I think you need to explain in more detail how that is significantly different from the pitch of a Pascal’s Mugger—which usually doesn’t make too much sense either.
It’s easy to calculate the expected returns from buying a lottery ticket, and they’re almost always negative. The psychology behind them is similar to a P-mugging, but only because people aren’t very good at math—eight-digit returns are compared against a one-digit outlay and scope insensitivity issues do their dirty work.
P-muggings like the one Eliezer described work differently: they postulate a return in utility (or, in some versions, avoided disutility) so vast that the small outlay in utility is meant to produce a positive expected return, as calculated by our usual decision theories, even after factoring in the very high probability that the P-mugger is lying, mistaken, or crazy. Whether or not it’s possible for such a setup to be credible is debatable; as given it probably wouldn’t work well in the wild, but I’d expect that to be due primarily to the way human risk aversion heuristics work.
True enough, but that distinction represents a can of worms that I don’t really want to open here. Point is, you don’t need that sort of utilitarian sleight of hand to get Pascal’s mugging to work—the vulnerability it exploits lies elsewhere, probably in the way Solomonoff-based decision theory bounds its expectations.
It’s easy to calculate the expected returns from buying a lottery ticket, and they’re almost always negative. The psychology behind them is similar to a P-mugging, but only because people aren’t very good at math—eight-digit returns are compared against a one-digit outlay and scope insensitivity issues do their dirty work.
P-muggings like the one Eliezer described work differently: they postulate a return in utility (or, in some versions, avoided disutility) so vast that the small outlay in utility is meant to produce a positive expected return, as calculated by our usual decision theories, even after factoring in the very high probability that the P-mugger is lying, mistaken, or crazy. Whether or not it’s possible for such a setup to be credible is debatable; as given it probably wouldn’t work well in the wild, but I’d expect that to be due primarily to the way human risk aversion heuristics work.
In dollars—but not expected utilons, obviously. People generally play the lottery because they want to win.
True enough, but that distinction represents a can of worms that I don’t really want to open here. Point is, you don’t need that sort of utilitarian sleight of hand to get Pascal’s mugging to work—the vulnerability it exploits lies elsewhere, probably in the way Solomonoff-based decision theory bounds its expectations.