always a good time to mention that "pascal's" wager was supposedly found in a journal after he died and i believe it to be a complete hoax
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@hipsterelectron I looked that up today for a blog post 'cause I thought that was the case but couldn't find a source so I decided to just remove the metaphor in its entirety 🤷♀️ I hate the 2026 Internet
@vtrlx i found the bit on wikipedia mentioning the CRITICAL bit of info that it was not something pascal ever said himself to itself be inadequately sourced. i wanna know who could have stood to gain from this!
@hipsterelectron It's really strange! I'm not sure if anyone would really have anything to gain from it? Perhaps it's one of the machine devil's hallucinations, or perhaps it's someone who abhors the idea that Pascal would make such a Wager. Either way I'm left unable to trust anything I knew ever.
@vtrlx i personally abhor the idea that pascal would make such a wager and i believe it to be someone affiliated with some form of christianity who sought to take pascal's name and use it to buttress the claim that mathematics can prove the inherent righteousness of specifically their one god--yet failing to note that once an infinity is introduced, any absurdity can be proven, including the religion of the devil, or pagans, or even perhaps the exact opposite of religion, for if it were false, consequently one could surmise that any time at all spent in prayer is a second wasted and any tithe would be taxation without representation
@vtrlx pascal's wager is often invoked in advocacy for the "rationalist" (fascist) form of "utilitarianism" in which one sets the weighting for the value of life for people they don't care about to zero and subsequently claims that math proves hitler was right "if you think about it". this is why we call it "rationalization"
@vtrlx pascal's wager is a classic attempt to wield math [which is prized for its supposed truth because it admits no master, and defines itself by a system of universal agreement (deeply anarchic, in a very literal sense)] for its rhetorical weight in order to justify an illogical conclusion. we do actually have a framework in mathematics to represent things which are provably unprovable (or rather not disprovable), such as the continuum hypothesis (which notably deals with the cardinality of infinity: exactly the thing which pascal's wager manipulates to its benefit!)
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