ColdButtonIssues

• ColdButtonIssuesAug 7, 2022, 12:51 PM

  2 points

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  in reply to: Yitz’s comment on: What rea­son is there NOT to ac­cept Pas­cal’s Wager?

  I think this is true for some people, but not for most people. Religion seems helpful for happiness, health, having a family, etc which are some of the most common terminal goals out there.

• ColdButtonIssuesAug 7, 2022, 12:49 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: What rea­son is there NOT to ac­cept Pas­cal’s Wager?

  I would say if we use other people’s judgment as a guide for our own, it’s an argument for the belief in the divine/​God/​the supernatural and it becomes hard to say Christianity and Islam have negligible probability. So rules that are like “ignore tiny probability” don’t work. Your idea of discounting probability as utility rises still works but we’ve talked about why I don’t think that’s compelling enough.

  I don’t have good survey evidence on Pascal’s Wager, but I think a lot of religious believers would agree with the general concept- don’t risk your soul, life is short and eternity is long, and other phrases like that seem to reference the basic idea.

  This guy converted on his deathbed because of the wager (John von Neumann).

• ColdButtonIssuesAug 7, 2022, 2:50 AM

  1 point

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  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: What rea­son is there NOT to ac­cept Pas­cal’s Wager?

  I’m not against it- I think it’s an okay way of framing something real. Your phrasing here is pretty sensible to me.

  “Let’s say we could identify exemplary societies across the past, present, and future. Furthermore, assume that, on some questions, these societies had a consensus common sense view. Finally, assume that, in some cases, we can predict what that intertemporal consensus common sense view would be.

  Given all three of these assumptions, then I think we should consider adopting that point of view.”

  But I have concerns about the future perspective, in theory and practice.

  I think people will just assert future people will agree with them. You think future people will agree with you, I think future people will agree with me. There’s no way to settle that dispute conclusively (maybe expert predictions or a prediction market can point to some answer), so I think imagining the future perspective is basically worthless.

  In contrast, we can look at people today or in the past (contingent on historical records). The widespread belief in the divine is, I think, at least another piece of (weak?) evidence that points to taking the wager. This could be weakened if secular societies or institutions were much more successful than their contemporaries.

• ColdButtonIssuesAug 6, 2022, 9:56 PM

  3 points

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  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: What rea­son is there NOT to ac­cept Pas­cal’s Wager?

  I think imagining that current view X is justified, because one imagines that future generations will also believe in X is really unconvincing.

  I think most people think their views will be more popular in the future. Liberal democrats and Communists have both argued that their view would dominate the world. I don’t think it adds anything other than illustrating the speaker is very confident of the merits of their worldview.

  If for instance, demographers put together an amazing case that most future humans would be Mormon, would you change your mind? If you became convinced that AI would kill humanity next decade and we’re in the last generation so there are no future humans, would you change your mind?

• ColdButtonIssuesAug 5, 2022, 9:01 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: What rea­son is there NOT to ac­cept Pas­cal’s Wager?

  I would put it a different way.

  If we use normal decision-making rules that many people use, especially consequentialists, we find that Pascal’s wager is a pretty strong argument. There are many weak objections to and some more promising objections. But unless we’re certain of these objections it seems difficult to escape the weight of infinity.

  If we look to other more informal ways to make decisions- favoring ideas that are popular, beneficial, and intuitive, then major religions that claim to offer a route to infinity are pretty popular, arguably beneficial, and theism in general seems more intuitive to most people than atheism

  I think that given we have no strong reason to reject Pascal’s wager, I would suggest that people in general should do “due diligence” by investigating the claims and evidences for at least the major religions. If someone says hey I’ve spent 500 hours investigating Christianity and 500 hours investigating Islam and glanced at these other things and they all seem implausible… that’s one thing. But I think it’s hard (probably impossible) to justify not taking Pascal’s wager without substantially investigating religious claims.

  If for instance, you end up think there’s 0.5% chance that Jesus was God or Mohammed was the messenger of God, that’s pretty substantial.

  How many hours do you think a reasonable person is obligated to spend investigating religions before rejecting the wager?

• ColdButtonIssuesAug 5, 2022, 7:27 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: What rea­son is there NOT to ac­cept Pas­cal’s Wager?

  I’m mostly interested in the first. I think people should take Pascal’s wager!

• ColdButtonIssuesAug 5, 2022, 3:11 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: What rea­son is there NOT to ac­cept Pas­cal’s Wager?

  Yes, I feel comfortable saying if the EV changes based on our action, we are responsible in some sense or produced it.

  In Newcomb’s paradox, I think you can “produce” additional dollars.

• ColdButtonIssuesAug 5, 2022, 2:43 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: What rea­son is there NOT to ac­cept Pas­cal’s Wager?

  “Another way of putting it—the question isn’t “how likely is this to be a scam,” but “how likely is this to be a real offer.” Would you agree that an offer of a million dollars is more likely to be real than an offer of a billion dollars?”

  Thanks for the example. Yes, I think you’ve convinced me on this point. I think I want to say something like “when we have a good sense of the distribution of events, we know the bigger the departure from typical events, the less likely it is.”

  But I still think (and maybe this is going back to #1 a little) that this still has some issues. We don’t know how likely infinite payoffs are- some theist can say literally every human has achieved an infinite payoff- so I don’t think we can say infinite payoffs don’t happen. Outside religion, an infinite universe or multiverse maybe exists so if our actions are correlated with other people all our actions might produce an infinite payoff.

  And if I did accept that we should discount infinite payoffs, I’m not sure the probability would fall fast enough to still get a finite payoff in expectation.

• ColdButtonIssuesAug 5, 2022, 11:53 AM

  1 point

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  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: What rea­son is there NOT to ac­cept Pas­cal’s Wager?

  Right, the distinction between expected value from tech expected utility from offers from people makes sense. But I think your axiom still doesn’t provide enough reason to reject Pascal’s Wager.

  1. I’m not sure if we can say we have good grounds to apply this discounting to God or the divine in general. Can we put that in the same bucket as human offers? I guess you could say yes by arguing that God is just a human invention but isn’t that like assuming the conclusion or something?

  2. I don’t think probability declines as fast as promised value rises- a guy on the street offering me $1 Billion versus $100 million is about equally likely to be a scam, but the $$$ is different.

  3. Because of how infinity works, wouldn’t I have to think there is a 100% chance that your axiom holds? Otherwise, I would think even if there’s only a 1% chance X God is real and a 1% chance that the expected value is infinite it still dominates everything.

• ColdButtonIssuesAug 4, 2022, 7:57 PM

  6 points

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  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: What rea­son is there NOT to ac­cept Pas­cal’s Wager?

  This is an interesting response, but doesn’t it run into a problem where you could have large amounts of evidence that Action X provides infinite payoff but have to ignore it.

  Imagine really credible scientist/​theologians discover there’s a 90% chance that X gives you infinite payoff and 90% chance Y gives you $5, but you feel obligated to grab the $5 just because you’re an infinity skeptic?

  I also think this isn’t consistent with how people decide things in general- we didn’t need more evidence that COVID vaccines worked than flu vaccines worked, even though the expected utility from COVID vaccines was much higher.

• ColdButtonIssuesAug 4, 2022, 5:35 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Kinbote’s comment on: What rea­son is there NOT to ac­cept Pas­cal’s Wager?

  In theory, you could be stuck doing bizarre things like that. But I don’t think you would in this world. Most reasonably taking infinity seriously, probably involves converting to Christianity or if not that Islam or if not that some other established religions.

  Major religions normally condemn occultic practices and superstitions from outside that practice. If someone comes up to you and claims to be a demon that will inflict suffering, someone who has already bet on the Christian God or Allah for instance, can just say go away- I’m already maximizing my chance of infinite reward and minimizing my chance of infinite punishment.

• ColdButtonIssuesAug 4, 2022, 5:33 PM

  3 points

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  in reply to: Transient Altruist’s comment on: What rea­son is there NOT to ac­cept Pas­cal’s Wager?

  I think one takeaway is that given the stakes of the question- people should actually assess the arguments offered for each religion’s truth. It’s probably not correct to just assume a thought experiment (the Evidentialist God is as plausible as Gods for which there is (at least purported) evidence that many find convincing.

  But if Evidentialist God is the most likely, we should dedicate ourselves to spreading Bayesian statistics or something like that.

  I think it makes sense to spend a substantial amount of time researching religions. If you’re terminally ill, you should convert now.

  Also, how you weigh suffering/​joy probably matters. If Mormonism is true, it’s super-hard to go to Hell/​become a son of perdition. So if you want to minimize odds of eternal punishment, joining the LDS Church may be less attractive. But they do have essentially tiers of heaven so if you’re more joy-motivated, research them!

• ColdButtonIssuesAug 4, 2022, 5:28 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: ryancbriggs’s comment on: What rea­son is there NOT to ac­cept Pas­cal’s Wager?

  What major religion are you thinking of that has that ranking? Islam seems to treat Christianity/​Islam as preferable to paganism/​irreligion.

• ColdButtonIssuesAug 4, 2022, 2:50 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Transient Altruist’s comment on: What rea­son is there NOT to ac­cept Pas­cal’s Wager?

  You’re welcome!

• ColdButtonIssuesAug 4, 2022, 2:33 PM

  1 point

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  on: What rea­son is there NOT to ac­cept Pas­cal’s Wager?

  There isn’t one. To reject Pascal’s Wager, you just have to conclude that you don’t care about infinity. Taking Pascal’s Wager is the correct utilitarian response. You probably need to weight religions both by how likely they are to be true and how likely you can “win” conditional upon them being true.

  Amanda Askell has a good rundown on why most objections to Pascal’s Wager are bad.

• ColdButtonIssuesJul 13, 2022, 7:00 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Chris Kerr’s comment on: One Million Miss­ing Children

  Yeah, I think this would worth be trying.

  Even more speculatively, I was thinking of whether trying to reduce wedding costs would be effective. Married couples have much higher birth rates than unmarried couples, and it looks like it might be partly causal. For instance, I know couples who waited to have children till they married and waited to marry until they could pay for a wedding.

• ColdButtonIssuesJul 13, 2022, 3:42 PM

  2 points

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  in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: One Million Miss­ing Children

  I know a lot of people feel this way, but I disagree.

  If it’s not good for people to come into existence, then human extinction is no big deal. All the people who die during the asteroid strike or whatever, were going to die already, so the downside is just the lost years of life and whatever fear and suffering the looming asteroid causes. I think human extinction is very bad because it would prevent many generations of people from coming into existence.

  And FWIW, I do think it’s also bad for potential parents to not have the family they want and I think that’s a problem too. But I don’t have a good sense of how to quantify that loss to the parents.

• ColdButtonIssuesJul 12, 2022, 3:21 AM

  5 points

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  in reply to: Henry Howard🔸’s comment on: One Million Miss­ing Children

  You can look up the survey data and check yourself. I relied on IFS for doing the work of graphing it and explaining it clearly.

  So for instance here is information from Gallup up to 2013.

  Here is data from GSS.

• ColdButtonIssuesJul 12, 2022, 3:17 AM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Jay Bailey’s comment on: One Million Miss­ing Children

  Yeah, this is what I meant. Thanks, Jay!

One Million Miss­ing Children