LESSWRONG
LW

All of Greg D's Comments + Replies

D&D.Sci (Easy Mode): On The Construction Of Impossible Structures
Greg D10

I’m not a data scientist, but I love these. I’ve got a four-hour flight ahead of me and a copy of Microsoft Excel; maybe now is the right time to give one a try!

!It seems like the combination of materials determines the cost of the structure.

!Architects who apprenticed with Johnson or Stamatin always produce impossible buildings; architects who apprenticed with Geisel, Penrose, or Escher NEVER do. Self-taught architects sometimes produce impossible buildings, and sometimes they do not.

!This lets us select 5 designs from our proposals which will ce

... (read more)
Reply
Has anyone actually changed their mind regarding Sleeping Beauty problem?
Answer by Greg D20

I was an inveterate thirder until I read a series of articles on repeated betting, which pointed out that in many cases, maximizing expected utility leads to a “heavy tailed” situation in which a few realizations of you have enormous utility, but most realizations of you have gone bankrupt. The mean utility across all realizations is large, but that’s useless in the vast majority of cases because there’s no way to transfer utility from one realization to another. This got me thinking about SB again, and the extent to which Beauties can or can not share or ... (read more)

Reply
1JeffJo
I try to avoid any discussion of repeated betting, because of the issues you raise. Doing so addresses the unorthodox part of an unorthodox problem, and so can be used to get either solution you prefer. But that unorthodox part is unnecessary. In my comment to pathos_bot, I pointed out that there are significant differences between the problem as Elga posed it, and the problem as it is used in the controversy. It the posed problem, the probability question is asked before you are put to sleep, and there is no Monday/Tuesday schedule. In his solution, Elga never asked the question upon waking, and he used the Monday/Tuesday schedule to implement the problem but inadvertently created the unorthodox part. There is a better implementation, that avoids the unorthodox part. Before being put to sleep, you are told that two coins will be flipped after you are put to sleep, C1 and C2. And that, at any moment during the experiment, we want to know the degree to which you believe that coin C1 came up Heads. Then, if either coin is showing Tails (but not if both are showing Heads): 1. You will be wakened. 2. Remember what we wanted to know? Tell us your degree of belief. 3. You will be put back to sleep with amnesia. Once this is either skipped or completed, coin C2 is turned over to show its other side. And the process is repeated. This implements Elga's problem exactly, and adds less to it than he did. But now you can consider just what has happened between looking at the coins to see if either is showing Tails, and now. When examined, there were four equiprobable combinations of the two coins: HH, HT, TH, and TT. Since you are awake, HH is eliminated. Of the three combinations that remain, C1 landed on Heads in only one.