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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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Even if you take Pascal's wager seriously, it is not actually very useful. There are multiple religions that each claim their god created the world, with most of them being mutually exclusive. Thus Pascal's wager works about as well as an argument for believing in the Christian God as it does for believing in Allah.

Regarding the atomic bomb, they did the math which showed that a chain reaction was impossible prior to the test. We have no such proof against the dangers of AI. The equivalent would be a paper that shows the theoretical limits of how intelligent LLM's can get, and thus prove that the line will stop going up before we reach the point of AGI.

Since there are more than one interpretations of p(doom), and they are mutually exclusive, pascal's wager is not a good argument for believing one of them over the other.

Why then do people invoke some principle of precaution when it comes to AI and not God? Both are claimed to be possible or extant based on unfalsifiable metaphysical assumptions.

And before you make one, remember that claims the metaphysics can be arrived at through intuitions about extant objects exist for both. But they all require an article of faith to arrive at the extraordinary conclusion.