royf comments on How to Be Oversurprised - Less Wrong

13 Post author: royf 07 January 2013 04:02AM

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Comment author: royf 07 January 2013 09:13:35PM *  3 points [-]

Philosiphically, yes.

Practically, it may be useful to distinguish between a coin and a toss. The coin has persisting features which make it either fair or loaded for a long time, with correlation between past and future. The toss is transient, and essentially all information about it is lost when I put the coin away - except through the memory of agents.

So yes, the toss is a feature of the present state of the world. But it has the very special property, that given the bias of the coin, the toss is independent of the past and the future. It's sometimes more useful to treat a feature like that as an observation external to the world, but of course it "really" isn't.