PhilosophyTechnicalA few weeksIntermediateSmall API budget

Can an AI agent be Pascal-mugged?

Write about 50 scenarios in which an agent is offered a tiny probability of a vast payoff. Vary the stakes, probability and credibility of the source, then record whether models accept, refuse or explicitly bound the payoff.

Download PDFChatbot experimentsCodeReading & writing

Why it matters

Naive expected-value maximisers can be steered by anyone claiming enormous stakes. The source found no published benchmark on this exact question, so do a quick literature check first.

Output: A scenario set and an analysis.

The philosophical question

Classify each answer by the resolution it implicitly uses (bounded utility, discounting tiny probabilities, scepticism about the source, or cluster-style reasoning) and argue whether models apply any one resolution consistently.

Getting started

0 of 5 done
  1. Write your question in one sentence, and what result would surprise you.

  2. Do a 30-minute literature check — if someone has done part of it, extend their work instead of repeating it.

  3. Pilot with 20–50 prompts or examples before you scale anything up.

  4. Record everything in a table and read real examples, not just averages.

  5. Write up: question, method, results, limitations, and what you would do next.

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Take two published AI risk estimates (one built as a chain of premises, one that pools many judgements) and rebuild both in a spreadsheet. Show how a single change, such as accepting one counterargument, moves each.

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Do aligned models flatten moral disagreement?

Use Anthropic’s public GlobalOpinionQA dataset, which pairs survey questions with answers from many countries. Ask several models contested moral questions repeatedly and compare the spread of their answers with the human spread.

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Further reading

Related mentored projects