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comment by Dacyn · 2023-03-05T23:23:19.240Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Not eating meat is not a Pascal's mugging because there is a solid theoretical argument for why the expected value is positive even if the payoff distribution is somewhat unbalanced: if a large number of people decide not to eat meat, then this will necessarily have the effect of shifting production, for supply to meet demand. Since you have no way of knowing where you are in that large ensemble, the expected value of you not eating meat is equal to the size of the effect divided by the number of people in the ensemble, which is presumably what we would expect the value of not eating meat to be under a naive calculation. There's really nothing mysterious about this, unlike the importance of the choice of a Solomonoff prior in a Pascal's mugger argument.