However, the message could easily be modified to exclude the supernatural (the poster has hacked youtube and is monitoring the responses for IP addresses of those who viewed the video and those who posted the comment), thus raising the priors, and the consequences could be greater (if you don’t repost this, you, everyone you know, and everyone they know, will be killed, and all cryonics institutes will be invaded, and the bodies of those interred within removed, warmed, and allowed to decompose), thus raising the payoff.
In the ‘most inconvenient world’ it constitutes a mugging. Your objection to the example given does not mean that it is not isomorphic to Pascal’s mugging given suitable conditions.
I would still say your suggesting doesn’t work, that consequence is huge but the tiny probability still brings it down. At an estimate you’ve threatened maybe a few thousand people. To pull of a threat like that would require a huge amount of resources (at a guess, nothing short of a government could manage it), I would guess that the number of youtube commenters capable of that is probably much less than one-thousandth of the number of youtube commenters capable of killing a single person, so that threat is less scary than:
Reply to this comment or I will hunt you down and kill you
For small threats the probability it will be followed through on goes down faster than the utility at stake goes up. It is a non-trivial proposition that this trend ever reverses, which is why the original post is careful to make the important arguments to do with Busy Beaver numbers and Solomonoff Induction.
To make a real mugging you would have to go really big, threaten 3^^^^3 people who live outside the matrix and then we might be talking.
In the ‘most inconvenient world’ it constitutes a mugging.
If your claim was ‘I can imagine something like this which would be a Pascal’s Mugging’ then you should have said that. What you actually said was that it was one, and you don’t get to use ‘least convenient possible world’ when you’re making statements about the actual world. You made a false claim, encouraged others to make similar claims and contributed to the loss of a useful term from LW vocabulary.
In the ‘most inconvenient world’ it constitutes a mugging.
If your claim was ‘I can imagine something like this which would be a Pascal’s Mugging’ then you should have said that. What you actually said was that it was one, and you don’t get to use ‘least convenient possible world’ when you’re making statements about the actual world. You made a false claim, encouraged others to make similar claims and contributed to the loss of a useful term from LW vocabulary.
I get to use ‘least convenient possible world’ when I said that there are:
often messages posted at least superficially similar to the following
and gave an example of one claim that could be made.
I think that conversation would be best continued in messages.
Fair point.
However, the message could easily be modified to exclude the supernatural (the poster has hacked youtube and is monitoring the responses for IP addresses of those who viewed the video and those who posted the comment), thus raising the priors, and the consequences could be greater (if you don’t repost this, you, everyone you know, and everyone they know, will be killed, and all cryonics institutes will be invaded, and the bodies of those interred within removed, warmed, and allowed to decompose), thus raising the payoff.
In the ‘most inconvenient world’ it constitutes a mugging. Your objection to the example given does not mean that it is not isomorphic to Pascal’s mugging given suitable conditions.
Oh, it could be made a mugging, I don’t disagree.
I would still say your suggesting doesn’t work, that consequence is huge but the tiny probability still brings it down. At an estimate you’ve threatened maybe a few thousand people. To pull of a threat like that would require a huge amount of resources (at a guess, nothing short of a government could manage it), I would guess that the number of youtube commenters capable of that is probably much less than one-thousandth of the number of youtube commenters capable of killing a single person, so that threat is less scary than:
For small threats the probability it will be followed through on goes down faster than the utility at stake goes up. It is a non-trivial proposition that this trend ever reverses, which is why the original post is careful to make the important arguments to do with Busy Beaver numbers and Solomonoff Induction.
To make a real mugging you would have to go really big, threaten 3^^^^3 people who live outside the matrix and then we might be talking.
If your claim was ‘I can imagine something like this which would be a Pascal’s Mugging’ then you should have said that. What you actually said was that it was one, and you don’t get to use ‘least convenient possible world’ when you’re making statements about the actual world. You made a false claim, encouraged others to make similar claims and contributed to the loss of a useful term from LW vocabulary.
I get to use ‘least convenient possible world’ when I said that there are:
and gave an example of one claim that could be made.
I think that conversation would be best continued in messages.