He’s arguing that it’s dangerous to Pascal’s Mug people. This surely affects your probability that the guy who’s pulling a Pascal’s mugging on you is really faking.
The whole point of Pascal’s Mugging is that an arbitrarily small probability of something happening is automatically swamped if there’s infinite utility or disutility if it does, according to all usual ways of calculating. Making the arbitrarily small probability smaller doesn’t fix this.
What Adelene said. Add to that the fact that the small probability that the threat is real actually increases by an irrelevant amount rather than decreasing by an irrelevant amount due to the consideration in question.
Since we are already conditioning on the fact that we know we are subject to a mugging attempt when we consider that mugging attempts are dangerous we should slightly increase our estimation that the mugger is powerful enough to carry out the threat. Because the more powerful the potential mugger is the fewer potential anti-mugging genies he has to fear. So apart from being too small an effect to be relevant it is also an effect in the wrong direction.
This surely affects your probability that the guy who’s pulling a Pascal’s mugging on you is really faking.
Adelene’s response is important, but I’d like to point out that if anything the danger in engaging in such muggings makes people even less likely to be faking. So this isn’t a solution to Pascal’s Mugging, it just means that the situation is even worse. So now the mugger instead of saying 3^^^^3 people can just say (3^^^^3)/2 or something like that.
He’s arguing that it’s dangerous to Pascal’s Mug people. This surely affects your probability that the guy who’s pulling a Pascal’s mugging on you is really faking.
The whole point of Pascal’s Mugging is that an arbitrarily small probability of something happening is automatically swamped if there’s infinite utility or disutility if it does, according to all usual ways of calculating. Making the arbitrarily small probability smaller doesn’t fix this.
What Adelene said. Add to that the fact that the small probability that the threat is real actually increases by an irrelevant amount rather than decreasing by an irrelevant amount due to the consideration in question.
Since we are already conditioning on the fact that we know we are subject to a mugging attempt when we consider that mugging attempts are dangerous we should slightly increase our estimation that the mugger is powerful enough to carry out the threat. Because the more powerful the potential mugger is the fewer potential anti-mugging genies he has to fear. So apart from being too small an effect to be relevant it is also an effect in the wrong direction.
Adelene’s response is important, but I’d like to point out that if anything the danger in engaging in such muggings makes people even less likely to be faking. So this isn’t a solution to Pascal’s Mugging, it just means that the situation is even worse. So now the mugger instead of saying 3^^^^3 people can just say (3^^^^3)/2 or something like that.