Word.ws English Dictionary

Pascal's mugging

Pascal's mugging proper noun: a thought experiment demonstrating a problem in expected utility maximization. A rational agent should choose actions whose outcomes, when weighed by their probability, have higher utility; but some very unlikely outcomes may have very great utilities, and these utilities can grow faster than the probability diminishes. Hence the agent should focus more on vastly improbable cases with implausibly high rewards; this leads first to counterintuitive choices, and then to incoherence as the utility of every choice becomes unbounded.

Proper noun

Pascal's mugging

  1. A thought experiment demonstrating a problem in expected utility maximization. A rational agent should choose actions whose outcomes, when weighed by their probability, have higher utility; but some very unlikely outcomes may have very great utilities, and these utilities can grow faster than the probability diminishes. Hence the agent should focus more on vastly improbable cases with implausibly high rewards; this leads first to counterintuitive choices, and then to incoherence as the utility of every choice becomes unbounded.

Origin of Pascal's mugging

Coined by Eliezer Yudkowsky, based on Pascal's wager.

Questions about Pascal's mugging

What does Pascal's mugging mean?
Pascal's mugging means a thought experiment demonstrating a problem in expected utility maximization. A rational agent should choose actions whose outcomes, when weighed by their probability, have higher utility; but some very unlikely outcomes may have very great utilities, and these utilities can grow faster than the probability diminishes. Hence the agent should focus more on vastly improbable cases with implausibly high rewards; this leads first to counterintuitive choices, and then to incoherence as the utility of every choice becomes unbounded.
What part of speech is Pascal's mugging?
Pascal's mugging is a proper noun.

Words near Pascal's mugging in the dictionary

  1. Pascal string
  2. Pascal strings
  3. Pascal's barrel
  4. Pascal's gamble
  5. Pascal's law
  6. Pascal's mugging
  7. Pascal's triangle
  8. Pascal's triangles
  9. Pascal's wager
  10. PascalCase
  11. Pascalian

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Pascal's mugging (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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