Philosophical thought experiment: “A mugger, who forgot his weapon, proposes a deal to Pascal: ‘you give me your wallet, and I will give you N times the money, where N is large enough to compensate for the low probability of me honoring the deal’”
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In philosophy, Pascal's mugging is a thought experiment demonstrating a problem in expected utility maximization. A rational agent should choose actions whose outcomes, when weighted by their probability, have higher utility. But some very unlikely outcomes may have very great utilities, and these utilities can grow faster than the probability diminishes. Hence the agent should focus more on vastly improbable cases with implausibly high rewards; this leads first to counter-intuitive choices, and then to incoherence as the utility of every choice becomes unbounded.