Misha comments on St. Petersburg Mugging Implies You Have Bounded Utility - Less Wrong

10 Post author: TimFreeman 07 June 2011 03:06PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (163)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 June 2011 04:18:16PM 0 points [-]

I introduced the concept of CoinSpace to make it clear that all the coinflips are independent of each other: if I were actually flipping a single coin I would assign it a nonzero (though very small) probability that it never lands "tails". Possibly I should have just said the independence assumption.

And yes, I agree that if we postulate a finite time condition, then P(X) = 0 means one can't ever update on X. However, in the context of this post, we don't have a finite time condition: God-TimFreeman explicitly needs to stop time in order to be able to flip the coin as many times as necessary. Once we have that, then we need to be able to assign probabilities of 0 to events that almost never happen.