Sufficiently Wrong: March 2022

Sunday, March 6, 2022

A Flaw in Pascal's Wager

Most reasonable people probably recognize that Pascal's wager is not a very good argument from a purely epistemological point of view. There is, however, also a strange incentive structure to it.

Follow along. If we want to 'minimize the negative outcomes', we should believe in the particular version of God, in which belief undoes the maximal amount of negative outcome. Thus, if you believe in a God that will punish you with an eternity in hell and I want you to turn to belief in a different God, I should present you with a God that will punish both you and anyone you know with an eternity in hell.

But that's not even the end-point. We can imagine a God that will punish you with an eternity in hell, and infinitely improved pain receptors. We know there's multiple ever greater infinities, and we can imagine a God who increases the pain receptors and time in hell into ever greater infinities. Maybe God even can copy your consciousness and punish both? All three of them! An infinity of them!

Thus, the God that Pascal's wager would ultimately lead you to accept is either the maximally cruel God if such a God can be imaginable, or ever crueller Gods replacing each other as fast as preachers can invent ever crueller ones.

Some Rationalism

Pseudoscience and more generally, pseudoscientific reasoning is a problem that educated people need to contend with more strongly. This blog will investigate various pseudoscientific claims, but also pseudoscientific understanding of proper science, as well as pseudoscientific reasoning used by fans of science and popular science writers. The blog started with the primary objective of reviewing D.M. Murdock's The Christ Conspiracy, which is a rather solid example of pseudoscientific 'research' into history.

At times, I may also write about pseudoscience more generally - why it is a problem, why its methods are prone to mistakes, its sociological role, and its similarities to religion. Religion will naturally also feature as a topic on occasion.

Finally, a form of pseudoscience that has gotten too little recognition is what I call 'cargo cult reasoning', a flawed use of logics among online atheists and people identifying with movements such as 'brights' and other rationalists sometimes fall for. I fear the kind of reasoning involved in that may evolve into a religion-like set of mistaken notions, and hope to contribute to curbing that tendency.