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Jack 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.
I define subjective probability in terms of what wagers I would be willing to make. I think a good rule of thumb is that if you can't figure out how to turn the problem into a wager you don't know what you're asking. And, in fact, when we introduce payoffs to this problem it becomes extremely clear why we get two answers. The debate then becomes a definition debate over what wager we mean by the sentence "what credence should the patient assign..."
As I just explained, the fact that the original author of the story wrote amnesia into it tells you which definition the author of the story was using.
And that's a good argument you've got there, but I don't think that is totally obvious on the first read of the problem. It's a weird feature of a probability problem for the relevant wager to be offered once under some circumstances and twice under others. So people get confused. It is a little tricky. But, far from confusing things, that entire issue can be avoided if we specify exactly how the payoff works when we state the problem! So I don't know why you're freaking out about Less Wrong's ability to answer these problems when it seems pretty clear that people interpret the question differently, not that they can't think through the issues.
(Not my downvote, btw)