There is no payoff involved. Introducing a payoff only confuses matters.
I define subjective probability in terms of what wagers I would be willing to make. I think a good rule of thumb is that if you can’t figure out how to turn the problem into a wager you don’t know what you’re asking. And, in fact, when we introduce payoffs to this problem it becomes extremely clear why we get two answers. The debate then becomes a definition debate over what wager we mean by the sentence “what credence should the patient assign...”
As I just explained, the fact that the original author of the story wrote amnesia into it tells you which definition the author of the story was using.
And that’s a good argument you’ve got there, but I don’t think that is totally obvious on the first read of the problem. It’s a weird feature of a probability problem for the relevant wager to be offered once under some circumstances and twice under others. So people get confused. It is a little tricky. But, far from confusing things, that entire issue can be avoided if we specify exactly how the payoff works when we state the problem! So I don’t know why you’re freaking out about Less Wrong’s ability to answer these problems when it seems pretty clear that people interpret the question differently, not that they can’t think through the issues.
I define subjective probability in terms of what wagers I would be willing to make. I think a good rule of thumb is that if you can’t figure out how to turn the problem into a wager you don’t know what you’re asking. And, in fact, when we introduce payoffs to this problem it becomes extremely clear why we get two answers. The debate then becomes a definition debate over what wager we mean by the sentence “what credence should the patient assign...”
As I just explained, the fact that the original author of the story wrote amnesia into it tells you which definition the author of the story was using.
And that’s a good argument you’ve got there, but I don’t think that is totally obvious on the first read of the problem. It’s a weird feature of a probability problem for the relevant wager to be offered once under some circumstances and twice under others. So people get confused. It is a little tricky. But, far from confusing things, that entire issue can be avoided if we specify exactly how the payoff works when we state the problem! So I don’t know why you’re freaking out about Less Wrong’s ability to answer these problems when it seems pretty clear that people interpret the question differently, not that they can’t think through the issues.
(Not my downvote, btw)