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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
How To Save Pascal (And Ourselves) From The Mugger, Avram Hiller, Ali Hasan
How To Save Pascal (And Ourselves) From The Mugger, Avram Hiller, Ali Hasan
Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations
In this article, we re-examine Pascal's Mugging, and argue that it is a deeper problem than the St. Petersburg paradox. We offer a way out that is consistent with classical decision theory. Specifically, we propose a “many muggers” response analogous to the “many gods” objection to Pascal's Wager. When a very tiny probability of a great reward becomes a salient outcome of a choice, such as in the offer of the mugger, it can be discounted on the condition that there are many other symmetric, non-salient rewards that one may receive if one chooses otherwise.
Comment On Gignac And Zajenkowski, “The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is (Mostly) A Statistical Artefact: Valid Approaches To Testing The Hypothesis With Individual Differences Data”, Avram Hiller
Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations
Gignac and Zajenkowski (2020) find that “the degree to which people mispredicted their objectively measured intelligence was equal across the whole spectrum of objectively measured intelligence”. This Comment shows that Gignac and Zajenkowski’s (2020) finding of homoscedasticity is likely the result of a recoding choice by the experimenters and does not in fact indicate that the Dunning-Kruger Effect is a mere statistical artifact. Specifically, Gignac and Zajenkowski (2020) recoded test subjects’ responses to a question regarding self-assessed comparative IQ onto a linear IQ scale when a normal IQ scale would likely have been more appropriate. More generally, researchers studying self-assessed …