re: #279 Aceofwhat?

this wasn’t Pascal’s wager, it was an invitation to open a discussion about risk management probability theory

The majority of the video was “you get to choose columns, not rows, so choose the column that lets you avoid this really really bad square.” He spent only a few seconds mentioning the idea of adding in probabilities to the table and doing risk management, and that was near the end. His position is more sophisticated than Pascal’s Wager, but the vast majority of this specific presentation was vintage PW.

In my experience, people’s reaction to PW is to assume that whoever made the argument isn’t worth talking to any further, and tune them out. Seriously, rewatch the video and imagine you were confused about the science. Think about how far you would make it before you decided “this guy is just feeding me a line of bull. There’s no science here, it’s just Pascal’s Wager.”

It’s important to present our arguments in effective ways (not like my first post in this thread; that post sucked.) I think this particular presentation is worse than ineffective; I think people who are honestly confused are likely to get partway through it and decide that it’s not worth watching any of the other, better videos and articles Charles has posted (just like people reading my first post might get a paragraph in and decide it’s not worth reading anything else I wrote.)