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It's free and available to everyone online. Check them out at give well.org. Welcome to rationally speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galef, and with me is today's guest, Amanda Askell.

Amanda is in her final year of her philosophy PhD at NYU, where her research focuses on all the ways in which incorporating infinities into our decision theory and our moral theory causes problems.

Amanda, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

So I've been meaning to invite you on the show for a while now, but the immediate impetus

was in a recent episode with Will McCaskill.

We were talking about normative uncertainty, among other things, and we ventured briefly into

the territory of Pascal's Wager, which very briefly is the philosophical argument put forth by Blaise Pascal

in which he said, people should really try to believe in God because if you're wrong and there is

no God, then oh well, that's fine. But if there is a God, then believing in him is going to be

much better for you than not believing in him. And so the sort of

expected utility of belief is much higher. And this is one of those arguments that I find there's

this non-monitonic relationship between how much philosophical exposure people have and how seriously

they take that argument in that a lot of people without a ton of education

are like, yeah, that makes sense. You should believe because higher payoff. And then a lot of people

who are like well educated are very dismissive of Pascal's wager and they're like, oh, that's ridiculous

and they have one or two objections to it. And then philosophers are like, well, actually it's

harder to dismiss than you might think, which is kind of an inch. I like, I like things with that shape of like people's belief in them.

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