Comment by UltraSane
7 hours ago
The antidote to Roko's basilisk is realizing it is exactly the same as Pascal's wager. They both rely on the premise of possible unlimited suffering to skew the probabilities arbitrarily.
7 hours ago
The antidote to Roko's basilisk is realizing it is exactly the same as Pascal's wager. They both rely on the premise of possible unlimited suffering to skew the probabilities arbitrarily.
The joke about Pascal's wager, and I love to point it out to some associates, is that it embarks a devious hidden assumption: that the wager's idea of God is an entity that would see faith in its existence as a positive, and even worst case as not an insult to its powers of creation...
The "anti-Pascal" wager can thus be formulated as: the one who has had no faith in any eternal force will be congratulated on having kept their head straight and their focus on reality as it was painstakingly designed, and the faithful will be submitted to the full wrath of what such an entity as the creator of our mess could muster for their arrogant presumptions about this or that bug being made in this or that designer's image...
And this argument is more or less one of the main counterarguments to Pascal's wager. Once you break free from the false dichotomy of the wager it's at lot more obvious how it's incoherent.
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