People generally find it difficult to judge the size of these kinds of small probabilities that lack robust epistemic support. That means that they could be susceptible to conmen telling them stories of potential events which, though unlikely (according to the listener’s estimate), has a substantial expected value due to huge payoffs were they to occur (akin to Pascal’s mugging). It may be that people have developed defence mechanism against this, and reject claims of large expected value involving non-robust probabilities to avoid extortion. I once had plans to study this psychological hypothesis empirically, but abandoned them.
I agree with this.
People generally find it difficult to judge the size of these kinds of small probabilities that lack robust epistemic support. That means that they could be susceptible to conmen telling them stories of potential events which, though unlikely (according to the listener’s estimate), has a substantial expected value due to huge payoffs were they to occur (akin to Pascal’s mugging). It may be that people have developed defence mechanism against this, and reject claims of large expected value involving non-robust probabilities to avoid extortion. I once had plans to study this psychological hypothesis empirically, but abandoned them.