Bayesianism and Sleeping Beauty - Page 11

On January 06 2013 01:34 Kukaracha wrote:
Just like that imaginary monkey will plagiarize Shakespeare some day,

On January 06 2013 04:40 Reason wrote:
Can you explain indexical propositions in general and in the context of the sleeping beauty puzzle, and make an effort to dumb your language down more

"The question is, how many other things are like this?"

I don't know, but I don't think many.

As for propositions about probability not telling you anything about the world... well I think it's sort of an issue of time.

Probability can't and doesn't claim to be able to tell me what the next flip of the coin will be, it merely assures me and quite correctly so that there's an even chance of it being heads or a tails. Probability can tell you an awful lot about the world, it just can't tell you about the state of the world at a specific point in time.

"Heads is 1/2 probable.

if I flip a coin and guess heads 1/2 the time, I will be right 1/2 the time."

Your situation has been specifically engineered to show there's a difference between those two statemens and my above situation has been engineered to show that they're the same.

She's right about the probability prior to the answering scenario by saying 1/2 but she would be incorrect, I believe, once actually involved in the experiment.

So I suppose you could end up with "X is 1/2 probable is not *always* equal to 'If I guess X I will be right 1/2 of the time'" but I don't think that's really what's been established here and thus why there's no accepted solution to this problem.

I know there's another similar and much simpler example :

There's three cups and one contains the ball. You have to get the ball. You make two guesses at first. Your first guess is wrong, so there's two cups left and one contains the ball. You get offered the choice to swap or stick with your original guess. You always swap, because it improves your chance of getting the right cup from 1/3 to 1/2, even though this seems counter intuitive. As far as I'm aware there's absolutely no debate about this and it can be proven and tested in a laboratory or in your own home if you're a bit of a nerd, which leaves me confused because it seems identical to this problem yet it seems to be troubling the educated world a bit more than the old cup 'n' ball scenario.

Your thoughts?

On January 06 2013 04:52 Reason wrote:
What makes the Sleeping Beauty problem different from the Monty Hall problem aside from rhetorical embellishments?

I think once we establish the key difference(s) we can approach this in a more constructive fashion and attempt to find similar scenarios.

When I say chance I'm referring to likelihood or.. probability lol.

That's kind of useful if say you're going for an operation and the doctor says "there's a 2% chance of serious complications and you could die" you don't just say " LIAR, YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN" you accept the information he has given you, because it is indeed useful.

Philosophy 1, Reason 0

On January 06 2013 04:58 Reason wrote:
How does her own memory loss effect the probability of the outcome or the credence that can be attributed to the statement?

Why are models lies?

I respectfully disagree, please elaborate.

On January 06 2013 05:04 sam!zdat wrote:


That's what we've been talking about for all these pages.



Because if there were a model which weren't a lie, it would just be the thing you were trying to model, and it would be pointless.



Because you can't define what you mean by 'chance' and I count that as a victory for Philosophy.

On January 06 2013 05:04 sam!zdat wrote:


Because if there were a model which weren't a lie, it would just be the thing you were trying to model, and it would be pointless.

On January 06 2013 05:30 Reason wrote:
I explained what I meant by chance. Likelihood or probability.

edit: From what I've read everyone has just treated it like the Monty Hall problem and given you a bunch of mathematical proofs, if that's what you were hoping for then fine. I don't get it and I don't think others do either from their responses.

On January 06 2013 05:31 imallinson wrote:

Just because a model is not 100% accurate, which is always the case or it wouldn't be a model, doesn't mean it's a lie, it means it's an approximation. The only case where it would be a lie is if you tried to claim it was 100% accurate or even more accurate than it actually is.

On January 06 2013 05:43 sam!zdat wrote:


Those are just synonyms.



It's like the Monty Hall problem, but much harder.



An approximation is one kind of lie. Another kind of lie is claiming that your approximation is not a lie.

On January 06 2013 04:58 Reason wrote:
How does her own memory loss effect the probability of the outcome or the credence that can be attributed to the statement?

On January 06 2013 05:49 Reason wrote:

So by giving you synonyms don't you think I know what I mean by something?

I don't know why you'd randomly ask me to define a word anyway...

I'm going to read this entire thread again and then comment tomorrow but from what I've seen I don't think we're really getting at the root of the problem here.

I'm still of the opinion that it's just the Monty Hall problem re-written

and I know that's not true, but unfortunately "memory loss" isn't a sufficient enough explanation for me.

I'll try to figure this out myself I guess... might be useful to quote the Monty Hall problem in the OP for new readers and explain specifically what's different about this and why it's not been solved, quote the opposing positions and give a bit of background etc... meh.

On January 06 2013 05:50 hypercube wrote:


It's the fact that the mad philosopher changes the distribution between the two questions.