Pascal's Wager's an interesting 'bet' on death itself, which is of course biased towards optimism and 'rational'. (Though suspect because there are a great deal of internally consistent and optimistic metaphysical propositions one could assume, which are 'rational' but mutually inconsistent.)
Perhaps if the 'betting unit' is considered the group rather than the individual, then the lengths over which the bets affect the 'life' of the agent is longer (i.e. I will die in about half a century, but my family of direct and indirect descendents will live much longer), and so the duration which must be exceeded in order for the optimistic default to become rational is longer.
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krja
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-28 01:11 am (UTC)Perhaps if the 'betting unit' is considered the group rather than the individual, then the lengths over which the bets affect the 'life' of the agent is longer (i.e. I will die in about half a century, but my family of direct and indirect descendents will live much longer), and so the duration which must be exceeded in order for the optimistic default to become rational is longer.
Does that make any sense?