Sleeping Beauty Problem Can Be Explained by Perspective Disagreement (II)
This is the second part of my argument. It mainly involves a counter example to SIA and Thirdism. Different part of the argument can be found here: I, II, III, IV. The 81-Day Experiment(81D): There is a circular corridor connected to 81 rooms with identical doors. At the beginning all rooms have blue walls. A random number R is generated between 1 and 81. Then a painter randomly selects R rooms and paint them red. Beauty would be put into a drug induced sleep lasting 81 day, spending one day in each room. An experimenter would wake her up if the room she currently sleeps in is red and let her sleep through the day if the room is blue. Her memory of each awakening would be wiped at the end of the day. Each time after beauty wakes up she is allowed to exit her room and open some other doors in the corridor to check the colour of those rooms. Now suppose one day after opening 8 random doors she sees 2 red rooms and 6 blue rooms. How should beauty estimate the total number of red rooms(R). For halfers, waking up in a red room does not give beauty any more information except that R>0. Randomly opening 8 doors means she took a simple random sample of size 8 from a population of 80. In the sample 2 rooms (1/4) are red. Therefore the total number of red rooms(R) can be easily estimated as 1/4 of the 80 rooms plus her own room, 21 in total. For thirders, beauty's own room is treated differently.As SIA states, finding herself awake is as if she chose a random room from the 81 rooms and find out it is red. Therefore her room and the other 8 rooms she checked are all in the same sample. This means she has a simple random sample of size 9 from a population of 81. 3 out of 9 rooms in the sample (1/3) are red. The total number of red rooms can be easily estimated as a third of the 81 rooms, 27 in total. If a bayesian analysis is performed R=21 and R=27 would also be the case with highest credence according to halfers and thirders respectively. It is worth mentioning if
The doomsday argument is controversial not because its conclusion is bleak but because it has some pretty hard to explain implications. Like the choice of reference class is arbitrary but affects the conclusion, it also gives some unreasonable predicting power and backward causations. Anyone trying to understand it would eventually have to reject the argument or find some way to reconcile with these implications. To me neither position are biased as long as it is sufficiently argued.