Comment on Avoiding doomsday: a "proof" of the self-indication assumption

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:46:11 GMT

By "a coin is fair", do you mean that if we considered all the possible environments in which the coin could be flipped (or some subset we care about), and all the ways the coin could be flipped, then in half the combinations the result will be heads, and in the other half the result will be tails?

Why should that matter? In the actual coin flip whose result we care about, the whole system is not "fair", there is one result that it definitely produces, and our probabilities just represent our uncertainty about which one.

What if I tell you the coin is not fair, but I don't have any clue which side it favors? Your probability for the result of heads is still .5, and we still reach all the same conclusions.

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