Your first example (quantum/many worlds): I don’t think it’s clear that the quantum worlds example is more likely to be net positive than net negative. You talk about the Many Worlds hypothesis and say that our “power to produce quantum events <...> gives us the power to pretty trivially exponentially increase the total amount of value (for better or worse) in the world by astronomical numbers.” (emphasis added). In this case I don’t need to apply the reversal/inconsistency test, because the original statement already indicates that it could go either way. I.e. no case is made for the proposed action being net positive.
Your second example (evangelism/Pascal’s wager): I think you again acknowledge the problem:
“There are significant complications to Pascal’s argument: it isn’t clear which religion is right, and any choice with infinite rewards on one view may incur infinite punishments on another which are hard to compare. ”
To be more specific, if you decided that converting everyone to religion X was the best choice, I could concoct religion anti-X. Under the doctrine of anti-X, every time you convert someone to religion X, it creates a large infinity* of suffering, and this large infinity is very big.
Sure, you might think that there are asymmetric reasons to believe religion X over religion anti-X. E.g. maybe a billion people believe religion X, whereas I’m the only one supporting religion anti-X, but I’ve constructed the payoffs to be much larger in favour of religion anti-X to offset this.
* If you really want to get into the details about the large infinity, we could say that each time we convert one person to religion X, we create a large infinity of new humans, and there exists a bijective mapping between that new set of humans and the real number line. Each of the new humans is subjected to an infinity of suffering which is more gruesome than the suffering in the hell of religion X.
A bit more detail on the examples from item (2)
Your first example (quantum/many worlds): I don’t think it’s clear that the quantum worlds example is more likely to be net positive than net negative. You talk about the Many Worlds hypothesis and say that our “power to produce quantum events <...> gives us the power to pretty trivially exponentially increase the total amount of value (for better or worse) in the world by astronomical numbers.” (emphasis added). In this case I don’t need to apply the reversal/inconsistency test, because the original statement already indicates that it could go either way. I.e. no case is made for the proposed action being net positive.
Your second example (evangelism/Pascal’s wager): I think you again acknowledge the problem:
“There are significant complications to Pascal’s argument: it isn’t clear which religion is right, and any choice with infinite rewards on one view may incur infinite punishments on another which are hard to compare. ”
To be more specific, if you decided that converting everyone to religion X was the best choice, I could concoct religion anti-X. Under the doctrine of anti-X, every time you convert someone to religion X, it creates a large infinity* of suffering, and this large infinity is very big.
Sure, you might think that there are asymmetric reasons to believe religion X over religion anti-X. E.g. maybe a billion people believe religion X, whereas I’m the only one supporting religion anti-X, but I’ve constructed the payoffs to be much larger in favour of religion anti-X to offset this.
* If you really want to get into the details about the large infinity, we could say that each time we convert one person to religion X, we create a large infinity of new humans, and there exists a bijective mapping between that new set of humans and the real number line. Each of the new humans is subjected to an infinity of suffering which is more gruesome than the suffering in the hell of religion X.