Comment on Beauty quips, "I'd shut up and multiply!"

Sat, 08 May 2010 05:37:04 GMT

The problem posed is, p(heads | Sleeping Beauty is awake). There is no payoff involved. Introducing a payoff only confuses matters. For instance, Roko wrote:

But if we specify that the money will be put into an account (and she will only be paid one winning) that she can spend after the experiment is over, which is next week, then she will find that 1/2 is the "right" answer.

This is true; but that would be the answer to "What is the probability that the coin was heads, given that Sleeping Beauty was woken up at least once after being put to sleep?" That isn't the problem posed. If that were the problem posed, we could eliminate her forgetfulness from the problem statement.

If you agree that the forgetfulness is necessary to the story, then 1/2 is the wrong answer, and 1/3 is the right answer. If you don't agree it's necessary, then its presence suggests that the speaker intended a different semantics than you're using to interpret it.

ADDED: This is depressing. Here we have a collection of people who have studied probability problems and anthropic reasoning and all the relevant issues for years. And we have a question that is, on the scale of questions in the project of preparing for AGI, a small, simple one. It isn't a tricky semantic or philosophical issue; it actually has an answer. And the LW community is doing worse than random at it.

In fact, this isn't the first time. My brief survey of recent posts indicates that the LessWrong community's track record when tackling controversial problems that actually have an answer is random at best.

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