ESRogs comments on Take heed, for it is a trap - Less Wrong
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Let n be an integer. Knowing nothing else about n, would you assign 50% probability to n being odd? To n being positive? To n being greater than 3? You see how fast you get into trouble.
You need a prior distribution on n. Without a prior, these probabilities are not 50%. They are undefined.
The particular mathematical problem is that you can't define a uniform distribution over an unbounded domain. This doesn't apply to the biased coin: in that case, you know the bias is somewhere between 0 and 1, and for every distribution that favors heads, there's one that favors tails, so you can actually perform the integration.
Finally, on an empirical level, it seems like there are more false n-bit statements than true n-bit statements. Like, if you took the first N Godel numbers, I'd expect more falsehoods than truths. Similarly for statements like "Obama is the 44th president": so many ways to go wrong, just a few ways to go right.
Edit: that last paragraph isn't right. For every true proposition, there's a false one of equal complexity.
I read the rest of this discussion but did not understand the conclusion. Do you now think that the first N Godel numbers would be expected to have the same number of truths as falsehoods?
It turns out not to matter. Consider a formalism G', identical to Godel numbering, but that reverses the sign, such that G(N) is true iff G'(N) is false. In the first N numbers in G+G', there are an equal number of truths and falsehoods.
For every formalism that makes it easy to encode true statements, there's an isomorphic one that does the same for false statements, and vice versa. This is why the set of statements of a given complexity can never be unbalanced.
Gotcha, thanks.