Pascal's mugging

The mugger's argument, reconstructed

valid

1. 1.

   Pascal's utility function is unbounded and aggregative in happy days of life, with no risk aversion and no temporal discounting.

2. 2.

   Pascal's credence that the mugger will deliver 1,000 quadrillion extra happy days in exchange for his wallet is 1 in 10 quadrillion.

3. 3.

   Handing over the wallet costs Pascal 1 Util.

4. 4.

   If [1] and [2] and [3], then the expected utility of handing over the wallet exceeds the expected utility of keeping it by nearly 100 Utils.

5. 5.

   Therefore, the expected utility of handing over the wallet exceeds the expected utility of keeping it by nearly 100 Utils. [1,2,3,4]

6. 6.

   Pascal is a committed expected-utility maximizer.

7. 7.

   If [5] and [6], then Pascal should hand over the wallet.

8. 8.

   Therefore, Pascal should hand over the wallet. [5,6,7]

Editor's note

The live tool could not complete this passage: its repair stage failed output validation on both attempts and the run failed closed, so no artifact exists yet. The argument shown is a hand-authored reconstruction that passed the deterministic syntax and transparent-entailment gates. It will be replaced by a tool artifact when a run succeeds. The passage is dialogue, and the mugger's argument is spread across several turns; the reconstruction collects Pascal's stated commitments (unbounded aggregative utility, no risk aversion or discounting, credence of one in ten quadrillion) as premises. The paper's point is that the conclusion is absurd, so one of the premises must go; the reconstruction shows where the weight sits. Yudkowsky's earlier statement of the problem is at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a5JAiTdytou3Jg749/pascal-s-mugging-tiny-probabilities-of-vast-utilities.