Pascal's wager doesn't sound too bad for the 1% chance I mentioned. 0.0001% chance? Maybe not so much. Now I suppose you could argue there are an infinite numb

Pascal's wager doesn't sound too bad for the 1% chance I mentioned. 0.0001% chance? Maybe not so much. Now I suppose you could argue there are an infinite number of scenarios where there is a 1% chance of some kind of disproportionate reward, or conversely, a 1% chance of an outsized penalty. Expected value isn't really the right target to optimize for anyway, otherwise we might all be buying lottery tickets when the jackpot becomes large enough. If I have to formalize my post a bit more, I'd say we first narrow down the set of issues into those where the population is roughly split on the matter. Even if you have a very compelling case for why an asteroid is going to strike the earth in the next year, if you can't convince enough people to adopt your viewpoint then it's not going to make any difference, and you may as well optimize for enjoying your last year alive instead. Then once we have this set of critical issues, we allow each side to consider the probability and associated damage of every outcome resulting from the set of decisions to be made about each issue. Why do both sides of an issue get equal representation? Shouldn't the more scientifically literate side carry more weight? Again, the problem here is not devising the best predictive model of outcomes but rather convincing a majority to buy into a particular decision making framework that allows for a significant reduction in overall societal risk. Once each side has provided their subjective confidence of the various outcomes and the resulting damage, then you specify a threshold for acceptable damage. For example, what amount of damage to the economy would be expected due to attempts to mitigate global warming? What amount of damage to the climate would be expected if nothing were done? I would think most people's baseline threshold for acceptable risk is similar even if they disagree on the particular issues. At this point, each side should then be satisfied with the knowledge that even though the other side is "wrong", they got their way on some things and the other side got their way on some things in a manner that reduces each side's subjective global risk to a tolerable amount.