AlephNeil comments on Dutch Books and Decision Theory: An Introduction to a Long Conversation - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (100)
If physics is deterministic then conditional on the state of the world at the time you make the bet, the probability of heads is either 0 or 1. The only disanalogy with your example is that you may not already have sufficient information to determine how the coin will land (which isn't even a disanalogy if we assume that the person doesn't know what the Collatz conjecture says). But suppose you did have that information - there would be vastly more of it than you could process in the time available, so it wouldn't affect your probability assignments. (Note: The case where the Collatz conjecture turns out to be true but unprovable is analogous to the case where the laws of physics are deterministic but 'uncomputable' in some sense.)
Anyway, the real reason why I want to resist your line of argument here is due to Chaitin's number "omega", the "halting probability". One can prove that the bits in the binary expansion of omega are algorithmically incompressible. More precisely: In order to deduce n bits' worth of information about omega you need at least n - k bits' worth of axioms, for some constant k. Hence, if you look sufficiently far along the binary expansion of omega, you find yourself looking at an infinite string of "random mathematical facts". One "ought" to treat these numbers as having probability 1/2 of being 1 and 1/2 of being 0 (if playing games against opponents who lack oracle powers).