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MrMind comments on Monty Hall Sleeping Beauty - Less Wrong Discussion

1 Post author: PhilGoetz 18 September 2015 09:18PM

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Comment author: MrMind 22 September 2015 08:28:15AM 0 points [-]

Yes, but to be clear, my 'answer' is that theres' no universal right answer: whenever the question asked is about the single anthropic position, thirders are correct, when it's about the global structure of the branch they're in, halfers' is the correct answer.
The argument would have carried through even if I had not destroyed the symmetry between the branches, because in that case it would have been that both positions would have won on average, and so there was no 'obviously' correct answer, but I think this way is clearer, because in the Monty Hall version one of the branch gets almost all probability mass.

Comment author: OrphanWilde 22 September 2015 01:07:08PM 0 points [-]

Only one of those questions is asked in the problem proper. The other is the product of a poor rephrasing or somebody seeking the question to which their incorrect answer ceases to be incorrect.

Comment author: MrMind 23 September 2015 06:59:28AM 0 points [-]

I don't know / care to track the problem as it was originally formulated. If it's as you say so, then I wholeheartedly agree that the correct answer is 1/3.
It's just nice to be able to reason correctly about this kind of anthropic questions and to be aware that the answer changes (which is not a given in non Bayesian takes on probability).