Jack comments on Beauty quips, "I'd shut up and multiply!" - Less Wrong
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I'm coming around to the 1/2 point of view, from an initial intuition that 1/3 made most sense, but that it mostly depended on what you took "credence" to mean.
My main new insight is that the description of the set-up deliberately introduces confusion, it makes it seem as if there are two very different situations of "background knowledge", X being "a coin flip" and X' being "a coin flip plus drugs and amnesia". So that P(heads|X) may not equal P(heads|X').
This comment makes the strongest case I've seen that the difference is one that makes no difference. Yes, the setup description strongly steers us in the direction of taking "credence" to refer to the number of times my guess about the event is right. If Beauty got a candy bar each time she guessed right she'd want to guess tails. But on reflection what seems to matter in terms of being well-calibrated on the original question is how many distinct events I'm right about.
Take away the drug and amnesia, and suppose instead that Beauty is just absent-minded. On Tuesday when you ask her, she says: "Oh crap, you asked me that yesterday, and I said 1/2. But I totally forget if you were going to ask me twice on tails or on heads. You'd think with all they wrote about this setup I'd remember it. I've no idea really, I'll have to go with 1/2 again. Should be 1 for one or the other, but what can I say, I just forget."
I'm less than impressed with the signal-to-noise ratio in the recent discussion, in particular the back-and-forth between neq1 and timtyler. As a general observation backed by experience in other fora, the more people are responding in real time to a controversial topic, the less likely they are to be contributing useful insights.
I'm not ruling out changing my mind again. :)
I've been thinking 1/2 as well (though I'm also definitely in the "problem is underdefined" camp).
Here is how describe the appropriate payoff scheme. Prior to the experiment (but after learning the details) Beauty makes a wager with the Prince. If the coin comes up heads the Prince will pay Beauty $10. If it comes up tails Beauty will pay $10. Even odds. This wager represents Beauty's prior belief that the coin is fair and head/tails have equal probability: her credence that heads will or did come up. At any point before Beauty learns what day of the week it is she is free alter the bet such that she takes tails but must pay $10 more dollars to do so (making the odds 2:1).
Beauty should at no point (before learning what day of the week it is) alter the wager. Which means when she is asked what her credence is that the coin came up heads she should continue to say 1/2.
This seems at least as good an payoff interpretation as a new bet every time Beauty is asked about her credence.
You don't measure an agent's subjective probability like that, though - not least because in many cases it would be bad experimental methodology. Bets made which are intended to represent the subject's probability at a particular moment should pay out - and not be totally ignored. Otherwise there may not be any motivation for the subject making the bet to give an answer that represents what they really think. If the subject knows that they won't get paid on a particular bet, that can easily defeat the purpose of offering them a bet in the first place.
This doesn't make any sense to me. Or at least the sense it does make doesn't sound like sufficient reason to reject the interpretation.