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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   24463 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025

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This is just not true. Waking up doesn't give you any information, because you already know that you will wake up. You are 100% expecting to wake up.

You are not expecting to wake up on Tuesday if the coin is heads. If it clears your confusion, imagine that instead you always wake up, but at 8:00 am a researcher will come in and give you a lollipop if (and only if) it's Tuesday and the coin was heads. Mathematically, it is exactly the same scenario, only without the "sleeping through the experiment" part that seems to be throwing you. At 7:59 am you have 50% confidence that the coin was tails. At 8:01 am you have either 66% confidence that the coin was tails, or 100% confidence that the coin was heads. You have been given partial information.

This is because 'probability' here is being used in two different ways - in the first, about our estimation about how the world actually is or was in the past, and in the second on a physical outcome in the future that can go different ways.

You're using the passive "is being used" here, but you're the one making this mistake. (Note that probabilities can differ, even for the same event, based on knowledge.) Sleeping Beauty is just asked "was the flip tails?" Not something silly like "do we live in a world where coin flips are fair?"

(BTW, your computer program/anthropic example is fine, and I've seen scripts to do it. Of course the answer you get is 2/3.)

If you get a lollipop on Tuesday then you get new information, but the whole premise of the thought experiment is that you don't have any way to distinguish the days, so there's no new information gained. And because of the magical memory erasure that applies to both days.

Either way, I think you're basically right that it should by 2/3, but I don't think it's a paradox or even particularly interesting when properly formulated. The anthropic principle version makes the correct answer instinctual as well as mathematically correct. The Sleeping Beauty version simply uses poor formulation and equivocates on the meaning of probability to make it seem paradoxical, which is why I line up more with the Ambiguous-question position.

Either way, I think you're basically right that it should by 2/3, but I don't think it's a paradox or even particularly interesting when properly formulated.

Absolutely! This is what I'm trying to get across. Unfortunately, Wikipedia does NOT present the problem this way: "an easy probability question that some people misinterpret."

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