Pascal's mugging

English

Etymology

Coined by Eliezer Yudkowsky, based on Pascal's wager.

Proper noun

Pascal's mugging

1. (philosophy) A thought experiment demonstrating a problem in expected utility maximization. A rational agent should choose actions whose outcomes, when weighed 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 counterintuitive choices, and then to incoherence as the utility of every choice becomes unbounded.