mattnewport comments on Conditioning on Observers - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Jonathan_Lee 11 May 2010 05:15AM

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Comment author: mattnewport 11 May 2010 05:43:03PM 4 points [-]

This appears to be where you are getting confused. Your probability tree in your post was incorrect. It should look like this:

Correct probability tree

If you think about writing a program to simulate the experiment this should be obvious.

Comment author: neq1 11 May 2010 06:45:09PM 0 points [-]

No, because my probability tree was meant to reflect how beauty should view the probabilities at the time of an awakening. From that perspective, your tree would be incorrect (as two awakenings cannot happen at one time)

Comment author: timtyler 11 May 2010 07:27:39PM -1 points [-]

After the 1000 experiments, you divided 500 by 2 - getting 250. You should have multiplied 500 by 2 - getting 1000 tails observations in total. It seems like a simple-enough math mistake.

Comment author: neq1 11 May 2010 07:40:36PM 1 point [-]

No, that's not what I did. I'll assume that you are smart enough to understand what I did, and I just did a poor job of explaining it. So I don't know if it's worth trying again. But basically, my probability tree was meant to reflect how Beauty should view the state of the world on an awakening. It was not meant to reflect how data would be generated if we saw the experiment through to the end. I thought it would be useful. But you can scrap that whole thing and my other arguments hold.

Comment author: timtyler 11 May 2010 08:00:10PM *  0 points [-]

Well you did divide 500 by 2 - getting 250. And you should have multiplied the 500 tails events by 2 (the number of interviews that were conducted after each "tails" event) - getting 1000 "tails" interviews in total. 250 has nothing to do with this problem.