brendan_oconnor_ai brendan_oconnor_ai-2007 brendan_oconnor_ai-2007-50 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Either God is tricky, or maybe probability is. Pascal’s Wager: Say there’s only a small chance God exists. If you are an atheist but God does actually exist, He will send you to hell for eternity. This is infinitely bad. Therefore you should believe in God on the off-chance he does exist, since a small chance of something infinitely bad is worse than the alternative. Believe in Pascal’s Wager? Have I got a deal for you! says if you believe it, you should send Alex Tabarrok money because he will put in a good word to God for you. Hey, there’s a small chance he has a direct line to God, which yields infinite utility (or avoids hell’s infinite disutility). FWIW, I’m thinking the paradoxes in this sort of arithmetic always happen when you start doing addition/multiplication distribution across those darn infinities. Like on the third page Tabarrok starts talking about p1*Inf – p2*Inf = (p1-p2)*Inf. That’s shady shit. And more about the big PW . I don’t like the SEP ent
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Pascal’s Wager: Say there’s only a small chance God exists. [sent-2, score-0.379]
2 If you are an atheist but God does actually exist, He will send you to hell for eternity. [sent-3, score-0.371]
3 Therefore you should believe in God on the off-chance he does exist, since a small chance of something infinitely bad is worse than the alternative. [sent-5, score-1.013]
4 says if you believe it, you should send Alex Tabarrok money because he will put in a good word to God for you. [sent-8, score-0.665]
5 Hey, there’s a small chance he has a direct line to God, which yields infinite utility (or avoids hell’s infinite disutility). [sent-9, score-1.174]
6 FWIW, I’m thinking the paradoxes in this sort of arithmetic always happen when you start doing addition/multiplication distribution across those darn infinities. [sent-10, score-0.385]
7 Like on the third page Tabarrok starts talking about p1*Inf – p2*Inf = (p1-p2)*Inf. [sent-11, score-0.311]
8 I don’t like the SEP entry on it, because there’s too much history and it talks too much about the boring stuff like the oddness of a decision to believe or disbelieve something. [sent-14, score-0.775]
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same-blog 1 1.0 50 brendan oconnor ai-2007-02-15-Pascal’s Wager
Introduction: Either God is tricky, or maybe probability is. Pascal’s Wager: Say there’s only a small chance God exists. If you are an atheist but God does actually exist, He will send you to hell for eternity. This is infinitely bad. Therefore you should believe in God on the off-chance he does exist, since a small chance of something infinitely bad is worse than the alternative. Believe in Pascal’s Wager? Have I got a deal for you! says if you believe it, you should send Alex Tabarrok money because he will put in a good word to God for you. Hey, there’s a small chance he has a direct line to God, which yields infinite utility (or avoids hell’s infinite disutility). FWIW, I’m thinking the paradoxes in this sort of arithmetic always happen when you start doing addition/multiplication distribution across those darn infinities. Like on the third page Tabarrok starts talking about p1*Inf – p2*Inf = (p1-p2)*Inf. That’s shady shit. And more about the big PW . I don’t like the SEP ent
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Introduction: Since I posted the link to his blog, Baron just wrote about Cardinal Schönborn’s anti-evolution Op-Ed piece . I agree absolutely that people should learn about the psychology of judgment and probability for these sorts of questions, where it’s really hard to understand that random processes can generate things that seem not so random. I’m still thinking about how the psychology of judgment plays in to the analysis below . I have a feeling that people’s intuitions are usually too hospitable for explanations based on intention. E.g.: People are poor, therefore someone is trying to make them poor. Organizations (corportations, governments) do things, therefore someone (say, at the top) ordered them to do these things. Natural disasters happen, therefore someone is wishing them upon us. Etc., etc. I’m still not sure how a bayesian dissection of whether “looks intentful” implies “is intentful” shows us whether such an “intent-seeking” bias (hey, I have to call it something) is
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Introduction: This is a revision of my earlier post . In Jaynes’ awesome statistical manifesto book ( another link ), I just saw for the second time the odds ratio form of Bayes’ rule, which is a lot cleaner for this sort of static analysis. So anyway… Pick an organism. Two propositions, H and E, each may be either true or false about it. H : the organism was designed by an intelligent creator. E : the organism looks like it was designed by an intelligent creator. Most of what I know about Intelligent Design theory (ID) is from seeing a talk by Michael Behe (may 2005). He had to major lines of argument: (1) it is implausible that an evolutionary process could produce life that looks as if it was intelligently designed. (2) Since it looks like it was intelligently designed, it was. He really emphasized the E component of the argument. Justifications for E: Lots of organisms look like they were intelligently designed. They have complex and intricate mechanisms involving coordina
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Introduction: This entry was posted in Uncategorized . Bookmark the permalink .
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Introduction: UPDATE: just wrote a revision of this . Pick an organism. Two propositions, H and E, each may be either true or false about it. H : the organism was designed by an intelligent creator. E : the organism looks like it was designed by an intelligent creator. Most of what I know about ID is from seeing a talk by Michael Behe (may 2005). He had to major lines of argument: (1) it is implausible that an evolutionary process could produce life that looks as if it was intelligently designed. (2) Since it looks like it was intelligently designed, it was. He really emphasized the E component of the argument. Justifications for E: Lots of organisms look like they were intelligently designed. They have complex and intricate mechanisms involving coordination among many components. Sometimes they look like things humans would design: for example, bacteria locomotion devices sometimes bear uncanny resemblance to human-designed motors or propellers. Behe was really into showing al
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Introduction: Either God is tricky, or maybe probability is. Pascal’s Wager: Say there’s only a small chance God exists. If you are an atheist but God does actually exist, He will send you to hell for eternity. This is infinitely bad. Therefore you should believe in God on the off-chance he does exist, since a small chance of something infinitely bad is worse than the alternative. Believe in Pascal’s Wager? Have I got a deal for you! says if you believe it, you should send Alex Tabarrok money because he will put in a good word to God for you. Hey, there’s a small chance he has a direct line to God, which yields infinite utility (or avoids hell’s infinite disutility). FWIW, I’m thinking the paradoxes in this sort of arithmetic always happen when you start doing addition/multiplication distribution across those darn infinities. Like on the third page Tabarrok starts talking about p1*Inf – p2*Inf = (p1-p2)*Inf. That’s shady shit. And more about the big PW . I don’t like the SEP ent
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