Pushing anti-anthropic intuitions

A stranger comes up to you and offers to play the following game with you: “I will roll a pair of dice. If they land snake eyes (i.e. they both land 1), you give me one dollar. Otherwise, if they land anything else, I give you a dollar.”

Do you play this game?

Here’s an intuitive response: Yes, of course you should! You have a 35/36 chance of gaining $1, and only a 1/36 chance of losing $1. You’d have to be quite risk averse to refuse those odds.

What if the stranger tells you that they are giving this same bet to many other people? Should that change your calculation?

Intuitively: No, of course not! It doesn’t matter what else the stranger is doing with other people.

What if they tell you that they’ve given this offer to people in the past, and might give the offer to others in the future? Should that change anything?

Once again, it seems intuitively not to matter. The offers given to others simply have nothing to do with you. What matters are your possible outcomes and the probabilities of each of these outcomes. And what other people are doing has nothing to do with either of these.

… Right?

Now imagine that the stranger is playing the game in the following way: First they find one person and offer to play the game with them. If the dice land snake eyes, then they collect a dollar and stop playing the game. Otherwise, they find ten new people and offer to play the game with them. Same as before: snake eyes, the stranger collects $1 from each and stops playing, otherwise he moves on to 100 new people. Et cetera forever.

We now ask the question: How does the average person given the offer do if they take the offer? Well, no matter how many rounds of offers the stranger gives, at least 90% of people end up in his last round. That means that at least 90% of people end up giving over $1 and at most 10% gain $1. This is clearly net negative for those that hand over money!

Think about it this way: Imagine a population of individuals who all take the offer, and compare them to a population that all reject the offer. Which population does better on average?

For the population who takes the offer, the average person loses money. An upper bound on how much they lose is 10% ($1) + 90% (-$1) = -$.80. For the population that reject the offer, nobody gains money or loses It either: the average case is exactly $0. $0 is better than -$.80, so the strategy of rejecting the offer is better, on average!

This thought experiment is very closely related to the dice killer thought experiment. I think of it as a variant that pushes our anti-anthropic-reasoning intuitions. It just seems really wrong to me that if somebody comes up to you and offers you this deal that has a 35/36 chance of paying out you should reject it. The details of who else is being offered the deal seem totally irrelevant.

But of course, all of the previous arguments I’ve made for anthropic reasoning apply here as well. And it is just true that the average person that rejects the offer does better than the average person that accepts it. Perhaps this is just another bullet that we have to bite in our attempt to formalize rationality!