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Pascal's Scams (2012)
- praptak 1y agoIt has a wiki page under a slightly different name (but the concept is the same): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging
- skrebbel 1y agoKinda hilarious that this got invented by the same people who later Pascal's-Mugged half the world with AI doomerism.
- Symmetry 1y agoIf someone thinks there's only 1% change of AI doom they're definitely not a doomer, much less 1 in 1,000.
- clayhacks 1y ago1% chance of humanity going extinct is exactly the pascals mugging doomerism. If someone thinks there’s like >10% chance they’re probably actively working on like AI safety or something else to stop it.
- thornewolf 1y agoI argue that it's not that hilarious because the thinking is very tightly related. The very contemplations that lead to AI doomerism lead to pascals mugging. One of my main gripes with AI doomerism is that it is downstream of being pascal's mugged into being a doomer
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- hollerith 1y agoA better explanation would be https://www.lesswrong.com/w/pascal-s-mugging https://www.lesswrong.com/w/pascal-s-mugging, but all most readers will need to know is this next quote from that last page: >Suppose someone comes to me and says, "Give me five dollars, or I'll use my magic powers from outside the Matrix to run a Turing machine that simulates and kills 3^^^^3 people. It was introduced to point out a place where the currently-best "decision theory" produces a seemingly-wrong recommended action in the hope that someone might come up with a better decision theory or alternatively to explain why the seemingly-wrong recommendation is actually right. A "decision theory" is a recipe for acting in the face of uncertainty that is precisely stated enough that it might eventually serve as the basis of a computer program.
- praptak 1y agoThis also touches mind theory. In particular it relies on the belief that running a Turing machine that kills 3^^^^3 people is as bad as breeding and killing the same number of people in the physical world we live in.
- elcapitan 1y agoCame to read a programming language related polemic, stayed to read about philosophy.
- BigChemical 1y agoPascal’s gamble wasn’t just about probability, it was about storytelling: the promise of nearly infinite payoff with minimal risk. That same allure is still at play today whenever people chase “moonshot” returns on crypto or quick-rich schemes. It underscores a timeless lesson: no matter how much data or logic we have, we’re still wired to fall for well-crafted optimism and that means skepticism remains the best defense.
- hollerith 1y ago>people chase “moonshot” returns on crypto Your comment would have been better if you'd chosen and example that did not create hundreds of thousands of millionaires.
- empath75 1y ago> Your comment would have been better if you'd chosen and example that did not create many tens of thousands of millionaires. Lotteries have also produced lots of millionaires. Crypto could produce lots of winners just from wealth transfer even if it was a zero sum or net negative game in terms of wealth creation.
- pastage 1y agoJust bitcoin uses more energy than Finland, the energy sector in Finland makes lots of people rich. Of course people will earn money when people spend that amount of resources on something.
- RodgerTheGreat 1y ago...and plenty more folks who lost their shirts- or even just their pizza money- on crypto scams in order to subsidize those millionaires.
- analog31 1y agoNot to mention countries who subsidized the electricity.
- alach11 1y agoA lower-key variant of this frequently comes into play with consulting or other sales pitches. "You spend <big number> per year on this <necessary business expense>. Our service will easily shave 2% off this, making the cost of our service completely negligible and this purchase an obviously good decision."
- michaelcampbell 1y agoYou've lost me; can you explain how these two relate?
- mturmon 1y agoFor reasons explained in the article, we are bad at estimating small probabilities. Similarly, we are bad at estimating small proportions ("easily shave 2%"). What is being claimed in the parentheses here is that there's a probability distribution of "how much costs are shaved" and that we can estimate where the bulk of its support is. But we're not really good at making such estimates. Maybe there is some probability mass around 2%, but the bulk is around 0.5%. It seems like that's a small difference (just 1.5%!) but it's a factor of 4 in terms of savings. So now we have a large number (annual spend), multiplied by a very uncertain number (cost shave, with poor experimental support), leading to a very uncertain outcome in terms of savings. And it can be that, in reality, the costs of changing service turn out to overwhelm this outcome.
- aspenmayer 1y agoWhen modern advertising is a spectrum of “lies, damn lies, and statistics,” I don’t blame folks for crying foul and demanding a baseline level of truth in advertising. When folks trust but verify, this is seen as a change in the status quo by folks, and some of those folks who protest about it in those terms are trying to sell you something.
- munchler 1y agoThis is exactly how I feel when Effective Altruism starts talking about the wellbeing of trillions of humans living in the far distant future that we should be devoting ourselves to now. https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/cause-profile-long-run-future https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/cause-profile-lon...
- clueless 1y agohow are "trillions of humans living in the far distant future" improbable, or poor information or has a lack of information? seems pretty obvious
- munchler 1y agoIt seems obvious to you that there will be trillions of people alive in the far distant future? Please explain how you know this.
- tasty_freeze 1y agoThey claim isn't that there will be trillions of people alive at the same time; they are integrating over the course of tens and hundreds of thousands of years. Although we are at a peak population of a bit over 8B people at the moment, it is estimated that more than 100B people we would classify as humans have ever lived. The population long ago was much smaller than 1B, but thousands of generations have lived and died.
- andsoitis 1y agoWhat is something specific that an individual should have done or should not have done, say, 2000 years ago, that would have made a positive impact on your life?
- tasty_freeze 1y agoCertainly there are individuals who have had that kind of impact, but I don't think one could have foreseen the consequences at the time, e.g., Jesus and Mohamed. Likewise, the guy who invented the Segway probably thought he was going to revolutionize personal transportation, but that didn't pan out (yet, at least).
- superb-owl 1y agoAs with most cognitive biases, there's an inverse to this, where we ignore low-probability high-impact scenarios. E.g. people drive drunk or without a seatbelt, because it'll *probably* be fine. And they repeatedly have that assumption confirmed--until one day it isn't. I had one friend who would leave his bike chained partially blocking a fire exit, because "what are the odds the fire inspector will come today?" But the fire inspector comes once a year, and if your bike is chained there 99% of the time, odds are you're going to get a fine. He couldn't see the logic. He got fined.
- sfn42 1y agoTraffic in general is riddled with this. People don't understand the risks they're taking during their everyday driving and get offended when you comment on it.
- jajko 1y agoTypical folks cutting in front of me while I am barely at safe breaking distance from the car in front of me, on speeds > 100kmh. This is of course always in at least semi-dense traffic, and them immediately obscuring view further means I have less than second to react to any stronger breaking or I slam into them. I honk them, then they often get aggressive that I dared to react to their perfectly cool maneuver that gave them those precious extra 5 seconds. Bloody a-holes. Had few almost-collisions even this year due to too aggressive drivers riding too close, some were literally car in front of us or next one behind. Keep your distance, I can't emphasize this enough.
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- throw10920 1y agoHave you considered buying a dashcam? Then in case you do actually hit them because you weren't able to break fast enough, it's very likely that insurance will end up siding with you, as opposed to the usual outcome where you're the rear-ender.
- b450 1y agoIt's amusing to consider how much of a Rorschach test this article must be. But it's a great point, even if it arms us to abusively write off unwelcome ideas as scams. As the author points out, Pascal's reasoning is easily applied to an infinity of conceivable catastrophes - alien invasions, etc. That Pascal specifically applied his argument to the possibility of punishment by a biblical God was due to the psychological salience of that possibility in Pascal's culture - a truly balanced application of his fallacious reasoning would be completely paralyzing.
- aspenmayer 1y agoI often like to pair Pascal’s wager with Hitchens’s razor: > Hitchens's razor is an epistemological razor that serves as a general rule for rejecting certain knowledge claims. It states: > > What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor
- taeric 1y agoThis is a funny read in contrast to the latest Nate Silver book. He seems to have gone all in on justifying EV bets.
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- empath75 1y agoRationalists and Effective Altruism people fall for this stuff _constantly_. Roko's Basilisk being the canonical example of it. They assign infinite negative or postive values to outcomes and then it doesn't mighter what the likelihood or how much they uncertainty they have everywhere else, they insist that they need to do everything possible to cause or prevent whatever that outcome is. Aside from other problems with it, there are a vast number of highly improbable and near-infinitely bad or good outcomes that might possibly occur which would require completey different actions if you're concerned about them.
- bcrl 1y agoAs a kernel developer, I have always had to worry about what happens in the 0.000001% of cases. You're either correct all of the time or you likely have an exploitable security hole in your code that will turn into a CVE at some point in the future that will cost a lot of money to fix. One has to use strategies to reason through proof that your code does the right thing in all states, including the insertion of delays and other fault injection techniques to trigger the cases that aren't normally hit. It's also kind of like saying that an LLM only pushes 0.01% of people off the deep end in a psychotic episode, so it doesn't really matter. That doesn't actually get rid of the liability. All that said, I will always refuse to write life safety code. I am not a good enough developer to do so.