Kindly comments on SIA fears (expected) infinity - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 12 November 2012 05:23PM

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

Comments (13)

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

Comment author: Kindly 13 November 2012 07:28:01PM 0 points [-]

I don't believe the first point, but I'm not entirely certain you're wrong, so if you think you have such a construction, I'd like to see it.

As for your second point, the number of times that Sleeping Beauty wakes up is always finite, so no matter what, the experiment does end. It's just that, due to the heavy tail of the distribution, the expected value is infinite (see also: St. Petersburg paradox). Of course, we would have to adjust rewards for inflation; also, the optimal strategy changes if the universe (or Sleeping Beauty) has a finite lifespan. So there's a few implementation problems here, yes.