Notes on Pascal’s mugging

Abstract

Pascal’s Mugging is a general problem in decision theory: it exposes the paradoxical and apparently irrational consequences of a thorough-going probabilistic approach to devising a rational utilitarian agent, by offering a deal which seems, intuitively, to be utterly worthless but which the agent will accept. It is generally thought that any system which allows an agent to be exploited this way, to be a ‘money pump’, is irrational & flawed. I attempt to dissect Pascal’s Mugging into 2 separate problems, one of an epistemological flaw in the agent, and another about how to deal with low-probability but high-payoff events.