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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

That's probably the first time I have mapped Russian Roulette odds to percentages - and 83% chance used to look pretty good.

Now I understand Robert Downey Jrs maths skills in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

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Pascals' Wager: multiply the odds by the cost or benefit of each outcome. The higher the potential cost, the less good your odds look even if the percentage is the same.

Not sure what that has to do with Pascal’s wager? This is just basic “expected value” in probability terms.

The cost of "believing" in God, near zero, the expected value if correct - huge :-)

Plus wasn't it pascal who invented expected value?

And the negative side: eternal damnation in hell (which he valued at -infinity) times a very very small chance, still means it's worth putting in whatever work to be righteous.

And yes he was the inventor.

Pascal's Wager assumes the only God that can possibly exist is the Judeo-Christian one, and that the Bible is correct in its description of what that God wants, and of what awaits those who fail Him.

But logically, if any one God can exist, then so might any God or set of Gods from any pantheon, including sets never even conceived of by human beings. Since the evidence of any one God over another is the same (zero, it's entirely a matter of faith,) the benefit of belief in any one God over another is also zero, since the set of all possible Gods is infinite.

Yeah there's a real difference between a very small but still finite chance, and an infinitesimally small chance. If you're trying to multiply negative infinity by reciprocal infinity, you have to be specific about how big each infinity is. :)

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