I wasn't sneaky about it.
I don't think I got visibly hurt or angry. In fact, when I did it, I was feeling more tempted than angry. I was in the middle of a conversation with another guy, and her rear appeared nearby, and I couldn't resist.
It made me seem like a jerk, which is bad, but not necessarily low status. Acting without apparent fear of the consequences, even stupidly, is often respected as long as you get away with it.
Another factor is that this was a 'high status' woman. I'm not sure but she might be related to a celebrity. (I didn't know that at the time.) Hence, any story linking me and her may be 'bad publicity' for me but there is the old saying 'there's no such thing as bad publicity'.
It was a single swat to the buttocks, done in full sight of everyone. There was other ass-spanking going on, between people who knew each other - done as a joke - so in context it was not so unusual. I would not have done it outside of that context, nor would I have done it if my inhibitions had not been lowered by alcohol; nor would I do it again even if they are.
Yes, she deserved it!
It was a mistake. Why? It exposed me to more risk than was worthwhile, and while I might have hoped that (aside from simple punishment) it would teach her the lesson tha...
Women seem to have a strong urge to check out what shoes a man has on, and judge their quality. Even they can't explain it. Perhaps at some unconscious level, they are guarding against men who 'cheat' by wearing high heels.
I can confirm that this does happen at least sometimes (USA). I was at a bar, and I approached a woman who is probably considered attractive by many (skinny, bottle blonde) and started talking to her. She soon asked me to buy her a drink. Being not well versed in such matters, I agreed, and asked her what she wanted. She named an expensive wine, which I agreed to get her a glass of. She largely ignored me thereafter, and didn't even bother taking the drink!
(I did obtain some measure of revenge later that night by spanking her rear end hard, though I d...
But Stuart_Armstrong's description is asking us to condition on the camera showing 'you' surviving.
That condition imposes post-selection.
I guess it doesn't matter much if we agree on what the probabilities are for the pre-selection v. the post-selection case.
Wrong - it matters a lot because you are using the wrong probabilities for the survivor (in practice this affects things like belief in the Doomsday argument).
...I believe the strong law of large numbers implies that the relative frequency converges almost surely to p as the number of Bernoulli t
It is only possible to fairly "test" beliefs when a related objective probability is agreed upon
That's wrong; behavioral tests (properly set up) can reveal what people really believe, bypassing talk of probabilities.
Would you really guess "red", or do we agree?
Under the strict conditions above and the other conditions I have outlined (long-time-after, no other observers in the multiverse besides the prisoners), then sure, I'd be a fool not to guess red.
But I wouldn't recommend it to others, because if there are more people, that ...
The way you set up the decision is not a fair test of belief, because the stakes are more like $1.50 to $99.
To fix that, we need to make 2 changes:
1) Let us give any reward/punishment to a third party we care about, e.g. SB.
2) The total reward/punishment she gets won't depend on the number of people who make the decision. Instead, we will poll all of the survivors from all trials and pool the results (or we can pick 1 survivor at random, but let's do it the first way).
The majority decides what guess to use, on the principle of one man, one vote. That is ...
If that were the case, the camera might show the person being killed; indeed, that is 50% likely.
Pre-selection is not the same as our case of post-selection. My calculation shows the difference it makes.
Now, if the fraction of observers of each type that are killed is the same, the difference between the two selections cancels out. That is what tends to happen in the many-shot case, and we can then replace probabilities with relative frequencies. One-shot probability is not relative frequency.
No, it shouldn't - that's the point. Why would you think it should?
Note that I am already taking observer-counting into account - among observers that actually exist in each coin-outcome-scenario. Hence the fact that P(heads) approaches 1/3 in the many-shot case.
Adding that condition is post-selection.
Note that "If you (being asked before the killing) will survive, what color is your door likely to be?" is very different from "Given that you did already survive, ...?". A member of the population to which the first of these applies might not survive. This changes the result. It's the difference between pre-selection and post-selection.
This subtly differs from Bostrom's description, which says 'When she awakes on Monday', rather than 'Monday or Tuesday.'
He makes clear though that she doesn't know which day it is, so his description is equivalent. He should have written it more clearly, since it can be misleading on the first pass through his paper, but if you read it carefully you should be OK.
So on average ...
'On average' gives you the many-shot case, by definition.
In the 1-shot case, there is a 50% chance she wakes up once (heads), and a 50% chance she wakes up twice (tails). ...
The 'selection' I have in mind is the selection, at the beginning of the scenario, of the person designated by 'you' and 'your' in the scenario's description.
If 'you' were selected at the beginning, then you might not have survived.
There are always 2 coin flips, and the results are not known to SB. I can't guess what you mean, but I think you need to reread Bostrom's paper.
Under a frequentist interpretation
In the 1-shot case, the whole concept of a frequentist interpretation makes no sense. Frequentist thinking invokes the many-shot case.
...Reading Bostrom's explanation of the SB problem, and interpreting 'what should her credence be that the coin will fall heads?' as a question asking the relative frequency of the coin coming up heads, it seems to me that the answer is 1/2 however many times Sleeping Beauty's later woken up: the fair coin will always be tossed after she awakes on Monday, and a fair coin's probability of
A few minutes later, it is announced that whoever was to be killed has been killed. What are your odds of being blue-doored now?
Presumably you heard the announcement.
This is post-selection, because pre-selection would have been "Either you are dead, or you hear that whoever was to be killed has been killed. What are your odds of being blue-doored now?"
...The 1-shot case (which I think you are using to refer to situation B in Stuart_Armstrong's top-level post...?) describes a situation defined to have multiple possible outcomes, but there's only
I think talking about 'observers' might be muddling the issue here.
That's probably why you don't understand the result; it is an anthropic selection effect. See my reply to Academician above.
...We could talk instead about creatures that don't understand the experiment, and the result would be the same. Say we have two Petri dishes, one dish containing a single bacterium, and the other containing a trillion. We randomly select one of the bacteria (representing me in the original door experiment) to stain with a dye. We flip a coin: if it's heads, we kill
Given that others seem to be using it to get the right answer, consider that you may rightfully believe SIA is wrong because you have a different interpretation of it, which happens to be wrong.
Huh? I haven't been using the SIA, I have been attacking it by deriving the right answer from general considerations (that is, P(tails) = 1/2 for the 1-shot case in the long-time-after limit) and noting that the SIA is inconsistent with it. The result of the SIA is well known - in this case, 0.01; I don't think anyone disputes that.
...P(R|KS) = P(R|K)·P(S|RK)/P(S
Mitchell, you are on to an important point: Observers must be well-defined.
Worlds are not well-defined, and there is no definite number of worlds (given standard physics).
You may be interested in my proposed Many Computations Interpretation, in which observers are identified not with so-called 'worlds' but with implementations of computations: http://arxiv.org/abs/0709.0544
See my blog for further discussion: http://onqm.blogspot.com/