On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 5:15 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
Pascal's Wager involves infinite gain/loss - this is just basic risk analysis and has nothing at all to do with Pascal's Wager.
It's true that Pascal's own version of Pascal's Wager involves the risk of infinite loss, but it's commonly used among modern philosophers (and lawyers and others) to refer to scenarios regarding small probabilities of very large losses (since in the real world we humans mostly don't deal with infinite losses or gains). If I tell you there's only a 1 percent change of a 10-trillion-dollar personal loss (for example), the same paralyzing logic of Pascal's Wager applies, even though 10 trillion dollars isn't an infinite number of dollars. (And that's all I'll say here about Pascal's Wager on this list -- if you want to discuss it privately, I'm happy to continue that off-topic discussion, since I've been interested in the subject for almost three decades.)
So I
think the expected number of problematic cases is significantly less than 1, but it certainly isn't 0.
Fortunately for legal risk assessment, there's no need for risks to be zero in order for them to be judged insignificant.
--Mike