I guess an instrumental approach I’ve been advocating on this site for a long time is to estimate the noise level, call it “practically zero” and treat anything at that level as such. For example, in the Pascal’s mugger case, there are so many disjunctive possibilities with higher odds to hear the same story vs the story as told being true, that there is no reason to privilege believing in what you hear over all higher-probability options, including dreaming, hallucinating, con, psych experiment, candid camera… It’s not about accurately estimating EV and so becoming susceptible to blackmail, it’s about rejecting anything at the noise level. Which, I guess, is another way to say “epsilon”, not technically zero, but as good as.
I guess an instrumental approach I’ve been advocating on this site for a long time is to estimate the noise level, call it “practically zero” and treat anything at that level as such. For example, in the Pascal’s mugger case, there are so many disjunctive possibilities with higher odds to hear the same story vs the story as told being true, that there is no reason to privilege believing in what you hear over all higher-probability options, including dreaming, hallucinating, con, psych experiment, candid camera… It’s not about accurately estimating EV and so becoming susceptible to blackmail, it’s about rejecting anything at the noise level. Which, I guess, is another way to say “epsilon”, not technically zero, but as good as.