Love's Wager: Any Finite Action Is Rational When the Stakes Are Infinite

Abstract

Website: https://manual.warondisease.org/knowledge/proof/loves-wager.html Abstract: There's a non-zero possibility that hell exists, and that you and everyone you love is going to die and burn in it for eternity. As it is very hot in hell, this would be unfortunate. There's also a non-zero possibility that biotechnology lets you feel very good for an indefinitely long period of time. Expected value is the chance of a thing multiplied by the size of it, and if you multiply infinity by any likelihood at all, even 0.0000001%, it's still infinity. So the expected value of doing nothing is infinity bad, and the expected value of acting is infinitely good, even if there's an extremely low probability that any of this is true. The cost of acting is finite: roughly one share of a company that makes missiles. This paper argues that when one outcome is infinitely terrible and the other is infinitely good, any finite action that shifts the odds from the first toward the second is rational, and that the cheapest such action available is redirecting the resources your governments waste being really good at killing the taxpayers who pay for them. (They currently spend 604 (95% CI: 453-894) times more on the military than on the clinical trials that would cure the diseases doing the killing.) It's Pascal's wager with the broken parts replaced: one hypothesis instead of a thousand gods, real evidence instead of none, an action that actually changes the outcome, and a stake of one share instead of your eternal soul. Summary: A reconstruction of Pascal's Wager with its defects removed. Two propositions cannot be disproven: that a conscious being may suffer without end, and that it may flourish without end. Both carry nonzero probability and infinite magnitude, so any finite action that shifts probability from the first toward the second has unbounded expected value. Unlike Pascal's, the wagered action is empirical, not theological: funding the clinical trials that extend healthy lifespan and modify conscious experience.