kky
1d ago
Nothing in the problem says that only the last waking counts. But yes, if you add something to the problem that was never there, then the answer changes too.
Nothing in the problem says that each waking counts independently, either. That's the problem. Why do you think that the wakings should count independently? What in the problem makes that explicit and incontrovertible?
I gave you a clear description of what a totally unambiguous version of the problem was, so I think I've made my case pretty well. Could you, in turn, explain your definition of the word "believe"? I note that this is the part that you assiduously avoided quoting, which to me indicates that you don't really have a leg to stand on here. The way that probability works, yup, I'm convinced on that count. But the way language works? I think you, Tanya, and the initial author are making some pretty wild assumptions on the ownership of mathematicians over language. But the fact of the matter is, if this original fellow wrote something retarded and ambiguous, that's on him, that's not on the rest of humanity - just like the schoolteacher who writes a dumb and vague word problem on a test and punishes the student who misinterprets it.
kky
1d ago
I'm not totally sure it is correct. I understand what the piece is saying: basically, at time of waking, you know you're in one of three possible wakings, and in only one of those wakings would the coin have come up heads. Therefore, the chance the coin came up heads is 1/3.
But let's look at this from a different perspective. Before the experiment, the researchers ask you what the probability of the coin coming up heads is. What's the answer? 50%, obviously. So what if they ask you after waking you up what the probability of the coin coming up heads was? It's still 50%, isn't it? There's only one question they can ask you that would return 1/3, and it is: what is the average expected proportion of wakings to happen when the coin has come up heads? But that's not quite the same question as "what is the probability the coin was tails?"
I think the question, in itself, basically comes down to: do you count getting a correct answer twice "more valuable" than getting it once?
To illuminate. Imagine you pre-commit to guessing heads. If you get heads, that's one correct answer. If you get tails, that's zero. If you pre-commit to tails, and get tails, you get two correct answers. If you get heads, you still only get zero. This differential, between one and two answers, is exactly the phenomenon being referred to. But at the end of the experiment, when you wake up for good and get your debriefing, the chance that you got ANY right answers at all is still 50-50.
This problem strongly reminds me of the Monty Hall problem, where of course the key insight is that the ordering matters and that eliminating possibilities skews the odds off of 50%. This, I feel, is something of the opposite. The reality of the hypothetical is that, once the coin is flipped, the subsequent direction of the experiment is determined and cannot be moved away from that 50-50 chance. The only thing that changes is our accounting.
If Sleeping Beauty is told before the experiment that she's going to get cash for each correct answer she gives, heads or tails, on waking up, then she should always precommit to tails, because the EV is 2x on tails over heads. If she is told that she's going to get cash ONLY if she correctly answers on the last waking, then it doesn't matter what she picks, her odds of a payday are equal. The thought experiment, as written, really wants us to assume that it's the first case, but doesn't say it outright. It actually matters a LOT whether it is the first case or the second case. To quote:
When you are first awakened, to what degree ought you believe that the outcome of the coin toss is Heads?
What, precisely, does it mean to believe? Does it mean "optimize for total number of correct answers given to the experimenter?" That's a strange use of "belief" that doesn't seem to hold anywhere else. Or does it mean what you think is actually true? And if so, what is actually true in this scenario?
In other words: garbage in, garbage out applies to word problems too. Sorry, mathematicians.
(I finished looking through the Wikipedia article after the fact, and found that this is effectively their "Ambiguous-question position." But I searched the Wikipedia history page and this section was absent in 2022, when Tanya wrote her piece, and so she can be forgiven for missing it.)
kky
4d ago
The point we disagree upon, I believe, is this: whether security can be guaranteed on anything beyond one’s own self (and, of course, the divine providence we are all obliged to depend on).
Let’s separate these two cases. The second is a simple one of self-imposed debt slavery. The man is working. The first is one where they have worked, but a great amount of their security is explicitly dependent on government largesse.
If Trump 2 has demonstrated nothing else, it’s that government largesse is far from guaranteed. It can be removed as political winds change, and possession being nine tenths of the law, is much harder to keep your hands on over personal holdings. One’s ownership, one’s capacity to work, one’s personal relationships are far more secure than anything coming from the government. The people on the dole are like that lady from Streetcar, always depending on the kindness of strangers. To dispel any subtlety to this point, she didn’t have to work, but she sure as hell got raped.
Another small point. The husband of the first couple is a civil engineer. He alone should have been capable of pulling approximately six figures yearly across his career, probably a little less because it’s Idaho. If he went into private industry instead of civil engineering he probably could have gotten a reasonable amount more. Add on the wife’s salary, adjust for stock market growth, and they could have been dramatically richer if they’d bought index funds starting in the 90s, when they were 30. Why is that hypothetical other couple not up for our ire? Their money has to be coming from somewhere, right? And they sure aren’t working for it. Why is it morally wrong to defer spending on your income in hopes of a future relaxed payday if and only if you’re investing that particular future into the government?
kky
4d ago
But it’s sadly not mainstream. (Also, IMO, pure TFR is not enough. You’d have to calculate things like the reproduction of various social and economic classes, weighted heavily towards the middle, and raw investment into maintenance and long-term infrastructure that can be used by future generations. Overbuilding networking in the dotcom boom would write out positive, while shuttering the steel mills would be negative. I guess you’d probably want multiple metrics to capture a place like China which is dramatically overbuilding at the same time as its TFR is cratering.)
kky
4d ago
What a strange thing to say. Didn’t I answer “no” there?
If you’re looking for an opportunity to be offended, then I can’t really help you.
kky
5d ago
It probably matters that you are receiving the 20m and could not possibly be giving the 10m. (Unless you actually have that much, in which case, apologies for assuming.)
It also probably matters that deontology is an excellent representation of how humans reason about truly heinous acts, and that to act is greatly different than to not act. Hence cowardice (short of desertion) and treason both being rewarded with a rope, excepting that in the latter case it gets tied in a loop first.
I would strongly trust those moral intuitions.
kky
5d ago
This appeared in my history, so I've probably linked it here before, but as far as interesting old blog posts about welfare go...
I'll quote the pieces I think most relevant in response to your post, but I encourage reading the whole thing.
There is a significant misconception of what "disability" means, and I'm not going to say what you think I might. Dr. Balt, and I'll wager most people, think Keisha is probably able to work. However, the issue isn't whether she can work, but whether any employer would be willing to take a chance on her ability to work. Would you hire Keisha to run your office? Do billing? In the spacious comfort of an internet comment you might hire a woman like Keisha to work at a hypothetically inefficient McDonalds, but in practice, are you willing to tolerate "3-4 absences a month due to illness?" McDonalds neither, which is why the SSI application form asks that exact question.
As long as they-- and the inmates and the etc-- are munching on food stamps, weed, and Xboxes, nearly illiterate but keeping their nonsense within their neighborhoods, the rest of us can go on with our lives.
Say your father raped you repeatedly for a decade. Hold on, slow down, it gets worse: now you're 40, and he shows up asking you for $2400 because, and I quote, "you have a responsibility to take care of me." There he is in your living room, eyeballing the nice things in your home. If it is a fact that you will inevitably give him the money, is it easier to for you to pair it with your venom or your sympathy? Though it's enraging, there is a perverse pleasure in giving that bastard the money. It tells you that you showed him that you are better than him.
If you've gotten through the above, superior thoughts, I'll scratch out a few of my own down here.
As far as I can see it, welfare is the summation of a few factors:
- The eternal need to provide somehow for the unfortunate, the unmotivated, and the unwise. This truly does go all the way back. If people are left to their own devices, most of them will attempt to relax and reproduce as much as possible. Something must be taken away if they are to have a surplus for when they truly need it. Separate post, sometime, but I suspect this is the reason behind most forms of government.
- Globalism, industrialism, and economic deracination, which makes it easier to support idle workers off of the productivity of others.
- Liberal egalitarianism and the elites' sharp retreat from noblesse oblige, removing the old-school frameworks for compelling labor and moral betterment. Again, separate post sometime.
The result is a bunch of policies that address pressing first-order concerns, but have some pretty nasty second- and third-order consequences that are extremely difficult to talk about while retaining sympathy for the people involved.
Can welfare continue to exist in its current form? Not forever, sure, but forever is a long time. How long can it last? Until the rubber hits the road, which is probably keyed off of the sharp population declines in our near future more than anything. There's a reasonable argument to be made that Europe (to a greater extent) and the US (to a lesser extent) are currently getting choked out by welfare. But that's somewhat besides the point. The reality is twofold: first, that welfare will continue until the affected nations are more or less forced into a New Deal of sorts, because those benefiting from welfare planned their lives around receiving it and aren't remotely prepared for the consequences of not having it; and second, that it is much, much better to not be on welfare than to be on welfare. Look at your two examples. The first couple have their future at the mercy of regular politics - their future is not under their control, and if Idaho should ever become unable to pay their pensions, they will be in unbelievably deep trouble. The second are in wild amounts of debt and are going to be barely scraping by, eternally. Their (presumable) food stamps are a pittance compared to how they've decided to sell themselves into slavery for the benefit of the banks. Either their consumption will sharply dry up once their income equals their debt payments, or they declare bankruptcy and lose everything and will never have a house again. Is either case remotely enviable? (Also, I'm pretty sure that way more of your money is going to cases like the first one, and barely anything is going to the second one. Social Security and Medicare together are about 33% of the budget, and only around 5% goes to food stamps, child tax credits, etc. The second couple is more outrageous from a morality point of view, but the first is vastly more expensive.)
Couple of things you mentioned that stood out to me.
And finally. No dependents. Its not like they've got mouths to feed and kids to raise. Every dollar they spend here on is solely on themselves, and contributes 'nothing' to the future productivity of the country.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that standard economic measures like GDP are flawed insofar as they only capture production and not reproduction, when it's pretty clear that the latter means a lot more in the long term. So if everyone's just looking at GDP for a vibe check on how the economy is doing, they get the totally wrong perspective and miss the steamroller coming down the road.
This raises a question: are 'we' really supporting this entire apparatus on the efforts of some small and possibly shrinking minority of our actual population? Without getting too Randian, what's the ratio of productive/unproductive left now?
For America specifically, the source of this support is not so much "the productive" as "the debt." For 2024 the debt (1.9T) is comparable in size to Social Security (1.5T). So there are people buying US bonds on the principle that the government will pay them back before it has to raise taxes. That is bound to stop at some point in the near-ish future (order of decades, not years). When it does, either the welfare will stop or taxes will go up, or probably both. This is the "New Deal" territory I was talking about earlier. Who knows what exactly will happen here? Easy to make predictions, but reality has a habit of surprising you.
kky
5d ago
I think French is basically right.
Andrews is making one of those famous totalizing theories of history, which invariably take a single phenomenon affecting a single place and time and attempt to make it into a completely general theory of cause and effect. A good analogy would be Marxism.
Totalizing theories fail because the actual material of history is far, far richer and denser than any monocausal theory can provide for (outside of extremely limited forms - think “crop failures drive starvation”). Right now, America specifically is under a great number of pressures, including: an aging population, immigration, the arrogance born of global superiority, gutted industries, old and new racial tensions, the rise of left and then right wokism, the intergenerational humiliations of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism, and yes, the monumental rise of women into the public sphere and corresponding retreat in men’s public influence. Each one of these is going to have its own effects and pressures, and to select one as the Cause of Causes is misguided or even benighted.
What I think Andrews is mostly describing is a sharpened tribalistic trend in the public sphere. Calls for ingroup violence are responded to more generously, as points of difference or even decorum are sufficient for a breach. At the same time, objective measures of advantage are taken less seriously, along with other dispassionate perspectives. Overt efforts towards creating entirely new value, or at least taking from the actual Other, are devalued compared to squabbling over internal resources.
But this happens over all places and times, and if I were to offer a theory, is probably more closely related to where people can expect the greatest return on investment for their efforts. While Rome had easy access to the Mediterranean and rich France, she expanded; when she reached the borders of the Sahara, the Atlantic, the Levant, and the Rhine, she turned inward and began warring over what she already had. This is not a complete analysis, but I think it’s a strong gearspring in this particular mechanism. In contrast, ONLY in the modern West have women penetrated the public sphere to such a degree. If there were consequences to this, we should expect to see unique ones, not regurgitations from every struggling power. And indeed, on the family and interpersonal level, we do see massive changes in gender relations. But interestingly, I don’t think those replicate directly to the civilizational level. The problems we are having were experienced by the men of yesteryear. Late Athens is, as always, an apt comparison.
I’m coming at this from a fairly sympathetic perspective. I think there are major problems with how America operates right now, I personally dislike how it feels to operate in a feminized institution, I think the legislative defenses of women have by and large exceeded their period of use now that women are paramount in many areas… and yet I find her overall piece to be lacking. It’s like she’s got cause and effect backwards.
Let me give an analogy. We all know that universities became dramatically more leftist over the past sixty or so years - I think that’s fairly established and supportable. But why? The simple reason is that more conservative individuals did not see the universities as worth fighting over. I know I didn’t. They don’t pay enough, you don’t get enough respect… so I went into industry, and I think that’s where most similar people went too. So the universities were ceded to people who wanted them for reasons nothing to do with wealth or status.
I think the women in industry question is similar. In the areas where women are most dominant, or increasingly dominant, one reason is that they want the job for reasons other than what men want, and are willing to effectively undercut men on that principle. As they do so, the costs for men to enter that industry go up and the rewards go down, so they hit a tipping point and become much more female. If a field were to become more profitable but also more demanding, we’d see a reverse effect where men flood in and squeeze the women - who frequently want more flexibility in their work and don’t like demanding and stressful positions - out. And I think this is happening to some degree in fields like nursing. It’s basically gender roles painted over industrial culture. So what does it mean that, say, being a judge or a lawyer or a Congressman is decreasingly attractive to men, such that they’d push through whatever feminine culture to be one anyway?
So, contra Andrews, my basic thesis is that the basic facts of gendering make some careers more suitable for men than women than vice versa, and that this tends to lead to dramatic differences in sex ratio and subculture, but that the larger cultural differences are separate from this phenomenon. Certainly there is some effect from civil rights legislation, but it’s not the whole story. If you took all the women out, I suspect the men that remain would act, by Andrews’ lights, like a bunch of girls.
kky
6d ago
This is an incredible non-sequitor. The people that the defendant had to fear weren’t the police, but rather the jury. Bring stats on opinions on a jury of one’s peers if you please, but the police themselves were not a danger to this man. And if you distrust juries, then suggest alternatives. Note that the final alternative is relying on justice through violence itself.
This argument fails on the basis of basic logic and on the basis of simple second-order consequences. I’m not remotely compelled by it, and surprised to see it here. Is this some kind of psyop to make the phenomenon of the underclass distrusting the police seem even less compelling? I see you’ve succeeded in getting people downthread talking about it. Otherwise, I’m just baffled.
Note the phrasing:
Not:
The former is a question about a reality that continues to exist outside of our personal observations. The latter is a description of assumptions you can make while biased under this or that frame that limit your observational abilities. These are different questions and have different answers. Again, as described, the gambling case makes the practical side of this very clear, but this shouldn't blind us to the absolute perspective.
As for why this matters: imagine that the researchers tell you what they flipped before you go to sleep the first time. This is the analogue to real-world scenarios, where there always is a driving factor of variance, but we rarely get a privileged peek behind the curtain as to what it is. Describing this or the other real world event as probabilistic is helpful primarily for placing ourselves within our own information-blind reality, but if you are able to get a real look at the coin, everything changes. That's why it's important to understand the odds, of course, but also to understand there's something behind them. If you at all aspire to a scientific understanding of your situation, you must not be thinking about the odds, you must be thinking about getting a look at that coin.
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