Brilliand comments on No Anthropic Evidence - Less Wrong

9 Post author: Vladimir_Nesov 23 September 2012 10:33AM

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Comment author: Brilliand 05 February 2016 04:08:01AM *  0 points [-]

I'm not getting the same result... let's see if I have this right.

If you quit if the first coin is heads: 50%*75% death rate from quitting on heads, 50%*50% death rate from tails

If you never quit: 50% death rate from eventually getting tails (minus epsilon from branches where you never get tails)

These deathrates are fixed rather than a distribution, so switching to a logarithm isn't going to change which of them is larger.

I don't think the formula you link to is appropriate for this problem... it's dominated by the log(2^-n) factor, which fails to account for 50% of your possible branches being immune to death by tails. Similarly, your term for quitting damage fails to account for some of your branches already being dead when you quit. I propose this formula as more applicable.