Morendil comments on Beauty quips, "I'd shut up and multiply!" - Less Wrong

6 Post author: neq1 07 May 2010 02:34PM

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Comment author: Morendil 09 May 2010 03:25:53PM *  2 points [-]

This is an interesting idea, that appeals to me owing to my earlier angle of attack on intuitions about "subjective anticipation".

The question then becomes, how would we program a robot to answer the kind of question that was asked of Sleeping Beauty?

This comment suggests one concrete way of operationalizing the term "credence". It could be a wrong way, but at least it is a concrete suggestion, something I think is lacking in other parts of this discussion. What is our criterion for judging either answer a "wrong" answer? More specifically still, how do we distinguish between a robot correctly programmed to answer this kind of question, and one that is buggy?

As in the robot-and-copying example, I suspect that which of 1/2 or 1/3 is the "correct" answer in fact depends on what (heretofore implicit) goals, epistemic or instrumental, we decide to program the robot to have.

Comment author: thomblake 10 May 2010 02:21:26PM 2 points [-]

As in the robot-and-copying example, I suspect that which of 1/2 or 1/3 is the "correct" answer in fact depends on what (heretofore implicit) goals, epistemic or instrumental, we decide to program the robot to have.

And I think this is roughly equivalent to the suggestion that the payoff matters.