Pascal's Wager | Dr. Al Hájek and Dr. Liz Jackson

Should you wager on God? Let's find out.

OUTLINE

0:00 Intro and outline
2:48 Key background
15:52 The wager
23:36 Many gods objection
32:16 Mixed strategies objection
39:00 Al’s dilemma
51:21 Pascal’s mugging
1:01:02 Is wagering even possible?
1:10:34 Is wagering impious?
1:14:25 St. Petersburg Paradox
1:30:17 Closing remarks

LINKS

THE USUAL...

[libertyfirst]

You should invite them over for Monopoly and see how all that probabilistic knowledge works out in practice!

[timhorton]

Al Hajek came to give a colloquium talk at my university a month or so ago. At the post-talk dinner he made an effort to talk to every graduate student on a very human level. Not only is he a great philosopher, but he also seems like a really great person. Glad to see him make an appearance on the channel! Gonna have to research Liz’s work as well after this one!

[benbockelman]

This is the best discussion of pascal’s wager I have listened to so far. I love how philosophy of religion touches on so many different topics.

[PiRobot]

I loved the discussion on the St. Petersburg Game. I think I can potentially resolve it:

Expected value is a very important consideration, but it's not the only consideration. We also have to consider a variable that I call "probability of success"


Games can be played multiple times, let's say that you decide to play an arbitrary x number of times.

Given x games played, either you will have lost money overall, gained money overall, or broken even.

A "win" means that in an *individual* game you win more than the cost to play.

A "success" means that given x games played, you have won more overall than you paid to play. We can then calculate the probability of success for x number of games played. Then we just have to decide if there exists a feasible number of attempts that justifies playing the game by giving us a sufficiently high probability of success.

[aosidh]

Are there Bayesian formulations of the wager? As a young atheist, one of the most convincing arguments I came up with was "No good god would put us in the situation of the standard wager."

I go back and forth on what this means - it might be a statement of the hiddenness problem, or some sort of Christian problem of informed consent. I still hold this as an argument for universalism 😌

[ObsidianTeen]

Every moment is a new Pascal's Wager, for one could commit mortal sin at any moment. The pressure could drive one to suicide. A nightmare.

[cliffordbohm]

If there is just one finite life then any reduction in the value of that limited life is an infinite waste. Why? Because you are losing something (a positive value) and getting nothing for it (0). Hence +/0! However, the truth is that we have no way of knowing if there is a god and if so, which one and what they may want. Since we don't know there is no way to set probabilities.

[calebp]

Love the thumbnail! I think Dr Michael Rota’s formulation of Pascal’s Wager is the most convincing- it is modest, and relies upon evidence from sociology. You can see an interview with him on The Analytic Christian.

[saliksayyar]

Most in the West don’t know that the concept of the so called Pascal Wager was first articulated by Ali, one of most significant companions of the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century of the CE.

[RandomYTubeuser]

I think expected value calculations stop making sense when dealing with infinities. Consider the following scenario:

- Option A: You get 1 billion years of the most enjoyable and fulfilling life you can imagine
- Option B: You get the most painful torture you can imagine for 1 billion years. After this, you have a chance of going to heaven forever

Expected value calculations would have us go with option B, but intuitively option A is obviously so much better (at least for me). Would anyone actually pick option B if given this choice?

[johannmatthee]

I know this is very late to the video, and will most likely not be seen, but in the section on Al's delimma, the whole focus is on infinity and or either the largest number and how that can represent salvation. The conversation is centered around how it is optimal to quantify salvation as infinite or as largest possible number since these things cause logical problems to the wager, but why not just set salvation as some arbitrary number, or as the greatest possible realization of ones reality. That is, why should we give it a number when we can just argue that God created reality such that salvation is the best possible outcome for any individual. The mathematics we bring is is purely to give some measurablility to the wager and does not need to objectively measure the actual expectation of an outcome. An analogy would be in Statistics qualitative categorical variables are usually encoded in some mathematical way to render statistical analysis of the data possibls, like saying red = 0, blue = 1 etc, these encoding are useful in drawing inferences from the data, nevertheless they are just encodings, a way of quantifying some qualitative categorical variables and do since these variables cannot be used in mathematical calculations unless they represented numerically.
The same is possible of salvation, that is that God created the world such that salvation is categorically set above all other possible outcomes, how we wish to encode that in a mathematical sence is arbitrary to the extent that we can accurately draw inferences from it

[stalemateib]

Ah, the Day of the Kentucky Derby... a great day to upload a video about wagering...

[perplexedon]

I think my biggest counterargument is that it is just a priori more probable that there is a noninterventionsist god that will offer infinite rewards for the intellectually honest than that the Christian god exists. Punishing someone for being sincirely unconvinced of something just has such a low probability combated to basic rewarding-deity conceptions like thay

[sat]

Great discussion. My take is that Pascal's wager is dubious from the start, in that it uses "expected" utility (defined in the frequentist interpretation by a potential infinity of trials) for a one-time wager - it has to rely solely on subjectivist notions of credence. So, a rational agent who finds the plausibility of the God claim "infinitely small" would (and should) never have to wrestle with the wager.

[Friction]

Minor point. I haven't read the paper, but it appears that they frame the utility calculation in terms of basic subjective expected utility (SEU), that is, as developed by Savage (1954). While this is unproblematic here, SEU is now universally rejected by decision theorists, since it admits of clear counterexamples. For example, if you're considering whether to get some vaccine at a small cost that's expected to significantly lower the likelihood of contracting some disease that you could get regardless, but would be a large cost, SEU invariably, but incorrectly, recommends declining the vaccine. The problem is that getting the disease is not independent (either causally or evidentially) of you getting the vaccine, and so it's a mistake to assess expexted utility with SEU. The popular approaches that accommodate cases like this are causal decision theory (CDT) and evidential decision theory (EDT). Also, facts about risk-aversion can be understood as impacting the preference function rather than requiring a whole new decision rule.

[samuelblackmon]

Infinity is gumming all of this up. I wonder if rates of utility could allow for some clarity

[SeekingVirtueA]

I always feel a bit gross from Pascal's Wager - there is always the ominous "or else..." hovering in the background, like a Mafioso encouraging you to accept his very generous offer.

[marksnow]

Faith or Works?
Friday sunset to Saturday sunset or all of Sunday?

[analyticallysound]

There seems to me to be something deeply troubling and almost insulting to religion to reduce it to a set of probabilities. It also assumes doxastic voluntarism which is highly controversial.

[JohnCamacho]

Pascal's wager is only about one type of God that separates mankind into one of two extreme destinations after death. There are other conceptions of God.