That’s not really a counterfactual mugging though, is it? ie, it doesn’t fit the template of “I decided to flip a fair coin give you ten dollars if it came up heads if I predicted (and I’m really good at predicting) that if it came up tails you would give me five dollars. I flipped the coin yesterday and it came up tails. So… do you give me five dollars?”
EDIT: to respond to your edit… what insurance company would actually do that? ie, you first have to sign up with them, etc etc. And if their actuaries compute that there’s a reasonable likelihood that they’ll have to pay out to you… They avoid you or give you nastier premiums or such in the first place. I guess I could see an argument that insurance could be viewed as RELATED to something like an iterated counterfactual mugging, though...
There are a few ways you can look at this to make it seem more relevant. I think you can transform the counterfactual mugging into insurance such that each step shouldn’t change your answer.
But let me put it this way instead: Imagine that you’re going to insert your consciousness into a random “you” across the multiverse. In some of those your house (or other valuable) burns down (or otherwise descends into entropy). Would you rather be thrown into a “you” who had bought insurance, or hadn’t bought insurance?
Remember, it’s not an option to only buy insurance in the ones where your house burns down, i.e. to separate the “yous” into a) those whose houses didn’t burn down and didn’t buy insurance, vs. b) those whose houses did burn down and did buy insurance. This inseparability, I think, captures the salient aspects of the counterfactual mugging because it’s (presumably) not an option to “be the type to pay the mugger” only in those cases where the coin flip favors you.
(I daydreamed once about some guy whose house experiences a natural disaster, so he goes to an insurance company with which he has no policy, and when it’s explained to him that they only pay out to people who have a policy with them, he rolls his eyes and tries to give them money equal to a month’s premium, as if that will somehow make them pay out.)
That’s not really a counterfactual mugging though, is it? ie, it doesn’t fit the template of “I decided to flip a fair coin give you ten dollars if it came up heads if I predicted (and I’m really good at predicting) that if it came up tails you would give me five dollars. I flipped the coin yesterday and it came up tails. So… do you give me five dollars?”
EDIT: to respond to your edit… what insurance company would actually do that? ie, you first have to sign up with them, etc etc. And if their actuaries compute that there’s a reasonable likelihood that they’ll have to pay out to you… They avoid you or give you nastier premiums or such in the first place. I guess I could see an argument that insurance could be viewed as RELATED to something like an iterated counterfactual mugging, though...
There are a few ways you can look at this to make it seem more relevant. I think you can transform the counterfactual mugging into insurance such that each step shouldn’t change your answer.
But let me put it this way instead: Imagine that you’re going to insert your consciousness into a random “you” across the multiverse. In some of those your house (or other valuable) burns down (or otherwise descends into entropy). Would you rather be thrown into a “you” who had bought insurance, or hadn’t bought insurance?
Remember, it’s not an option to only buy insurance in the ones where your house burns down, i.e. to separate the “yous” into a) those whose houses didn’t burn down and didn’t buy insurance, vs. b) those whose houses did burn down and did buy insurance. This inseparability, I think, captures the salient aspects of the counterfactual mugging because it’s (presumably) not an option to “be the type to pay the mugger” only in those cases where the coin flip favors you.
(I daydreamed once about some guy whose house experiences a natural disaster, so he goes to an insurance company with which he has no policy, and when it’s explained to him that they only pay out to people who have a policy with them, he rolls his eyes and tries to give them money equal to a month’s premium, as if that will somehow make them pay out.)