It seems like the term ‘Pascal’s Mugging’ is having its meaning degraded.
I believe the original article that introduced the idea was careful to make sure that a simple expected utility calculation would show that accepting the offer was rational. To do this it deliberately exploited explosive functions like Knuth up-arrow notation to make sure the utilities grew faster than the probabilities shrank. This is what made it scary, by our current understanding an ideal rational agent would hand over the money, it calls into question what we mean by ‘ideal rational agent’.
The example given is NOT a Pascal’s mugging. One life, even if it is my own, has nowhere near enough utility to overcome the astonishingly tiny probability of the message being correct. Even if I cared about nothing else, there are more effective uses of those few seconds in terms of increasing my life expectancy. The people who comment are being irrational (assuming they are taking it seriously and not just playing along for fun).
All the other examples given in the thread are the same (with the possible exception of religion). Please can we make an effort to keep the original meaning, it is more interesting as a concept for refining our understanding how rational agents would work.
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.
It seems like the term ‘Pascal’s Mugging’ is having its meaning degraded.
I believe the original article that introduced the idea was careful to make sure that a simple expected utility calculation would show that accepting the offer was rational. To do this it deliberately exploited explosive functions like Knuth up-arrow notation to make sure the utilities grew faster than the probabilities shrank. This is what made it scary, by our current understanding an ideal rational agent would hand over the money, it calls into question what we mean by ‘ideal rational agent’.
The example given is NOT a Pascal’s mugging. One life, even if it is my own, has nowhere near enough utility to overcome the astonishingly tiny probability of the message being correct. Even if I cared about nothing else, there are more effective uses of those few seconds in terms of increasing my life expectancy. The people who comment are being irrational (assuming they are taking it seriously and not just playing along for fun).
All the other examples given in the thread are the same (with the possible exception of religion). Please can we make an effort to keep the original meaning, it is more interesting as a concept for refining our understanding how rational agents would work.
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.