Oh, I only apologised because, well, if we start discussing about catchy paradoxes, we’ll soon lose the track of our original point.
But if you enjoy it, and since it is a relevant subject, I think people use 3 broad “strategies” to tackle St. Petersburg paradoxes and the like:
[epistemic status: low, but it kind makes sense]
a) “economist”: “if you use a bounded version, or takes time into account, the paradox disappears: just apply a logarithmic function for diminishing returns...”
b) “philosopher”: “unbounded utility is weird” or “beware, it’s Pascal’s Wager with objective probabilities!”
c) “statistician”: “the problem is this probability distribution, you can’t apply central limit / other theorem, or the indifference principle, or etc., and calculate its expectation”
Oh, I only apologised because, well, if we start discussing about catchy paradoxes, we’ll soon lose the track of our original point.
But if you enjoy it, and since it is a relevant subject, I think people use 3 broad “strategies” to tackle St. Petersburg paradoxes and the like:
[epistemic status: low, but it kind makes sense]
a) “economist”: “if you use a bounded version, or takes time into account, the paradox disappears: just apply a logarithmic function for diminishing returns...”
b) “philosopher”: “unbounded utility is weird” or “beware, it’s Pascal’s Wager with objective probabilities!”
c) “statistician”: “the problem is this probability distribution, you can’t apply central limit / other theorem, or the indifference principle, or etc., and calculate its expectation”