EV
Explanation
The Joke
This is a lengthy comic featuring what appears to be a bearded presenter (possibly meant to evoke a religious or prophetic figure) speaking to an audience of colorful alien-like creatures. The presenter is explaining expected value (EV) reasoning to the aliens.
The presenter walks through the concept of expected value -- how rational decision-making involves multiplying the probability of outcomes by their value and choosing the option with the highest expected value. He then pushes this logic to increasingly extreme conclusions. He argues that since there are hypothetical scenarios with astronomically large payoffs (even if extremely unlikely), rational expected value calculations would demand that we pursue those scenarios. The aliens in the audience grow increasingly uncomfortable as the presenter's reasoning leads to absurd or disturbing conclusions about what "rational" behavior demands.
The comic culminates with the aliens realizing that strict expected value reasoning, taken to its logical extreme, can justify almost anything if the hypothetical payoff is large enough, regardless of how improbable it is.
The Humor
The comic satirizes a well-known problem in decision theory: that naive expected value calculations break down when dealing with extreme probabilities and extreme payoffs. This is related to Pascal's Mugging -- the idea that if someone threatens you with an astronomically large harm (or promises an astronomically large reward), expected value reasoning says you should take them seriously no matter how unlikely their claim, because any finite probability multiplied by a sufficiently large number produces a large expected value.
Weiner's comedic technique is to have an enthusiastic lecturer walk a captive audience through this logic step by step, with the aliens serving as stand-ins for the reader growing increasingly alarmed. The visual absurdity of the colorful alien audience adds to the comedy.
References
Expected value (EV) is a fundamental concept in probability theory and decision theory, calculated as the sum of each possible outcome multiplied by its probability. The comic references problems with EV maximization including Pascal's Mugging (coined by Eliezer Yudkowsky), the St. Petersburg Paradox, and more broadly the debates within effective altruism and rationalist communities about whether strict EV reasoning leads to absurd conclusions. These debates were particularly active in the rationalist blogosphere around the time this comic was published.