Glad to see someone already wrote out some of my thoughts. To just tag on, some of my key bullet points for understanding Pascalian wager problems are:
• You can have offsetting uncertainties and consequences (as you mention), and thus you should fight expected value fire with EV fire.
• Anti-Pascalian heuristics are not meant to directly maximize the accuracy of your beliefs, but rather to improve the effectiveness of your overall decision-making in light of constraints on your time/cognitive resources. If we had infinite time to evaluate everything—even possibilities that seem like red herrings—it would probably usually be optimal to do so, but we don’t have infinite time so we have to make decisions as to what to spend our time analyzing and what to accept as “best-guesstimates” for particularly fuzzy questions. Thus, you can “fight EV fire with EV fire” at the level of “should I even continue entertaining this idea?”
• Very low probabilities (risk estimates) tend to be associated with greater uncertainty, especially when the estimates aren’t based on clear empirical data. As a result, really low probability estimates like “1/100,000,000” tend to be more fragile to further analysis, which crucially plays into the next bullet point.
• Sometimes the problem with Pascalian situations (especially in some high school policy debate rounds I’ve seen) is that someone fails to update based on the velocity/acceleration of their past updates: suppose one person presents an argument saying “this very high impact outcome is 1% likely.” The other person spends a minute arguing that it’s not 1% likely, and it actually only seems to be 0.1% likely. They spend another minute disputing it and it then seems to be only 0.01% likely. They then say “I have 5 other similar-quality arguments I could give, but I don’t have time.” The person that originally presented the argument could then say “Ha! I can’t dispute their arguments, but even if it’s 0.01% likely, the expected value of this outcome still is large” … the other person gives a random one of their 5 arguments and drops the likelihood by another order of magnitude, etc. The point being, given the constraints on information flow/processing speed and available time in discourse, one should occasionally take into account how fast they are updating and infer the “actual probability estimate I would probably settle on if we had a substantially greater amount of time to explore this.” (Then fight EV fire with EV fire)
Glad to see someone already wrote out some of my thoughts. To just tag on, some of my key bullet points for understanding Pascalian wager problems are:
• You can have offsetting uncertainties and consequences (as you mention), and thus you should fight expected value fire with EV fire.
• Anti-Pascalian heuristics are not meant to directly maximize the accuracy of your beliefs, but rather to improve the effectiveness of your overall decision-making in light of constraints on your time/cognitive resources. If we had infinite time to evaluate everything—even possibilities that seem like red herrings—it would probably usually be optimal to do so, but we don’t have infinite time so we have to make decisions as to what to spend our time analyzing and what to accept as “best-guesstimates” for particularly fuzzy questions. Thus, you can “fight EV fire with EV fire” at the level of “should I even continue entertaining this idea?”
• Very low probabilities (risk estimates) tend to be associated with greater uncertainty, especially when the estimates aren’t based on clear empirical data. As a result, really low probability estimates like “1/100,000,000” tend to be more fragile to further analysis, which crucially plays into the next bullet point.
• Sometimes the problem with Pascalian situations (especially in some high school policy debate rounds I’ve seen) is that someone fails to update based on the velocity/acceleration of their past updates: suppose one person presents an argument saying “this very high impact outcome is 1% likely.” The other person spends a minute arguing that it’s not 1% likely, and it actually only seems to be 0.1% likely. They spend another minute disputing it and it then seems to be only 0.01% likely. They then say “I have 5 other similar-quality arguments I could give, but I don’t have time.” The person that originally presented the argument could then say “Ha! I can’t dispute their arguments, but even if it’s 0.01% likely, the expected value of this outcome still is large” … the other person gives a random one of their 5 arguments and drops the likelihood by another order of magnitude, etc. The point being, given the constraints on information flow/processing speed and available time in discourse, one should occasionally take into account how fast they are updating and infer the “actual probability estimate I would probably settle on if we had a substantially greater amount of time to explore this.” (Then fight EV fire with EV fire)