Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…[laughs] Maybe we can get him on the 80,000 Hours Podcast sometime. It seems like the argument is really robust, though, because even if there’s a 10 percent chance that the future will be very big and glorious, that should still loom extremely large in our moral vision. I agree, but let me make another argument against myself, and that’s the Pascal’s Wager argument. Let’s say sustained growth has a value approaching infinity, but the chance we can ever get there — it’s not 10 percent, it’s like 1 percent. So if we’re not persuaded by Pascal’s Wager — a small chance of a really large payoff — in other contexts, like whether or not we should believe in the deity, maybe I’m offering the new version of Pascal’s Wager. Decay is really pretty likely, the future doesn’t extend that far. There’s like a 1 percent chance it does, and I’m trying to religiously preach to people to believe in that future, make it self-fulfilling, get people to believe, but I’m playing my own Pascal’s Wager game. I’m not saying Pascal’s Wager is always wrong, but we know it’s problematic. It’s not convincing per se, and if you’re looking for problems in the book, maybe that’s another one. I have an episode with the philosopher Amanda Askell where we talk about problems with infinite ethics and Pascal’s Wager, which perhaps can stick up a link to. It raises a lot of issues that we don’t really have time for. Okay, now, in the middle of these discussions, there’s usually a segment called overrated versus underrated. I’ll toss out the names of some things. I’m not sure whether you’re aware of this, but you’re free to pass on any one of them. [laughter]…

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