MartianNight
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User ID: 1244
MartianNight
7mo ago
Ah but in this construction, I have to pay my stake twice. That's not actually a 3:2 bet, but a 3:4 bet. I'm staking my $20,000 against your $15,000 after all.
Recall that the original formulation was:
When you are first awakened, to what degree ought you believe that the outcome of the coin toss is Heads?
If similarly, the bet only happens during the first awakening, then clearly it is in my favor to take the bet, since it's equally likely that the coin came up heads or tails.
If we're betting on every awakening, that means that if I lose on timeline B, I have to pay twice. So I'm not actually betting on 3:2 odds, but on 3:4 odds, which are clearly not in my favor if I believe the odds are 1:1, and I wouldn't take that bet.
I read up a bit on the older thread and I liked the analogy about putting balls in a bag. If the coin toss comes up head, then we put 1 red ball in the bag, if it comes up tail, we put 2 green balls in the bag. Clearly all the balls in the bag are either red or green.
If you ask me: “what is the probability that the balls in the bag are red?” I would say 50%.
If you ask me: “do you take a bet where I pay you $15 if the balls in the bag are red, and you pay me $10 if the balls in the bag are green?” I would take that bet since I know the odds are even and so the expected value is positive ($2.5).
If you ask me: “do you take a bet where I pay you $15 for each red ball in the bag, and you pay me $10 for each green ball in the bag?” I would not take that bet because I know that the probability of the balls being red/green are 1:1, but if they are green, there are 2 of them, so you'll pay me $15 in one case, and I pay you $20 in the other, which is a negative expected value (-$2.5).
So when first awakened Sleeping Beauty ought to believe that the coin came up heads with 50% probability. She also oughtn't take a bet that is resolved on every awakening, knowing that awakenings happen more frequently in timeline B. If she is guaranteed her bet is only resolved on the first awakening, she can take the bet.
MartianNight
7mo ago
If you ran this experiment on people who think the answer is 1/2 you could take their money.
I'll bite. Assume I believe the answer is 1/2, how would you take my money?
The answer for 95% of those decision theory puzzles/paradoxes is that the puzzle as stated is underspecified.
I disagree. In many cases the intended interpretation is clear, and people who give the wrong answer got the interpretation right but simply did the math wrong.
Specifically for the Monty Hall problem, most people who dispute the correct answer (switching doubles your winning chance) do not claim that the problem is underspecified, but give an answer (switching does not change your winning probability) that is not consistent with any reasonable interpretation of the problem.
Here's an article that covers everything I wanted to say about the topic. Behind Monty Hall's Doors: Puzzle, Debate and Answer?
"Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the other doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, 'Do you want to pick door No. 2?' Is it to your advantage to take the switch?"
This is the original formulation of the problem. It's true that it is ambiguous in that it doesn't specifically state whether the host would reveal a goat regardless of whether you picked right or wrong, as pointed out by Martin Gardner (whom I hold in high regard):
"The problem is not well-formed," Mr. Gardner said, "unless it makes clear that the host must always open an empty door and offer the switch. Otherwise, if the host is malevolent, he may open another door only when it's to his advantage to let the player switch, and the probability of being right by switching could be as low as zero." Mr. Gardner said the ambiguity could be eliminated if the host promised ahead of time to open another door and then offer a switch.
But that's not the criticism of most people who dispute the official answer. Those people usually say the answer is exactly 50/50:
Robert Sachs, a professor of mathematics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., expressed the prevailing view that there was no reason to switch doors.
"You blew it!" he wrote. "Let me explain: If one door is shown to be a loser, that information changes the probability of either remaining choice -- neither of which has any reason to be more likely -- to 1/2. As a professional mathematician, I'm very concerned with the general public's lack of mathematical skills. Please help by confessing your error and, in the future, being more careful."
I have a similar objection to your interpreation:
if he actually only picks a door when you have picked the winning door: don't
Okay, but if Monty only opens a door if you picked the winner, then obviously you shouldn't switch: your chance of winning would be 0% after switching, not 50%. That doesn't support the 50% answer at all!
You could at least somewhat reasonably assume an adverserial scenario where Monty may decide to reveal a goat or not, with the goal to maximally confuse you and minimize your chances of winning. But in that case, his optimal strategy isn't to reveal a goat only when you're about to win (which only confirms your choice was correct) but to never reveal a goat, regardless of your initial pick, in which case you cannot do better than sticking with your initial guess for an 1/3 chance of winning.
In short, there is no sensible interpretation of the problem where the correct answer is that switching or not doesn't matter. You can only reach the conclusion by getting the math wrong, not by finding a reasonable but unintended interpretation of the problem as stated.
(edit: removed a bit that I need to rethink)
MartianNight
7mo ago
OK, thanks for checking. A strange situation.
MartianNight
7mo ago
And your Play Store country is Germany? (You can check this under Settings > General > Account & Device > Country & Profiles.)
MartianNight
7mo ago
Are you sure? It shows up as unavailable in Switzerland.
Not getting thrown in jail for the numerous crimes you committed (either real ones, or the ones they will pin on you, like those sexual assault and felony fraud convictions)?
MartianNight
7mo ago
Even today, the money which influences politics is mostly spent by individual private individuals or by companies held privately
You say that but I was surprised to see that the list of donors to Donald Trump's new east wing ballroom includes most major tech companies: Amazon, Apple, Google, HP, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft.
These are all publicly held companies, and companies that I'd pegged as in the Democrat camp. Apparently that doesn't stop them from throwing some money Trump's way to stay on his good side.
spelling out how that is profitable at the stockholder's meeting is likely to get the CEO in legal trouble
The CEO won't have to spell it out at the stockholders meeting, because stockholders already understand how bribing the government benefits the company, and making that policy explicit can only harm the company, so they're not going to demand an explanation from the CEO. Tacit approval is clearly the best policy here.
MartianNight
8mo ago
As far as I can tell the Star Wars license expired already in 2023.
Obviously Zendaya is not ugly ugly, but judging by the standards for a 25 (?) year old Hollywood star, I consider her mediocre looking.
She's thin with a beautiful, symmetrical face.
She also has no curve to her body, her nose is too flat, her eyes are too small, her chin is too big, and she wears way too much makeup. Without makeup she looks like a cave(wo)man. She is neither cute nor handsome, and she tries too hard to hide it.
It doesn't help that she is a terrible actress who never impresses you with her performance, so she can't even grow on you despite her looks.
This is what she looks like when she actually tries to look good
Is this supposed to be a good look? Her smile looks fake, she's wearing way too much makeup, her top is ugly and her skirt is even more ugly, like literally what the fuck are those colors? They are all clashing (look at her nails and lipstick too, all different ugly shades of pink) and I'm not even into fashion? It's like she's trying to be ugly. Also I've never met a single man who thinks box braids are attractive on a woman.
Probably EU countries have their own individual laws on this. I know that outside the EU, in Switzerland, you are allowed to record in public, but not allowed to publish photos or videos of people without their consent at all.
(This is interpreted as recordings where a person is the focus of the image, so if you take a picture of your friend at tourist spot and there happen to be some random people visible in the background, that's still okay.)
That means live streaming in public is essentially illegal in Switzerland, as is the popular genre of Youtube influencers harassing people in public to get a rise out of them, including those obnoxious 1st amendment “auditors” that are intentionally annoying people.
MartianNight
11mo ago
Amadan, you are a fucking hypocrite and you're a disgrace of a mod. You constantly spread Zionist propaganda while pretending to be politically neutral.
You intentionally conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism and deride criticism of Zionism as “Joo-posting”, an intrinsically dismissive term, as if the people who have some concerns about the genocide-in-all-but-name that is being perpetrated by Israel in the middle east are just cuckoo-bananas.
Again in this comment, you create a false dichotomy between “Jews and Jew-haters” as if you can be either in support of Israel, or you must hate the Jews, which is far from the truth. I have no issue whatsoever with the many Jews who live in my neighbourhood, nor with those Israelis who are content to remain within the internationally recognized borders of Israel. I do hate anyone who supports the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, whether they are Jewish or not. I make no secret of this. Any attempt to conflate that opposition to Zionism to “hating Jews” is obviously disingeneous.
Even in this reply you stroke your own dick by waxing poetically about how you magnanimously tolerate the “Joo-posters” (a derisive term you invented to ridicule those who don't share your pro-Israel bias), as if banning people for disagreeing with you wouldn't violate half a dozen stated rules. Your tolerance of anti-Zionists is only commendable if this is an explicit Zionist space which is founded on the principle of promoting Israels divine right to annex Palestinian land and carpet bomb Palestinian civilians. If that's not a founding principle, you don't get brownie points for tolerating people who are calling out the state of Israel on its gross violation of international law.
I wouldn't be writing this reply if you were just another random Zionist voicing his dumb opinions. In that case, I would just flip the bozo bit on you and ignore your stupid takes from now on. But the fact that you're an actual moderator makes that impossible. I would think moderators should be extra committed to following the rules of the Motte, including being kind, charitable, not antagonistic, avoiding weakmen, not being egregiously obnoxious—all standards you fail here.
MartianNight
11mo ago
The project was pretty much under the radar until the ADL issued a statement last week. Now this might develop into a big story.
Ah yes, the organization that openly supports the establishment of a Jewish ethnostate on stolen land is deeply concerned about the theoretic possibility of “whites only enclaves” on privately purchased land in the US. I literally cannot imagine a group in America that has less of a leg to stand on to voice this concern than the Zionist hawks of the ADL.
You can offer it every day, just use the result from the first day to settle the bet on Wednesday, just like the original question asks: what is the credence on the first day, not on all days. If my answer is deterministic it will be the same in all cases anyway. Or we could agree the deposit will be spread equally over all days: $10,000 per day if I'm awakened twice, $20,000 if I'm awakened once.
Of course you don't want this, because you need me to double my stake only if I lose to turn even odds in your favor. And the problematic part is that you then claim this says something about the outcome of the coin toss, rather than stakes of the bet.
The problem can be simplified into a simply $1 to $2 bet. Let's start with this:
You toss a fair coin. If it's heads, you pay me $1. If it's tails, I pay you $1. Except, you have an accomplice that whacks me on the head with a stick as soon as I pay $1, inducing memory loss brief enough that I remember the bet but forgot I already paid up, so that when I recover and notice the coin came up tails, I pay you $1 again. (The stick breaks on first use, so you can only do this once.)
This is the same as the Sleeping Beauty problem. It's rigged against me, not because the probability of the coin coming up tails is less than 50%, but because you've found a way to trick me into paying twice if I lose. In the split second after you flip the coin but before I notice which face is up, I have every reason to insist my credence is 50:50 heads:tails. This is true before and after my memory loss.
Now if you tell me ahead of time, that if I lose, I'll be whacked in the head and made to pay twice, I know that I'm really staking $2 to your $1. Then I propose we skip the head whacking altogether, and if I lose I'll just pay you the $2. Clearly this is exactly equivalent.
Now if you toss the coin, and ask me before revealing the outcome: what is your credence that the coin came up tails? I will still say: 50%, but if you want me to bet on it, you will have to raise your stake to equal mine.
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