Pascal's wager is generally agreed to be logically unsound, so it's somewhat insane that we've revived it in all these modern contexts. If you believe in it, at least be consistent and sacrifice a goat to Zeus every couple years.
Pascal's wager is generally agreed to be logically unsound, so it's somewhat insane that we've revived it in all these modern contexts. If you believe in it, at least be consistent and sacrifice a goat to Zeus every couple years.
I haven’t watched it back but from what I remember the main point of the video is that kind of situation happens when the probability involved is vanishingly small, and all the events you listed don’t have a vanishingly small probability, so they are not Pascal’s wager situations, just a normal rational safety concerns with particularly high consequences
So it seems a mischaracterization to present the essence of the wager as going out of your way to perform random and costly rites in the hope of lifting any ill omen.
The wager is only interesting on those rites where the expected-value is uncertain or unknowable.
It does, in this life and the next.
Sacrificing a goat, after all, does sound like a lot of work. But maybe I will wear a lucky hat to a baseball game?