The Stolen Money Game (Pascal's Mugging)
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- Опубліковано 4 жов 2024
- A money game exists in which the potential payoff from being robbed makes perfect mathematical sense… but I won’t play it. Will you?
“Pascal’s Mugging” is derived from the classic philosophical scenario of Pascal’s Wager, which posits that it’s rational for humans to behave as though God exists. If they’re wrong, they don’t lose much; if they’re right, they have an infinite payoff in the afterlife.
The scenario of Pascal’s Mugging stems from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s unique twist on the original wager: what if a thief promised you a tremendous payoff tomorrow for stealing your wallet today? At what point would the near-infinitesimal odds of a criminal rewarding you tomorrow actually warrant you giving them a small amount of money right now?
If we process the situation by using expected value, we could very well be giving up our wallets to criminals who we know without a doubt will disappear forever, and the math would reinforce our decision. The consequences of that mathematical rationalism extend not only into everyday behavior, but also into areas like artificial intelligence. If math can lead us into bad decisions, how can we possibly program AI to act in our best interest?
The next time a creepy baby threatens to steal your wallet, consider the nuanced ramifications in decision theory, probability theory, and utilitarianism -- and to what degree we’ve made progress on the problem over the last 400 years.
** SOURCES **
“Pascal’s Mugging,” Nick Bostrom: nickbostrom.co...
“Pascal’s Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities,” by Eliezer Yudkowsky: www.lesswrong....
“Pascal’s Muggle: Infinitesimal Priors and Strong Evidence,” by Eliezer Yudkowsky: www.lesswrong....
“Pascal’s Wager,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: plato.stanford...
Benn, Alfred W. “Pascal's Wager.” International Journal of Ethics, vol. 15, no. 3, 1905, pp. 305-323. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/...
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Counter point: $10 is a small price to pay to get a weird demon baby to leave you alone
counter counter point: I get to keep my $10 dollars AND a weird demon baby
@@KohuGaly “Come one, come all! Step right up and see the weird demon baby! Only $20!”
@@KohuGaly 🤣🤣🤣🤣😂
😂😂😂
It's gonna come back for MORE
"I'm being mugged by a baby"
That's probably not the weirdest intro he has done
ORORORORO!!! I spend half of my day sleeping! ORORORO!!! Then I sometimes get up and tell you that I am a famous content creatorORORORORO!!! Please don't sleep while driving, dear maueo
@
Mauro Padrón No sir you're probably being Bugged by a May be, now sit back and enjoy debugging yourself.... hhhh :)
The best one: "I have 25... babies"
@@AxxLAfriku what
*Berd wants to know your location*
“Balloon argues with doll about money”
I AM REAL KEVIN
@@Vsauce2 THAT'S WHAT BALLOON KEVIN WOULD SAY
What if neither of them are real Kevin? O.o
@@wanderingshade8383 are you the real kevin?
@@wanderingshade8383 GET HIM!
My good ol' high school mates wanting to introduce me in a pyramid scheme
Love the profile pic ;)
Egypt studies I see?
@@magicjello4633 Just contributing to the cause
@@mduardo what cause
@@P0w_art A new Super Monkey Ball game
intelligence is knowing that, mathematically, it’s a good deal
wisdom is knowing to never trust strange babies you come across on the streets
"The wise seem dim-witted at first"
If you think that even mathematically it’s a good deal then it doesn’t show intelligence, it just tells you that probably you didn’t account for something in your calculations or assumed something incorrectly along the way... because that definitely isn’t a good deal.
I hate street babies.
@@G_Alamia as a purely mathematical experience this is always a good deal as far as the first version goes at some point the odds are in your favor. That's said, if a pascals mugging were to take place in real life I think most people would refuse and be rational in doing so. The expected return vs the relative value 10 dollars is the biggest question.
@@antanis As someone else already pointed out, as the expected payout increases, the likelihood that the doll will follow through with that amount correspondingly decreases. So the expected value still tends towards zero.
The only reason this scenario exists is by completely ignoring this fact when doing the initial math, but then countering the math with this fact afterward, pretending that our reasoning has outsmarted math. I know a lot of these scenarios are contrived to teach a math lesson, but this one has to be the most contrived.
Breaking News: Doll gave the entire world GDP to a balloon, stock market crashes.
Not the Stock Market!
Oh the humanity!
Stonks
Ballon Kevin!
If I have $10 in my wallet, I can live with giving up my $10, but giving up my wallet is not an option
Updating your ID at the DMV is inconvenient in its own right let alone everything else in a wallet
I would never give up my Ridge Wallet
@@Deado you actually had a ridge wallet?
@@200odd300 unfortunately not, wish I did tho
"Stealing 10 bucks from people and giving them 1000$ the next day" ...sounds like a new MrBeast video 😂
true
True if this offer was made by mr beast I would accept it
Minus the stealing part
More like Bernie Madoff video
(assuming the doll has to find illegal ways to make the payments)
Unfortunately, people *have* played out Pascal's Mugging in ponzi schemes.
The chaos makes me think more of Max Fosh actually
If I plot my 'gut' confidence that the promise of reimbursement is real, it rises after $10, but peaks at maybe $100, then goes back down. Someone who needs $10 might pay back $20 tomorrow; they might be genuinely desperate enough that they would pay back $100 tomorrow, but it seems that anyone who has access to a thousand, a million, a billion to pay back tomorrow, is decreasingly likely to be asking for $10 today.
But I concur with your final conclusion - regardless their relative probability, all of them are too unlikely for my appetite
Why hello there.
Wow I never thought I would see you here, I love your videos !
Hey, It's Atomic Shrimp! I love your vids.
If 100 rich Nigerian widows email me about each one sending me $1,000,000 tomorrow if I wire her $100 dollars today, what’s the probability that I break even?
I wouldn't pay more than 50$ (which I've actually done) and only if I really needed to get high/drunk 😹
* kevin in a street *
rober: hey, this is a mugging
* kevin pulls out a camera *
kevin: no, it's not a muggin and i'm trying to make a math video
You're a genius
Mark rober
Lol mark
@@puppyton2793 Plot Twist: It's actually Jake Roper (pretending to be Mark Rober) mugging Kevin for his PS5.
@@U014B I thought it was Jack, Jack the Roper
As the offered value increases, the likeliness of them paying out decreases, which could cancel this just on its own
But more importantly the money would have a diminishing return on impact on your life, weighed against the constant impact of the losing the $10. Scaling endlessly this caps out, so the expected return tends to zero (given any scaling low likelihood of payout.)
Further another issue arises. The possibility of a secret counter-offer.
At some point, a test of character with a payout for refusing the mugging is about as likely as a mugging with a payout for accepting.
Small chance * payout for accepting < small chance * payout for refusing + keeping $10
Biggest payout for refusing an actual mugger - getting shot/stabbed and no longer needing the 10$ 😸
In the same vein that very large sums have diminishing quality of life improvement so does a measly 10$ have insignificant immediate quality of life improvement. It's why I'm perfectly happy spending 1€ on a lottery ticket every week or so because the 52€ I would save in a year has absolutely no impact on my life whatsoever while winning the ever so unlikely 1m< will immediately have drastic impact on my life.
@@googolplexbyte Glad someone got that. It gets even crazier though if you posit an unknown number of secret offers of unknown rewards.
I am so disappointed that his "and as always" was accompanied by his throwing the bills at the camera rather than _smacking the doll off the table_ .
I didn’t know I needed that to happen till now, now I’m dissatisfied
Are you kidding? He'd be better off burning that 10 bucks than smashing that very expensive pristine vintage prop cabbage patch doll. I haven't looked it up but I'd wager it's worth WAY NORTH of 10 bucks, or even 100
"The baby knows the expected value calculation."
That's a pretty smart baby. ;P
Even more impressive is the fact that it's an inanimate object and not an actual baby
think the baby just knows their mark well
@@nicknevco215 think dababy
"What if the baby has a biological weapon?"
Kevin you kept your $10 about a year ago huh
Lmao
This is the best comment here hahaha
😂😂😂
> 5:33
Day 1: pays 10 dollars to doll
Day 2: receives 1 billion dollars
Day 3: reads newspaper "doll arrested for scamming 100 million people"
So exactly the lottery then
not exactly lottery, similar in ways., doll scams 1000 000 000, so it can proove, look it works for this one person, they got 1 billion. hence round 2 can keep going. in the example, no profit for doll, and rounds end after 1 round. further the doll garantees YOU a win . lottery garanteea SOMEONE a win. the doll the risk calc is if the doll will do, what is promissed. lottery is for something else, and to my knowledge, it does pay out 100% of the time, the promise to pay A winning apon conditions is kept 100%.
Day 4, your 1 billion dollars are confiscated and you land in jail.
Haheheha
The fool officially started a ponzi scheme
_kevin fills up a swimming pool with peanut butter and dives in_
Doll: HoW R U GoNnA GeT OUt noW _KEVEEEEEEEEN_
JACK
Follow up doll proposal: give me back the 1billion dollars to get you out!
He'll stay there, and eat that for food until it runs out, and then he'll get out
*JAAAAACK
POV. Vsauce Kevin wakes you up at night with his baby
Better than Rich Evan's laughs waking you up every night because the YT algorithm is broken and keeps playing the same videos you've already watched over and over and over again in your Up Next.
is the baby with him or does he use the baby to wake me up, it's important
"hey can I mug you for 100$ tomorrow?"
Bro that’s scary
Imagine the baby actually going through with its promise but the next day it gives you 1 billion dollars in Monopoly money...
It could be worth at least more than the 10 bucks
@@mauer1 Seriously, that's at minimum 2 million x $500 bills (assuming the standard edition of the game) and printing ain't free.
you might even get the return of investment if you recycle that paper properly
@@Havron Counter point: Monopoly here and now. 20 bills; take it or leave it.
are we just going to ignore that at 3:00 this man literally described squid game almost a year before it came out?
Omg same thought lol
In some parallel universes, Kevin is receiving $10bi from a creepy baby right now
Something I've noticed about expected utility is that the probability and repeatability are much more important than the actual values you get from expected utility. Because if you can't repeat this a billion times, and your chances are like one in a hundred million, you most likely won't get out with what expected utility tells you. Rather you get indebted to hell most of the time
If a doll comes to life and asks for ten dollars, you give it ten dollars. Never argue with haunted dolls.
Wow, a guest star of the famous Nigerian Prince himself!
Tell him he still owes me for the 1000 bucakaroos I gave him a couple years ago to access his back account.
He hasn't paid you back either?
genius
Wait, he owes you too?
"That's a 100% return on being mugged by me" is going to become a meme, isn't it?
Sadly not, but it should've been
I can tell. Still not.
For all the videos vsauce2 has done about risk, expected outcome, and interesting- yet-bizarre thought experiments I'm surprised he hasn't covered Roko's Basilisk.
“How to commit mass murder without getting caught 101”
Grown man talks to a doll for internet entertainment 2020 colorized
That's clearly a balloon arguing with a doll, smh
I'm so confused, the audio is horrifyingly out of sync, but no one's mentioning it, I feel like I'm losing my mind! Help!
WOW I thought it was me only. I looked at the comments and no one mentioned it so I thought it was just me so started looking at all my settings. Thank God for you. What's wrong with everyone else?!?!
Same Here! I was incredibly confused
Mine works fine
The beginning of this video perfectly explains when you should call in poker just based on the pot size. You have to consider your odds of winning, and whether the payout is worth it relative to your chip stack.
If I mugged a hundred people with the promise of 1% chance I’ll give them a $100 the next day. As long as the average amount in a wallet is above $1 I stand to profit.
But you wouldn’t be able to pay them back
Love Your Profile Pic
How Can I Find It ?
I thought this video was going to be about ponzi schemes at first.
@@kamdenmcleanmovies If the average is bigger than 1, 1×100 = 100
@@pedronunes3063 but you have 100 people to pay back, you’ll need 100 dollars for each person, therefore 100*100=10k.
I've learned more from V-Sauce than all my 10 years in school
Btw that's literally how most email scams work
And the lottery
@@SpikeTheDankMeme The lottery's probability is known. You can figure out the odds if you want to run the numbers. The lottery just puts the odds against you.
Unlike playing the lottery, the larger the payout, the smaller the chance you'll get it from a robber.
How is that unlike the lottery
I imagine Kevin standing next to a pool of peanut butter, scratching his head and thinking: now what?
Amazing channel! Bringing topics and concepts to us, nobody even knows exist or thinks about, but are part of our daily life!
This is bias because the doll thing says “tomorrow” and when tomorrow comes it will be today so you will never get the money
Fascinating are you suggesting that, just like our inability to fully grasp infinity, we also have a threshold in our ability to determine what the odds are. When the odds become so astronomically unlikely but never zero, we fail to comprehend it fully and revert to a perceived imaginary comprehensible odds and therefore believe it's possible.
I love how I refreshed my UA-cam page and this came up saying it was uploaded "4 seconds ago"
Even if there is a virtually 0% chance of making that 1B bucks, there is a close to 100% chance that the demon doll leaves me alone, and I will hope that it will no longer haunt me
Imagine having a baby politely ask for your wallet, or else.
"Ixcwoose me, siw, I'm wost and need hewp. Can u giv me ten dowwers or I kiw u?"
“… to change tens of thousands of lives.”
Your videos change hundreds of thousands of lives by sharing knowledge.
“Give me your wallet jack!”
“ my name’s Kevin not Jack”
“ quit screwing around Jack”
Idk why that made me laugh so much 😂
@@thattannerguy856 me too. Kinda stole that from the SNL skit of Will Ferrell playing Harry Carey on Weekend Update and calling Colin Quinn, Norm ,thinking it was still Norm MacDonald.
Kevin's setting us all up for when he muggs us all tomorrow with this promise
Or just setting us up for scammers
Doll: “Do the math 🧮, Kevin. Do...the...math!”
Me: 😂😂😂😂😩🤣🤣🤣🤣
Watching this post-Squid Games makes the whole thing just very much more interesting. :)
The doll is basically the classic doubling money scam in Old School RuneScape
The baby: *give me your $10*
Me who has 27 cents in my wallet: **nervous sweating**
When you're so early you read comments about people complaining about people posting comments about being early
Just because a prospect is expressible in words does not mean it is possible. The mugger returning $1 billion after being allowed to take a $10 Walet is just as unlikely as that mugger being able to summon Galactus to eat the Earth, or stabbing the victim with a sword made out of shadows.
When you're so early every single comment is from people who havent even watched the video and have nothing to do with it
lol
@@MrSpiky lol
I feel like it also depends on how much $10 means to you. Like for a rich person, $10 is nothing, so they'll happily give it because they're not really hurt by losing it. Someone struggling to feed themselves is far likely to give the money, regardless of the unlikely potential payoff or value calculation.
You keep saying that at a high enough payout it becomes mathematically optimal to accept the deal, but my intuition tells me this isn't true. It seems reasonable to me that the likelihood of the mugger making good on their promise is *inversely* proportional to the payout they're promising. It isn't a given that there is some extremely high promised payout that makes even a very low chance of receiving that payout worthwhile, as those two values could easily *diverge,* making the deal worse and worse as the promised payout increases.
That Cabbage Patch Kid has strong Caitlin from Ask A Mortician vibes and I love it.
Thanks for that child voice at 3.07 am. Thanks Kevin.
The nuance here is that as the payoff increases it becomes even less likely, so the point that the expected value will never be positive. Paying me back $10 tomorrow is unlikely, but paying me back $10B tomorrow is monumentally less likely.
It reminds me of the Shadoks series: one in a million chance to succeed? Let's try one million times!
“The Shadoks, an alien species seeking to invade Earth, have decided to build and launch a space rocket. The Shadoks' only problem is their sheer incompetence. Their rocket science is abysmal. Their chances of getting a rocket into space are less than one in a million. Still, the ever confident Shadoks decide to take that one in a million chance. One million failed launchings later, the Shadok engineers are elated:
The situation was quite satisfactory. The trial rocket launches continued to fail very well (...) For such was the first basic principle of Shadok logic only by continually trying things out does one eventually achieve one's goals. In other words, the more you fail, the most likely you are to succeed.”
(copy pasted from How Traditions Live and Die by Olivier Morin)
Guys I think we need to get Micheal to pay Kevin more. He keeps mentioning his wallet is only 10 dollars. This is a cry for help!
One issue is this is a bad example. The more money the doll offers the less likely it'll even happen at all. If a kid came up to you and ask for $10, and said they'll pay you back $10 and 1 cent, that's much more likely to happen than the same kid that offers to pay back a billion dollars.
ok, so all the VSAUCE is back with new EDUTAINMENT videos. yayayyy
Kevin you're diving into more than math right now, and I love it!!
10€ today, 1000€ tomorrow
Sounds like a lucky YOLO in stock trading
Buy Bitcoin
I turned a few k into a couple of million over 4 years it is possible
or scammer in runescape
Pardon my cluelessness but what is a 'YOLO' in stock trading?
@@Bluejet_007 you only live once, akin to a very risky binary outcome play...
"hi" 1 second later. *mouth says hi*
That doll’s got a point, you know
It's like people who play the lottery when the maximum payout is $1B but refuse to play it when it is only $10M. For some reason, a decision to waste a $1 on a lottery ticket changes when the probabilistic odds of winning remain the same. You are after all choosing a set of six numbers from the same population of numbers. Yet the increased payout for whatever reason factors into a person's decision when both $10M and $1B would probably have the same outcome in that they would likely be set for life either way compared to their current economic position.
The lottery is winnable. Sure, you'll probably lose, but you can calculate the odds of winning and the expected value. There would get to be a tipping point where it's a worthwhile investment, at least mathematically.
Video not finished opinion: Its just $10, give me my billion
Isn't this what the lottery is? Giving up a few bucks with the expected payback of some amount, not just hitting the highest jackpot payback.
I'm not sure if it's me or the system but the audio and the video were out of sync as for the thought experiment pick the doll up and throw it as far as you can while saying, "NO"!!
It's unsyced for me as well
@@stormlord1984 me too
Expected value calculations only apply when you do things a considerable number of times. The calculation you should do here to determine if it's a good deal isn't the expected value but the number of times you would need to get mugged by the doll for it to be likely that you would get paid off at least once. If you can expect to get mugged enough, then you can use expected value, but if not, you should assume that you would lose which is more likely.
The audio and video are desynced by like 5 seconds. I only have it on this video, and I already tried restarting my browser, clearing my cache, and everything. Is the video just like this or is something else going on?
i think its the video
@@ihsanollasalamziy628 yep and only chrome, tried with mobile and it is fine
expected value only works if you have unlimited trys, if you dont then using it is simply a mistake. The correct rule would be that the gamble is only worth it if you have as much money as it costs to play times the odds of winning.
me to my friends:
"hey guys, lend me $10 and I'll flip it for you by the weekend."
friends: "what? how? no thank you."
me: "okay, your loss."
-proceeds to exploit MMO RMT communities
remember when twitter got hacked and people were giving out money to runescape scammers
proceeds to engage in illegal RuneScape activity
As Kevin from The Office says, if anyone gives you 1:100,000 odds against almost anything, you take it.
Oh, they are watching you regardless...
...
Vsause 2 and 3 striking it!
Waiting for Michael's video as well.
Why is the audio so badly, badly out of sync, and why is no-one mentioning that in the comments?
bug on chrome for some reason, idk what is causing it
@@AxzoYT Had it on Firefox, myself, but modern Firefox does share a fair bit of code with Chrome at last check.
This is always scary bc you’d think he’ll has like a 1 in 100000000000 chance of existing but yet if it does it’s eternal pain and suffering 🤗.
The problem is with thinking you have any idea what this entity wants, or that it has no competing entities with competing agendas.
Maybe you'll get eternal pain and suffering if you "believe." (I don't understand the concept of forcing belief, hence the quote marks.)
aaargh why is the audio and video so out of sync?
same here
We went from the Twitter/Doubling money scam, to utilitarian belief... That's why I love this channel. Thinking outside the box and into a kaleidoscope
audio out of sync for me, other videos are fine but when i come back still out of sync, not sure if its just me or needs to be fixed!
same
@@bitjaks - and it didn't used to be either , I've watched this video before and it was working fine .
I wouldn't take the bet either because I could only "expect" to break even if these events kept happening frequently enough.
For Instance, if I know the probability of being mugged to be 1:100.000 (with the same, single jackpot) I would estimate the probability of encounters accumulated over my lifetime to be about the same order of magnitude as "once in a lifetime"
I can't possibly expect to break even in a hundred lifetimes, that's probably where the strange gut feeling of "sure loss" came from.
Oh, and keep up the frequency of your amazing videos 😉
The audio is like two seconds ahead of the video.... >.
I’ve been watching you guys since i was a kid! I love youuu 💖💫‼️
"Bloviating"
Was that a Ludwig reference?
Kevin apparently knows English 2
i mean it’s an english word...
I think Kevin, here, forgot to mention something extremely important in the EV world, gambling world, which is implied odds. Winning a billion dollans would not just make you a billionaire but would also give you the opportunity to make plenty more and probably build a generational wealth that would last for centuries, you could use that money to do build any auto sustainable non-profit, who, again could provide even more value not calculated here. The odds might be slighter then we think, but I think its worth thinking about
So this is the level of insanity that Kevin is at right now because of no nut November
It’s December tho
Hey, he is okay now
If a 4 year old baby knows what a deadly bioweapon that can kill millions is, odds are something is off and you should better believe him.
The baby is almost as scary as the math
The reason an individual wouldn't want to take the deal even with a positive expected value is the time till expected return if I have a game where the odds of winning is 1 in 100,000,000 and the payout is higher maybe like 1,000,000,000x but the catch is you can only play once per a day you obviously wouldn't want to take that cause odds are that you lose 36,500 times before you find a win and than you'll be dead and I wont have to worry about any winning anymore. So AKA the number of chances you have should effect the real expected value in a discrete payout experiment. This would hold up in the experiment shown as you couldn't expect to find the number of similar opportunities in the future required to actually expect a payout.
Fun fact: all the dislikes come from people who have been mugged by babies
This reminds me of an adage a relative told me: If you’re ever wondering how much scratch off tickets are worth, ask yourself why there’s often a trash bin full of them a few feet away…
Sure, those have a negative expected value, but the point stands; Even if the expected value were positive, it may take thousands of tickets to make that happen, and even then…expected value isn’t a guarantee.
i feel like im early cuz i see all the bots
How do we know it's a bot by seeing a comment? Is anything like that even there?
@@sravanthch2879 yep. Weird fonts, weird words weird stuff.
@@hot_dog_water2437 right
Thank you for uploading frequently... unlike some Vsauces...
Hello guys! This is not a mugging!
Sorry I'm broke 🤷🏾♂️
Vsauce: What would you do with 100 billion dollars?
Mr Beast: Cure world hunger.
I wouldn’t play a money game either
Spamton mugging Kevin: "IF YOU GIVE ME [10 Kromer] I'LL RETURN THE FAVOR WITH [0 Kromer] AND [Hyperlink Blocked]! I WON'T FORCE YOU, I CAN'T."
Kevin: "No."
Spamton got wider.
2:58 squid game
Question is more of morality than maths; to make small difference collectively adding to larger change.
>4
In Soviet Russia meteor doesn't hit people, people hit meteor
^0
"What are the odds that a billionaire is sitting around with a few other billionaires watching me as they play some kind of creepy social experiment?" Pretty high. As explained in the noted documentary film "Rat Race", they can do anything they'd like; they're eccentric!
ooooooooo yall stay safe also I'm really early lol
Sure thing man