Roko comments on Beauty quips, "I'd shut up and multiply!" - Less Wrong
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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:
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.
If you don't need to condition on it, why is it in the story?
The question asked in the story is "Sleeping Beauty, what is p(heads | you are awake now)?"
Someone is going to complain that you can't ask about p(heads) when it's already either true or false. Well, you can. That's how we use probabilities. If you are a determinist, you believe that everything is already either true or false; yet determinists still use probabilities.
"On Sunday she is given a drug" is also in the story. Does it follow that it is imperative to explicitly condition on that as well?