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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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It is if our concern is the expected value of acting accordingly. Higher rewards->higher expected value (all else equal).

It actually doesn't leave me open to all sorts of malicious agents. My credence in them will understandably be quite low, and so the return on just continuing to try to follow Christianity faithfully will outweigh whatever they're offering/threatening.

Okay, do you think that the pagan gods of your homeland can plausibly promise you infinite benefits or threaten you with infinite harms? (And if so, we might then have to worry about different levels of infinities, given that e.g. hyperreals have them, but I'm not certain about that)

My credence in them will understandably be quite low

No, I don't understand why your credence in a random bum promising hell/heaven to you is not hypercharged to infinity the same way a religion's credence is hypercharged to infinity. My credence in religions is quite low, I consider them at best a way for people to epicycle their existential dread away and at worst a way for social egregores to keep downtrodden people downtrodden.

As long as we worry about different levels of infinities, consider Blarg, the god that will send you to hell of cardinality aleph(n+1) where aleph(n) is Christianity's hell, and vice versa for heavens.

It would be, but as compared to the larger infinity, it would be a much smaller one in expectation.

Cardinal infinities don't work. Something like hyperreals or surreals work better. You could also just drop the continuity axiom and treat infinity as a relation between values rather than sticking a number on it globally, but hyperreals/surreals should work equally well.

But if we want a convergent utility function, we probably need to add the stipulation that there's some maximum possible state, or at least, some state than which it is impossible that you have values infinitely greater.