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<blockquote data-quote="Flipx99" data-source="post: 5993506" data-attributes="member: 562352">I don&#039;t understand this sentence.Best believe I struggle with this as it is, as you say, non-sensical. What I am essentially trying to do is make Pascal&#039;s Wager work. I know it doesn&#039;t, you know it doesn&#039;t. I am doing a very piss-poor job of navigating gray areas to make it somewhat workable. The only way I can do this with any type of effectiveness is from the perspective of the speculator...but even then, as you mentioned, there are many inherent flaws.The agument makes sense to me on an emotional (and I use that term loosely), but not on a quantitative level. I am not able to perform any of the calculations to even venture to develop a forecasting model. Essentially, it&#039;s a guess.There is no way to know the optimal outcomeThere is no way to know the number of possible outcomesThere is no way to measure the distance between optimal and sub-optimal outcomes. (such as, is there is a 2nd place? Is that acceptable?etc.There has to be a way to prove that believing in something has a higher payoff than believing in nothing. However, I am uncertain as to if my belief that &quot;believing in something&quot; actually has a real payoff is based on social pressures/propaganda/etc or elsewhere. If I can determine why I believe the first step, &quot;why believing in something has a payoff&quot;, I think the rest will fall into place.I hope this clarifies my position some.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Flipx99, post: 5993506, member: 562352"] I don't understand this sentence. Best believe I struggle with this as it is, as you say, non-sensical. What I am essentially trying to do is make Pascal's Wager work. I know it doesn't, you know it doesn't. I am doing a very piss-poor job of navigating gray areas to make it somewhat workable. The only way I can do this with any type of effectiveness is from the perspective of the speculator...but even then, as you mentioned, there are many inherent flaws. The agument makes sense to me on an emotional (and I use that term loosely), but not on a quantitative level. I am not able to perform any of the calculations to even venture to develop a forecasting model. Essentially, it's a guess. There is no way to know the optimal outcome There is no way to know the number of possible outcomes There is no way to measure the distance between optimal and sub-optimal outcomes. (such as, is there is a 2nd place? Is that acceptable? etc. There has to be a way to prove that believing in something has a higher payoff than believing in nothing. However, I am uncertain as to if my belief that "believing in something" actually has a real payoff is based on social pressures/propaganda/etc or elsewhere. If I can determine why I believe the first step, "why believing in something has a payoff", I think the rest will fall into place. I hope this clarifies my position some. [/QUOTE]

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