Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
You are fighting the hypothetical. This sentence is key:
Any time Sleeping Beauty is awakened and interviewed she will not be able to tell which day it is or whether she has been awakened before.
In order to maintain the logic of the thought experiment, I have to offer you the bet each time you wake up. If I only offered it on the first day, that would give away that it is the first day.
You cannot decide to only take the bet on the first day, because you have no way of knowing when you wake up whether or not it is the first day. Any decision algorithm you implement that would accept the bet on the first day would also accept the bet on the second day, because there is no way within the experimental setup for you to distinguish them.
You are Sleeping Beauty, I am the Magician. The experimental setup is exactly the same as outlined in my previous comment, except that you deposit $20,000 with me before the experiment starts. I explain that each time I wake you up, I will hand you $10,000 of your own money and give you the option to bet at 3:2 odds that the coin came up heads. At the end of the experiment, any unbet deposits will be returned to you.
When you wake up, if you think that there is a 50% chance that the coin came up heads, then you should bet the $10,000 (because 3:2 is a better payout than 1:1). You have no way of determining which situation you woke up into, so you should take the bet every time if this is your true belief.
I am thrilled to offer you this bet. From my perspective, there is a 50% chance that the coin comes up heads, in which case you win $15,000 from me. However, the other 50% chance is that the coin came up tails, in which case you woke up and bet $10,000 on heads twice, so I won $20,000 from you. The net outcome is:
- Heads: I pay you $15,000
- Tails: You pay me $20,000
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Great Patio11 tweet:
Part of the reason for licensing regimes, btw, isn’t that the licensing teaches you anything or that it makes you more effective or that it makes you more ethical or that it successfully identifies protocriminals before they get the magic piece of paper. It’s that you have to put a $X00k piece of paper at risk as the price of admission to the chance of doing the crime. This deters entry and raises the costs of criminal enterprises hiring licensed professionals versus capable, ambitious, intelligent non-licensed criminals.
A lot of regulatory schemes are more complex than, "create a government entity that finds violations and punishes them." I have no idea whether or not the North Carolina State Board of Examiners of Plumbing, Heating and Fire Sprinkler Contractors is a wretched hive of regulatory capture and villainy, but punishing unliscensed practitioners is a key aspect of any regulatory regime involving licensing.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
I think it is very relevant even today that threats to withdraw US military forces abroad are met with bribery from foreign agents.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
I think there's a sort of Monty Hall-style switcharoo going on with regards to what Alice puts into the computer. Only what she puts in the computer on Monday matters, so she should put the probability conditional on it being Monday into the computer, but bet her true probability (since she doesn't know whether or not it is Monday) herself.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
It's a reference. My list was of course not all-inclusive. I assure you however that there exist people who are okay with white immigrants and not okay with any other immigrants.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
Sorry, my comment was ambiguously phrased. I was referring to the cannonical form of the Sleeping Beauty question from Wikipedia:
Sleeping Beauty volunteers to undergo the following experiment and is told all of the following details: On Sunday she will be put to sleep. Once or twice, during the experiment, Sleeping Beauty will be awakened, interviewed, and put back to sleep with an amnesia-inducing drug that makes her forget that awakening. A fair coin will be tossed to determine which experimental procedure to undertake:
- If the coin comes up heads, Sleeping Beauty will be awakened and interviewed on Monday only.
- If the coin comes up tails, she will be awakened and interviewed on Monday and Tuesday.
- In either case, she will be awakened on Wednesday without interview and the experiment ends.
Any time Sleeping Beauty is awakened and interviewed she will not be able to tell which day it is or whether she has been awakened before. During the interview Sleeping Beauty is asked: "What is your credence now for the proposition that the coin landed heads?"
This question is not ambiguous. The correct answer is 1/3. If you ran this experiment on people who think the answer is 1/2 you could take their money.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
I phrased it a bit flippantly, but I do think that the original question is not ambiguously phrased. We do not say that people who think that there is no advantage to switching doors in the Monty Hall problem are answering a different question than the people who say that there is an advantage to switching. We say they are wrong.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
The culture war angle is that the correct answer is 1/3 and that the people who think it is 1/2 cannot comprehend a word problem and need to be put into UCSD's remedial mathematics course.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
”Is this inevitable”
Probably. Intra-coalition jockeying always peaks around this point in the election cycle. Remember all the Kyrsten Sinema hate back in the winter of 2021-2022?
Regarding this cycle specifically, the Republican coalition that won the election was pretty united that mass immigration is bad, but they weren’t in agreement on why it is bad. Some people think it’s bad because “we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Some people think it’s bad because it drives down wages. Some people think it’s bad because immigrants are poor and stupid. Some people just think it’s unfair that illegals get to jump the line literally and figuratively. All of these groups will be more or less sympathetic to different particular types of immigrants.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
”Are there as many boring tomes as I would expect working over evidence for minor policy changes?”
When you actually read the Federal Register entries announcing proposed or promulgated changes, it is hard not to be awed by the sheer scope of what some guy at a desk in Washington has been up to for the last 6 months.
I looked-up a semi-random regulatory docket just for fun. Here are 60 pages from NOAA outlining the legal and factual basis for their plan to upgrade the Port of Alaska while complying with the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
For bonus hilarity, click over to the public comments tab. I assure you, this is a quite representative sample of who actually comments on these things and what they say.
No to incoherent worldbuilding.
No to "subverting expectations."
No to, "it's bad on purpose."
No to cowards like Kathleen Kennedy who normalize this trash.
No to bathos.
No to destroying beloved franchises.
No to Vice-Admiral Gender Studies.
No.
So first of all, it's /r/saltierthancrait.
Secondly, Star Wars wasn't Rian Johnson's to destroy. On December 15, 2017, Star Wars meant something. On December 16, 2017, Star Wars was a joke. I went into The Last Jedi excited to see the movie. I went into Solo and Rise of Skywalker excited to see the RedLetterMedia review afterwards. These are two very different things.
In a world of rapidly eroding meaning, Star Wars used to mean something. Now Star Wars is meaningless too.
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