>Getting fined doesn't sound so bad -- if it was like $100, your friend could just be treating it as a $0.30/day fee for convenient parking.

I had a professor in college that said she basically treated speeding tickets like that. She had to commute on the weekends from central IL to the Chicago and just accepted that she'd probably get 1-2 speeding tickets per year.

Typical folks cutting in front of me while I am barely at safe breaking distance from the car in front of me, on speeds > 100kmh. This is of course always in at least semi-dense traffic, and them immediately obscuring view further means I have less than second to react to any stronger breaking or I slam into them.

I honk them, then they often get aggressive that I dared to react to their perfectly cool maneuver that gave them those precious extra 5 seconds. Bloody a-holes. Had few almost-collisions even this year due to too aggressive drivers riding too close, some were literally car in front of us or next one behind. Keep your distance, I can't emphasize this enough.

My hand gesture for "Hey did you hear about the inverse Pascal Scam? It suggests that low-probability high-impact risks are easy to ignore, and I think that's what you're doing right now and that's not going to be good for your health, or mine for that matter, so maybe think about that a bit more in the future" is to raise my middle finger. Unfortunately it inevitably makes the situation worse somehow.

Up until recently, fares for the LRT system in my city were enforced by a random check by transit police, typically by having an officer board trains and check riders' tickets at random times during random days and handing out fines to fare evaders who they caught.

Between around mid-2006 and the end of 2008 I rode the train to work downtown every day. The trains were so crowded during rush hour that it was impossible for Transit police to board trains to check fares, and even outside rush hour, fare checks were very occasional. A monthly pass at the time was around $75 and a fine for fare evasion was around $200 (the first violation was less than $200, and I think it increased until a cap of something like $250 for repeat offenders). I'd worked it out that if I was caught without paying a fare less than once every three months, it would be cheaper to just pay the fine if/when I got caught rather than buy a pass. So I didn't buy a pass and decided to see how long it would take to actually get caught.

The answer was about 18 months. Got a $170 fine. Which I then forgot about and never actually paid. The statute of limitations on that fine has long since expired.

Even then, high impact very low likelihood is still often worth avoiding.

Maybe (impact * likelihood) - cost to mitigate

This also touches mind theory. In particular it relies on the belief that running a Turing machine that kills 3^^^^3 people is as bad as breeding and killing the same number of people in the physical world we live in.

If someone thinks there's only 1% change of AI doom they're definitely not a doomer, much less 1 in 1,000.

I argue that it's not that hilarious because the thinking is very tightly related. The very contemplations that lead to AI doomerism lead to pascals mugging.

One of my main gripes with AI doomerism is that it is downstream of being pascal's mugged into being a doomer

Sure! It's just not actually reasonably possible to predict what will lead to that outcome, whereas I can sorta (badly) predict what will make me happy tomorrow, my wife happy next week, and what will best improve conditions for my current fellow citizens of the world.

By that kind of logic, I’m actually a Boltzmann brain floating alone in an infinite void, so I don’t have to worry about anyone but myself.

> Wouldn't you want that version of yourself to live a great life?

The biggest positive change you can make, even for future generations, is to uplevel the people who are alive today.

Regardless, it is an extremely uncertain proposition that we can do anything in the present that would have a reliably positive impact on their lives in the far future. It's hard enough to figure something out for the billions of people who actually exist right now.

It seems obvious to you that there will be trillions of people alive in the far distant future? Please explain how you know this.

1. Suppose you have a chart of the total past and future history of human population.

2. Cover up the chart so only the data from the past to present day is visible.

3. Note that most humans in that subset exist near or at the present. You are one of these people today, it should make sense for you to be born in one of the densest parts of the graph.

4. Now uncover the graph. If there are trillions of humans in the future, it seems almost impossibly unlikely that you would born in a part of the graph with "so few" humans as today, and not in the far future.

Therefore, you must conclude that the actual graph rapidly drops to zero in the near future. QED.

This "doomsday argument" is a pretty shit one, but not worse than others I've seen arguing the opposite.

For reasons explained in the article, we are bad at estimating small probabilities.

Similarly, we are bad at estimating small proportions ("easily shave 2%"). What is being claimed in the parentheses here is that there's a probability distribution of "how much costs are shaved" and that we can estimate where the bulk of its support is.

But we're not really good at making such estimates. Maybe there is some probability mass around 2%, but the bulk is around 0.5%. It seems like that's a small difference (just 1.5%!) but it's a factor of 4 in terms of savings.

So now we have a large number (annual spend), multiplied by a very uncertain number (cost shave, with poor experimental support), leading to a very uncertain outcome in terms of savings.

And it can be that, in reality, the costs of changing service turn out to overwhelm this outcome.

> Your comment would have been better if you'd chosen and example that did not create many tens of thousands of millionaires.

Lotteries have also produced lots of millionaires. Crypto could produce lots of winners just from wealth transfer even if it was a zero sum or net negative game in terms of wealth creation.

...and plenty more folks who lost their shirts- or even just their pizza money- on crypto scams in order to subsidize those millionaires.