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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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Are you saying that you think that all chances of infinite rewards cancel exactly? And that you have precisely zero knowledge about this? No hunches whatsoever? You couldn't even come up with some mild leanings if you put a year's diligent work into it?

I don't think that it requires a finite list of religions; you should be able to calculate the expected value across a countable number of courses of action.

I don't see how it could be otherwise than that they cancel out exactly.

Deciding a course of action is more likely than another action to get those infinite rewards would require some knowledge of God, knowledge that the Wager specifically excludes. The only state which is logically possible in our state of complete ignorance is therefore one where every action is equally likely to lead to infinite rewards. This would cancel out the infinite reward part when deciding which of two actions is better, as both are equally likely to get you there.

How would you go about figuring out which actions are more likely to lead to infinite rewards in this situation? Whence comes this knowledge about the unknowable?

knowledge that the Wager specifically excludes.

Are you saying in that Pascal says so? Ignore that. Arguments matter in their idealized form, not their historical articulations.

How certain are you that we are completely ignorant? In the case where we are not completely ignorant, are there any possibilities that are at all more likely? (E.g. would "do good things" have better expected value than the contrary? Would some religion proposing some deity slightly increase the subjective chance of that deity existing (as presumably they should be evidence)? etc.)

I think that religions that claim revelation are at least more likely than the negation of those religions, and largeness is probably also a mildly positive sign for a religion. I further think that, even ignoring that, there's a decent chance that moral realism is true, in which case our ethical intuitions are more likely to be courses of action that are approved of by the divine.