Even if you don’t accept 1 and 2 above, there’s no reason to expect that the person is telling the truth. He might kill the people even if you give him the $5, or conversely he might not kill them even if you don’t give him the $5.
To put it another way, conditional on this nonexistent person having these nonexistent powers, why should you be so sure that he’s telling the truth? Perhaps you’ll only get what you want by not giving him the $5. To put it mathematically, you’re computing pX, where p is the probability and X is the outcome, and you’re saying that if X is huge, then just about any nonzero p will make pX be large. But you’re forgetting two things: first, if you have the imagination to imagine X to be super-huge, you should be able to have the imagination to imagine p to be super-small. (I.e., if you can talk about 3^^^^3, you can talk about 1/3^^^^3.) Second, once you allow these hypothetical super-large X’s, you have to acknowledge the possibility that you got the sign wrong.
OK, let’s try this one more time:
Even if you don’t accept 1 and 2 above, there’s no reason to expect that the person is telling the truth. He might kill the people even if you give him the $5, or conversely he might not kill them even if you don’t give him the $5.
To put it another way, conditional on this nonexistent person having these nonexistent powers, why should you be so sure that he’s telling the truth? Perhaps you’ll only get what you want by not giving him the $5. To put it mathematically, you’re computing pX, where p is the probability and X is the outcome, and you’re saying that if X is huge, then just about any nonzero p will make pX be large. But you’re forgetting two things: first, if you have the imagination to imagine X to be super-huge, you should be able to have the imagination to imagine p to be super-small. (I.e., if you can talk about 3^^^^3, you can talk about 1/3^^^^3.) Second, once you allow these hypothetical super-large X’s, you have to acknowledge the possibility that you got the sign wrong.