xkcd @lemmy.world schnurrito @discuss.tchncs.de 1 wk. ago

xkcd #2947: Pascal's Wager Triangle

Alt text:

In contrast to Pascal's Wager Triangle, Pascal's Triangle Wager argues that maybe God wants you to draw a triangle of numbers where each one is the sum of the two numbers above it, so you probably should, just in case.

43 comments

Hinduism with 330 million gods somewhere deep down that tree.
- Since I read that number for the first time last month, I’ve been wondering which seems wilder to a Hindu: monotheists or atheists?
  
  I think some Hindus would say they're monotheists because all gods are just different aspects of Brahman. Don't quote me on this though.
  
  Monotheists 100%
Religion is a whispering game between generations. The message is heavily distorted by bow.
- The message is heavily distorted by bow.
  
  I see what you did there.
  
  Hey everyone, the message heavily distorted my bow!
  
  Ha, that was unintentional. I'll leave it as a proof of concept.
  
  Hey everything, the massage is highly defined by now.
- Isaac Asimov's Bible guide convinced me that abrahamic religions are mostly made out from stuff either from Mesopotamia (Sabbath, Eden, the floods) or myths coming from later cults (e.g. Greece).
  
  That. Book. Is. Fire.
- And the original message was dreamed up by dudes on shrooms.
  
  I don't know about the shrooms, my reading of the old testament made me think it started with some old guy trying to stop his nomadic desert tribe dying of anything too stupid by telling camp fire stories with some sort of message. The whole 'god will make the ground open up to swallow you and your family if you screw up' is a desperate attempt to scare them into not doing stupid things like slaughtering too many of their livestock at once, or eating shellfish whilst wandering around in a desert. The stories get retold, changed and embellished over generations before being written down, and you end up with the weird mess of basic survival tips, animal husbandry, heroic stories and mystic fluff that is the OT.
  
  The new testament is just the story of a fairly chill guy, with a slight messianic complex, wandering around with his mates and suggesting people be nice to each other, put through a similar transformation.
  
  The true part.
- Religion is intentionally designed that way. So it can be altered to better control the next generation...
- This presumes some type of "pure" original religion — which indeed some people believe — as opposed to an evolving understanding that is relevant in each generation.
  
  Evolving evolution in a biblical context? My ass.
I’m not sure I get what this is saying.
- Pascal was a famous thinker of their time, particularly in mathematics.
  
  Two of the ideas they're remembered for are Pascals Triangle and Pascals Wager.
  
  Their triangle is a helpful tool for combinations of things. Their wager is a (kinda bad in my opinion) argument for why you should believe in the Christian God.
  
  The xkcd comic is a combination of both ideas
  
  Ahh, so I did actually understand it... I thought for sure I was missing something since they are usually way more clever than this.
- Blaise Pascal is famous for 2 things:
  
  Pascal's triangle. This describes how to expand expresions of the form (a+b)^n as well as to compute how many ways there are to pick k objects out of a set of n (ignoring order.
  
  This triangle is computed by starting with 1 at the tip, then having each element be the some of its 2 parents (except the diagonal edges with only one parent, which remains as 1)
  
  Pascal's wager. This is a theological argument for a belief in god that goes "if you believe and god doesn't exist, nothing happens. If you don't believe and he does exist, you suffer for eternity. The logical choice is therefore to believe"
  
  The natural conclusion is therefore to believe in all gods. If procelatizing happens in just the right way, and no one realizes people are talking about the same god, you end up with a triangle of polytheists, where the number of gods they believe in is given by Pascal's triangle.
  
  Edit: gid -> god
  
  All hail Gid!
  
  Thanks! I wasn’t familiar with 1.
I always took pascals wager as just being about some nebulous creator type of thing with no real specifics because the argument can't really handle specifics.
- It was specifically about the Christian God because all others were "obviously" incorrect. It's terrible logic because it discounts:
  
  God somehow doesn't know you're believing in him "just in case" rather than because of actual faith.
  
  The wager implies that you should be an adherent of the religion that gets you the most stuff in the afterlife.
  
  ooh I like point 2. i have a new question now for thiests. well ya know allahs offering me a harem of 72 comely virgins. whats your offer?
  
  the religion that gets you the most stuff in the afterlife.
  
  I think it would be rather the opposite, should be the one that promises the worst fate in the afterlife to non-believers
Brilliant! This is one of those things that when you see it, it seems so obvious that you wonder how nobody thought of it until now. But it takes someone like Randall to pluck it out of the space of unexplored ideas and present it perfectly.
Kali giggles
I don’t get how this relates to Pascal’s wager.

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