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shminux comments on The Ultimate Sleeping Beauty Problem - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: Coscott 30 September 2013 12:48AM

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Comment author: shminux 30 September 2013 06:50:30AM -1 points [-]

How do we decide if your answer is correct? If you have all the power, you might as well just make up a random number between 0 and 1 and call it the answer. That's why the whole SSA vs SIA argument makes little sense.

Comment author: Coscott 30 September 2013 07:00:00AM 0 points [-]

Oops. You are right, what I said didn't make sense. I just edited the above post by changing "I tell you if you are right" to "I tell you how many times the coin was flipped"

Comment author: shminux 30 September 2013 07:16:51AM *  -1 points [-]

OK, so, we can reformulate the question as "Dear Sleeping Beauty, what odds would you bet on the coin having been flipped an even number of times?", right? At least in this case the correctness of her answer can be explicitly tested by a frequentist simulation.

Comment author: Coscott 30 September 2013 07:21:53AM 0 points [-]

Sure, that is fine.

I am still curious though in the case where we do not reformulate the interview to that whether or not you think that the interviewer telling the beauty how many times the coin was flipped afterwords changes the question.

Comment author: shminux 30 September 2013 07:37:09AM -1 points [-]

Well, there are two issues there, one is the divergent weights given to the lower-probability flip sequences (the St. Petersburg paradox), the other is the meaning of the term "subjective probability". Asking for the odds gives a concrete interpretation to the latter. As for the former, you can probably get any answer you want, depending on how you choose to sum the divergent series.