being a random muggler instead of a matrix lord is still pretty high even after hearing the offer. However this probabiliy vanishes to almost nothingness after observing the reality-breaking sky rift—and how close to nothingness this vanishes to is directly dependent on the absurdity of the event witnessed.
In practice I would just pony up the money at the end of your scenario, for the same reasons as you give. So I guess my true rejection to Pascal’s Mugging is the one you give. I think I’ll still write out the other half of my ideas though, for agents with slightly more computing power than we have.
Wonderful post! As I mentioned in the comments on Against the Linear Utility Hypothesis and the Leverage Penalty I am in the process of writing a reply to this as well, and about half of what I had planned to write was this. Thank you for writing this up better than I would have!
I would like to add that not paying the muggler before the rift in the sky, but paying him afterwards, might not be a sole result of the decision theory (although it’s certainly very related): there is also something interesting going on with the probabilities. It is a priori pretty likely that given that a poorly-dressed person walks up to you on the street, you are about to hear some outlandish claim and a request for money. Therefore your updated probability of this being a random muggler instead of a matrix lord is still pretty high even after hearing the offer. However this probabiliy vanishes to almost nothingness after observing the reality-breaking sky rift—and how close to nothingness this vanishes to is directly dependent on the absurdity of the event witnessed.
In practice I would just pony up the money at the end of your scenario, for the same reasons as you give. So I guess my true rejection to Pascal’s Mugging is the one you give. I think I’ll still write out the other half of my ideas though, for agents with slightly more computing power than we have.
See this.
I think AlexMennen nailed it on the head—our utility is bounded and at a low number.