In philosophy, Pascal’s mugging is a thought experiment demonstrating a problem in expected utility maximization. A rational agent should choose actions whose outcomes, when weighted by their probability, have higher utility. But some very unlikely outcomes may have very great utilities, and these utilities can grow faster than the probability diminishes. Hence the agent should focus more on vastly improbable cases with implausibly high rewards; this leads first to counter-intuitive choices, and then to incoherence as the utility of every choice becomes unbounded.
The name refers to Pascal’s Wager, but unlike the wager, it does not require infinite rewards. This sidesteps many objections to the Pascal’s Wager dilemma that are based on the nature of infinity.
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Thanks. That was really informative. I still feel like it suffers from the need for absurdly high values, even though it’s not dependent on infinite reward anymore. Plus, the ability to pay decreases with amount, so then does the probability. I’m open to the idea of a use case for this, but I don’t know what it is.
