en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging
1 correction found
The term "Pascal's mugging" to refer to this problem was originally coined by Eliezer Yudkowsky in the LessWrong forum.
Yudkowsky introduced “Pascal’s mugging” on the Overcoming Bias blog, not in the LessWrong forum. LessWrong was created later, in 2009, and later imported earlier posts.
Full reasoning
This misstates where the term was first introduced.
Nick Bostrom's 2009 paper explicitly says: “Eliezer Yudkowsky named the problem ‘Pascal’s mugging’ in a post on the Overcoming Bias blog”. The Overcoming Bias 2007 archive also lists “Pascal’s Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities” among posts from that year. Separately, LessWrong’s own history page says the LessWrong community blog was created in 2009, after Yudkowsky had been writing on Overcoming Bias since 2006.
So the problem with the sentence is not that Yudkowsky coined the term — he did — but that it says he originally coined it in the LessWrong forum. The original coinage was on Overcoming Bias, and the post was only later mirrored/imported into LessWrong.
3 sources
- Pascal's Mugging — Nick Bostrom
Footnote 1: “Eliezer Yudkowsky named the problem ‘Pascal’s mugging’ in a post on the Overcoming Bias blog (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/10/pascals-mugging.html).”
- Sitemap - 2007 - Overcoming Bias
The 2007 Overcoming Bias archive includes the post title “Pascal’s Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities.”
- A Brief History of LessWrong - LessWrong
“In 2006, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Robin Hanson, and others began writing on Overcoming Bias... In 2009... Eliezer moved to a new community blog, LessWrong.”