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ChrisHallquist comments on Yes, Virginia, You Can Be 99.99% (Or More!) Certain That 53 Is Prime - Less Wrong
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Comments (68)
It seems to me to be mostly a cautionary tale about the dangers of taking a long series of bets when you're tired.
Definitely agreed. It's basically a variation on the old (very old) "Get a distracted or otherwise impaired person to agree to a bunch of obviously true statements, and then slip in a false one to trip them up" trick. I can't see that it has any relevance to the philosophical issue at hand.
Not quite, as SquallMage had correctly answered that 27, 33, 39 and 49 were not prime.
I believe that was part of the mistake, answering whether or not the numbers were prime, when the original question, last repeated several minutes earlier, was whether or not to accept a deal.
The point is, it's fundamentally the same trick, and is just that: a trick.
Except it's not the same trick. What you describe relies on the mark getting into the rhythm of replying "yes" to every question; the actual example described has the mark checking each number, but making a mistake eventually, because the odds they will make a mistake is not zero.
Yeah. When I try to do the "can I make a hundred statements yadda yadda" test I typically think in terms of one statement a day for a hundred days. Or more often, "if I make a statement in this class every day, how long do I expect it to take before I get one wrong?"