wnoise comments on Avoiding doomsday: a "proof" of the self-indication assumption - Less Wrong

18 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 23 September 2009 02:54PM

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Comment author: Mallah 07 April 2010 01:35:55PM -2 points [-]

Cupholder:

That is an excellent illustration ... of the many-worlds (or many-trials) case. Frequentist counting works fine for repeated situations.

The one-shot case requires Bayesian thinking, not frequentist. The answer I gave is the correct one, because observers do not gain any information about whether the coin was heads or tails. The number of observers that see each result is not the same, but the only observers that actually see any result afterwards are the ones in either heads-world or tails-world; you can't count them all as if they all exist.

It would probably be easier for you to understand an equivalent situation: instead of a coin flip, we will use the 1 millionth digit of pi in binary notation. There is only one actual answer, but assume we don't have the math skills and resources to calculate it, so we use Bayesian subjective probability.

Comment author: wnoise 07 April 2010 09:36:31PM *  0 points [-]

FWIW, it's not that hard to calculate binary digits of pi:

http://oldweb.cecm.sfu.ca/projects/pihex/index.html

The Quadrillionth Bit of Pi is '0'! The Forty Trillionth Bit of Pi is '0'! The Five Trillionth Bit of Pi is '0'!

I think I'll go calculate the millionth, and get back to you.

EDIT: also turns out to be 0.