= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
FAWS comments on Counterfactual Calculation and Observational Knowledge - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (183)
I'm not sure what's supposed to be tricky about this. It's trading off a 99% chance of doing better in 1% of all worlds against a 1% chance of doing worse in 99% of all worlds (if I am in a world where the calculator malfunctioned). Being risk averse I prefer being wrong in some small fraction of the worlds to an equally small chance of being wrong in all of them so I'd want Omega to write "odd" (or even better leave it up to the counterfactual me which should have the same effect but feels better).
(Apologies for a long string of mutually-contradictory replies I made to this and then deleted. Apparently I'm not in the best shape now, and the parent comment pattern-matches to elements of the correct solution, while still not making sense on further examination. One point that's clearly wrong is that risk-attitude matters for which solution is correct, whatever the other elements of this analysis mean.)
I don't see how you could possibly know that without knowing where the error in my reasoning is unless you already know with high confidence that in the correct solution the options are either nowhere close to being balanced or identical in every way anyone with consistent preferences could possibly care about. That would imply that you already know the correct solution and are just testing us. Why don't you simply post it here (at least rot13ed)? Wouldn't that greatly facilitate determining whether other solutions are due to misunderstandings/underspecifications of the problem statement or errors in reasoning?
That's the case. Updateless analysis is pretty straightforward, see shokwave's comment. Solving the thought experiment is not the question posed by the post, just an exercise.
(Although seeing the difficulty many readers had with interpreting the intended setup of the experiment, including a solution might have prevented such misunderstanding. Anyway, I think the description of the thought experiment is sufficiently debugged now, thanks to feedback in the comments.)
This raised by confidence that I'm right and both of you are wrong (I had updated based on your previous comment to 0.3 confidence I'm right, now I'm back to 0.8). Skokwave's analysis would be correct if Q was different in the counterfactual world. I'm going to reply there in more detail.