sansampersamp
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User ID: 751
I think a lot of this is compelling, and it's true that Europe has been much more institutionally resilient and stable over recent years than the US has been.
I don't think that civilisational depth and the accumulation of norms is, however, the most parsimonious explanation for why this is the case. Australia, for example, is younger than America and has been more institutionally resilient over the past few decades of populist headwinds than Europe has largely been.
The real reason the US is falling faster towards institutional dysfunction is more prosaic: its institutions are not well designed. That unified party control across different branches of government would still let each branch effectively check the excesses of the others was a naive theory at best. Instead political will flows through the channels of least resistance and carves them deeper.
One of the Westminster system's better features, which has achieved its final perfected form in Australia, is explicitly not tying the political ambitions and fates of would-be political leaders to that of whoever sits in the chair at a given moment. If there's no real way to self-correct a year into the term, everyone is sink-or-swim through any insanity.
sansampersamp
6mo ago
Prior comment is assuming a fair coin, so p_tails=0.5, but I've clarified to specify p* as Alice's credence upon waking that the coin result was heads.
Alice's bets are neutral EV at odds of 2:1, corresponding to p*=1/3 for a fair coin, yes. Unless I am missing something this is directly analogous to stating that Alice has a credence that the coin flip came up heads of 1/3. Therefore if Alice is directed to communicate their credence to Bob, they would communicate 1/3 (which Bob would understand to be subject to Alice's predetermined pattern of exposure and handle appropriately to derive their credence of heads at 2/3).
The ambiguity only arises if "credence" is allowed to mean something other than Alice's implied probability from her 0-EV betting odds. As I said, not across the formal literature here but that doesn't seem to be the case to me.
edit: perhaps the different probabilities can be better compared if the (fair) coin is flipped on the Sunday before either are put to sleep, and they provide their credence at that point as well. Alice would say: Today I have a credence that the coin came up heads of 1/2. Tomorrow, on waking, I will have a credence that it came up heads of 1/3. Bob will have a credence it came up heads of 2/3. This is no more unusual, mathematically, than if we were to flip the coin today, and ask me tomorrow by mail, if a result of tails today meant you opted for a mail service that was exactly twice as reliable than the service you'd have chosen if the result was heads. Equivalently, my response on receiving the question would be 1/3 and I could pre-register that response with you now.
Is there a definition here of "credence the coin flip came up heads" that is not equivalent to "what is the p*, such that you would bet the coin flip came up heads if given odds (1-p*)/p* or greater"?
sansampersamp
6mo ago
I think if Alice was specifically directed to input her "credence that the coin flip came up heads" then it's not really ambiguous if everyone is on the same page, as it were. I agree that it's not correct to characterise Alice (or Bob) waking as 'gaining' information, perhaps that's just some Bayesian baggage from Monty Hall or the way the notation is typically used. Alice is fully able to preregister her bets before she falls asleep the first time.
Alice has a computer terminal in her room, and the only thing she can do with this computer terminal3 is input into it a single number, her "credence that the coin flip came up heads".
..
I contend that it is obvious that in Variant 1, Alice should still tell Bob that the probability of the coin flip is p, even though she is going to personally bet on heads with probability (1-p)/(p+1). That is, if p=1/2, Alice should bet heads with probability 1/3, but tell Bob that the probability of the coin flip is 1/2.
Forgive me for not being initiated in the lit behind this question, but I'm not following why in variant 1, if Bob is expecting the message to denote Alice's credence for heads and they have mutually consistent methods for deriving it, i.e. (1-p)/(p+1), why Alice would provide anything other than her true credence (which is acknowledged to be invariant based on which wake/day they are in).
i.e.
- Alice wakes, knows p_tails, derives her P(H|wake) as (1-p)/(p+1), sends it to the computer
- Bob wakes, sees Alice's P(H|wake) on the computer. He knows how he'd derive it from p if he were Alice, so he reverses the calculation to get the coin weighting p_tails
- Bob uses the p_tails to derive his own credence for heads (2 wakes per head, heads results at 1-p), i.e. 2(1-p)/(2-p)
For Bob to benefit from being told p_tails instead of Alice's P(H|wake), then Bob must either not be aware that Alice's exposure setup is an inversion of his own, or otherwise believe that Alice will communicate 'true' p_tails instead of her P(H|wake), neither of which seems apparent from the set-up. If Bob expects Alice to input her actual credence and he knows the experiment setup, there's no need for Alice to strategically misreport.
sansampersamp
7mo ago
Emily Dickinson
sansampersamp
11mo ago
The DNC pursuing a perception of being a 'neutral leadership institution' is frequently at ends with its actual institutional purpose: getting democrats elected.
case could be made that if you were planning to take out several members of the admin in one swoop, leaving patel alive would increase your odds in the ensuing manhunt
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