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The reason I brought up PW is that it's not dissimilar to the conundrum you posed ( 1 if you win, -infinity if you lose). Of course, the immediacy/believability of the reward and threat are important considerations - I might believe that you'd be willing and capable of inflicting a horrible death on me :), but I'd be a little more skeptical about a supposed afterlife. Interesting how the payoff matrix for PW depends on one's intrinsic propensity toward belief - a believer like Pascal would assign infinity and -infinity to the payoffs for eternal bliss and damnation respectively, but a disbeliever like Dawkins would assign those same values to the benefits of a mortal life being lived well, and one wasted, respectively. PW is a difficult problem chiefly because it is a belief issue (valuations placed in the matrix depend on your beliefs anyway) masquerading as a logical (game-theoretic) problem.
But I'm getting way OT here - Dilbert's joke is far more tangible, I guess. :)
Thanks for your comment, wyntrewolfe. Apropos to this: "It's as if I were to flip a coin: heads, you get the coin, and tails, you die a horrible death. Not worth it.", what are your thoughts on Pascal's Wager? :)
... the main joke requires absolutely no math to figure out. There is a chance of a small success, and a chance of utter ruin. Intelligent people would not take those odds. It's as if I were to flip a coin: heads, you get the coin, and tails, you die a horrible death. Not worth it.
The secondary joke (i.e. "I wish I had ten projects like this one") requires a bit of background in probability to understand, but you don't have to actually do the math for it to be funny.
