This whole conversation isn’t about math. It is about philosophy.
The tragedy of the whole situation is that people keep thinking that.
Everything is “about philosophy” until you find a better way to formalize it. Here we have a better way to formalize the issue, which you keep ignoring. Let me spell it for you once more:
If a mathematical probabilistic model fits some real world process—then the outcomes it produces has to have the same statistical properties as the outcomes of real world process.
If we agree on this philosophical statement, then we reduced the disagreement to a mathematical question, which I’ve already resolved in the post. If you disagree, then bring up some kind of philosophical argument which we will be able to explore.
If you are a layman
I’m not. And frankly, it baffles me that you think that you need to explain that it’s possible to talk about math using natural language, to a person who has been doing it for multiple posts in a row.
mathematical objects itself have no concept of ‘experiment’ or ‘time’ or anything like those.
The more I post about anthropics the clearer it becomes that I should’ve started with posting about probability theory 101. My naive hopes that average LessWrong reader is well familiar with the basics and just confused about more complicated cases are crushed beyond salvation.
Can a probability space model a person’s beliefs at a certain point in time?
This question is vague in a similar manner to what I’ve seen from Lewis’s paper. Let’s specify it, so that we both understand what we are talking about
Did you mean to ask 1. or 2:
Can a probability space at all model some person’s belif in some circumstance at some specific point in time?
Can a probability space always model any person’s belief in any circumstances at any unspecified point in time?
The way I understand it, we agree on 1. but disagree on 2. There are definetely situations where you can correctly model uncertanity about time via probability theory. As a matter of fact, it’s most of the cases. You won’t be able to resolve our disagreement by pointing to such situations—we agree on them.
But you seem to have generalized that it means that probability theory always has to be able to do it. And I disagree. Probability space can model only aspects of reality that can be expressed in terms of it. If you want to express uncertanity between “today is Monday” or “today is Tuesday” you need a probability space for which Monday and Tuesday are mutually exclusive outcomes and it’s possible to design a specific setting—like the one in Sleeping Beauty—where they are not, where on the same trial both Monday and Tuesday are realized and the participant is well aware of it.
In particular, Beauty, when awoken, has a certain credence in the statement “Today is Monday.”
No she does not. And it’s easy to see if you actually try to formally specify what is meant here by “today” and what is meant by “today” in regular scenarios. Consider me calling your bluff about being ready to translate to first order logic at any moment.
Two awakenings with memory loss, regardless of the outcome of the coin.
Regular Sleeping Beauty
Your goal is to formally define “today” using first order logic so that a person participating in such experiments could coherently talk about event “today the coin is Heads”.
My claim is: it’s very easy to do so in 1. It’s a harder, but still doable in 2. And it’s not possible to do so in 3, without contradicting the math of probability theory.
setting up an icecream stand which is only open on Monday in one direction from the lab, another in the opposite direction which is only open on Tuesday and making this fact known to subjects of an experiment who are then asked to give you icecream and observe where the go
This is not a question about simply probability/credence. It also involves utilities and it’s implicitly assumed that the participant preferes to walk for less distance than more. Essentially you propose a betting scheme where:
P(Monday)U(Monday) = P(Tuesday)U(Tuesday)
According to my model P(Monday) = 1, P(Tuesday) = 1⁄2, so:
2U(Monday) = U(Tuesday), therefore odds are 2:1. As you see, it deals with such situations without any problem.
No she does not. And it’s easy to see if you actually try to formally specify what is meant here by “today” and what is meant by “today” in regular scenarios. Consider me calling your bluff about being ready to translate to first order logic at any moment.
I said that I can translate the math of probability spaces to first order logic, and I explicitly said that our conversation can NOT be translated to first order logic as proof that it is not about math, rather, it’s about philosophy. Please, reread that part of my previous comment.
And frankly, it baffles me that you think that you need to explain that it’s possible to talk about math using natural language, to a person who has been doing it for multiple posts in a row.
That is not what I explained and I suggest you reread that part. Here it is again:
This whole conversation isn’t about math. It is about philosophy. Math is proving theorems in various formal systems. If you are a layman, I imagine you might find it confusing that you can encounter mathematicians who seem to have conversations about math in common English. I can assure you that every mathematician in that conversation is able to translate their comments into the simple language of the given formal system they are working in, they are just simply so much of an expert that they can transmit and receive the given information more efficiently by speaking on a higher level of abstraction.
It is not possible to translate the conversation that we’re having to a simple formal system as it’s about how we should/can model some aspect of reality (which is famously dirty and complicated) with some specific mathematical object.
The structure of my argument here is the following:
Math is about concepts in formal systems, therefore an argument about math can be expressed in some simple, formal language
We are having an argument which can’t be translated to a formal system.
Therefore, we are not arguing about math.
The more I post about anthropics the clearer it becomes that I should’ve started with posting about probability theory 101. My naive hopes that average LessWrong reader is well familiar with the basics and just confused about more complicated cases are crushed beyond salvation.
Ah yes, clearly, the problem is that I don’t understand basic probability theory. (I’m a bit sad that this conversation happened to take place with my pseudonymous account.) In my previous comment, I explicitily prepared to preempt your confusion about seeing the English word ‘experiment’ with my paragraph (the part of it that you, for some reason, did not quote), and specifically linking a wiki which only contains the mathematical part of ‘probability’, and not philosophical interpretations that are paired with it commonly, but alas, it didn’t matter.
>In particular, Beauty, when awoken, has a certain credence in the statement “Today is Monday.”
No she does not. And it’s easy to see if you actually try to formally specify what is meant here by “today” and what is meant by “today” in regular scenarios. Consider me calling your bluff about being ready to translate to first order logic at any moment.
If you are not ready to accept that people have various levels of belief in the statement “Today is Monday” at all times, then I don’t think this conversation can go anywhere, to be honest. This is an extremely basic fact about reality.
EDIT: gears, in the first part you selected i″m answering an accusation of bluffing in a matter-of-fact way, how is that too combative? Also, fell free to chime in at any point it is an open forum after all..
Meta: the notion of writing probability 101 wasn’t addressed to you specifically. It was a release of my accumulated frustration of not-particularly productive arguments with several different people which again and again led to the realizations that the crux of disagreement lies in the most basics, from which you are only one person.
You are confusing to talk to, with your manner to rise seemingly unrelated points and then immediately drop them. And yet you didn’t deserve the full emotional blow that you apparently received and I’m sorry about it.
Writing a probability 101 seems to me as a constructive solution to such situations, anyway. It would provide opportunity to resolve this kinds of disagreements as soon as they arise, instead of having to backtrack to them from a very specific topic. I may still add it to my todo list.
Ah yes, clearly, the problem is that I don’t understand basic probability theory. (I’m a bit sad that this conversation happened to take place with my pseudonymous account.) In my previous comment, I explicitily prepared to preempt your confusion about seeing the English word ‘experiment’ with my paragraph (the part of it that you, for some reason, did not quote), and specifically linking a wiki which only contains the mathematical part of ‘probability’, and not philosophical interpretations that are paired with it commonly, but alas, it didn’t matter.
i figured that either you don’t know what “probability experiment” is or you are being confusing on purpose. I prefer to err in the direction of good faith, so the former was my initial hypothesis.
Now, considering that you admit that you you were perfectly aware of what I was talking about, to the point where you specifically tried to cherry pick around it, the latter became more likely. Please don’t do it anymore. Communication is hard as it is. If you know what a well established thing is, but believe it’s wrong—just say so.
Nevertheless, from this exchange, I believe, I now understand that you think that “probability experiment” isn’t a mathematical concept, but a philosophical one. I could just accept this for the sake of the argument, and we would be in a situation where we have a philosophical consensus about an issue, to a point where it’s a part of standard probability theory course that is taught to students, and you are trying to argue against it, which would put quite some burden of proof on your shoulders.
But, as a matter of fact, I don’t see anything preventing us from formally defining “probability experiment”. We already have a probability space. Now we just need a variable going from 1 to infinity for the iteration of probability experiment, and a function which takes sample space and the value of this variable as an input and returns one outcome that is realized in this particular iteration.
I said that I can translate the math of probability spaces to first order logic, and I explicitly said that our conversation can NOT be translated to first order logic as proof that it is not about math
Sorry, I misunderstood you.
Also a reminder that you you still haven’t addressed this:
If a mathematical probabilistic model fits some real world process—then the outcomes it produces has to have the same statistical properties as the outcomes of real world process.
If we agree on this philosophical statement, then we reduced the disagreement to a mathematical question, which I’ve already resolved in the post. If you disagree, then bring up some kind of philosophical argument which we will be able to explore.
Anyway, are you claiming that it’s impossible to formalize what “today” in “today the coin is Heads” means even in No-Coin-Toss problem? Why are you so certain that people have to have credence in this statement then? Would you then be proven wrong if I indeed formally specify what “Today” means?
Now, do you see, why this method doesn’t work for Two Awakenings Either Way and Sleeping Beauty problems?
If you are not ready to accept that people have various levels of belief in the statement “Today is Monday” at all times, then I don’t think this conversation can go anywhere, to be honest. This is an extremely basic fact about reality.
In reality people may have all kind of confused beliefs and ill-defined concepts in their heads. But the question of Sleeping Beauty problem is about what the ideal rational agent is supposed to believe. When I say “Beauty does not have such credence” I mean, that an ideal rational agent ought not to. That probability of such event is ill-defined.
As you may’ve noticed I’ve successfully explained the difference in real life beliefs about optimal actions in the ice-cream stand scenario, without using such ill-defined probabilities.
I hope it’s okay if I chime in (or butt in). I’ve been vaguely trying to follow along with this series, albeit without trying too hard to think through whether I agree or disagree with the math. This is the first time that what you’ve written has caused to go “what?!?”
First of all, that can’t possibly be right. Second of all, it goes against everything you’ve been saying for the entire series. Or maybe I’m misunderstanding what you meant. Let me try rephrasing.
(One meta note on this whole series that makes it hard for me to follow sometimes: you use abbreviations like “Monday” as shorthand for “a Monday awakening happens” and expect people to mentally keep track that this is definitely not shorthand for “today is Monday” … I can barely keep track of whether heads means one awakening or two… maybe should have labeled the two sides of the coin ONE and TWO instead is heads and tails)
Suppose someone who has never heard of the experiment happens to call sleeping beauty on her cell phone during the experiment and ask her “hey, my watch died and now I don’t know what day it is; could you tell me whether today is Monday or Tuesday?”
(This is probably a breach of protocol and they should have confiscated her phone until the end, but let’s ignore that.).
Are you saying that she has no good way to reason mathematically about that question? Suppose they told her “I’ll pay you a hundred bucks if it turns out you’re right, and it costs you nothing to be wrong, please just give me your best guess”. Are you saying there’s no way for her to make a good guess? If you’re not saying that, then since probabilities are more basic than utilities, shouldn’t she also have a credence?
In fact, let’s try a somewhat ad-hoc and mostly unprincipled way to formalize this. Let’s say there’s a one percent chance per day that her friend forgets what day it is and decides to call her to ask. (One percent sounds like a lot but her friend is pretty weird) Then there’s a 2% chance of it happening if there are two awakenings, and one percent if there’s only one awakening. If there are two awakenings then Monday and Tuesday are equally likely; if there’s only one awakening then it’s definitely Monday. Thus, given that her friend is on the phone, today is more likely to be Monday than Tuesday.
Okay, maybe that’s cheating… I sneaked in a Rare Event. Suppose we make it more common? Suppose her friend forgets what day it is 10% off the time. The logic still goes through: given that her friend is calling, today is more likely to be Monday than Tuesday.
Okay, 10% is still too rare. Let’s try 100%. This seems a bit confusing now. From her friends perspective, Monday is just as good as Tuesday for coming down with amnesia. But from sleeping beauty’s perspective, GIVEN THAT the experiment is not over yet, today is more likely to be Monday than Tuesday. This is true even though she might be woken up both days.
I understand that it all may be somewhat counterintuitive. I’ll try to answer whatever questions you have. If you think you have some way to formally define what “Today” means in Sleeping Beauty—feel free to try.
Second of all, it goes against everything you’ve been saying for the entire series.
Seems very much in accordance with what I’ve been saying.
Throughout the series I keep repeating the point that all we need to solve anthropics is to follow probability theory where it leads and then there will be no paradoxes. This is exactly what I’m doing here. There is no formal way to define “Today is Monday” in Sleeping Beauty and so I simply accept this, as the math tells me to, and then the “paradox” immediately resolves.
Suppose someone who has never heard of the experiment happens to call sleeping beauty on her cell phone during the experiment and ask her “hey, my watch died and now I don’t know what day it is; could you tell me whether today is Monday or Tuesday?” (This is probably a breach of protocol and they should have confiscated her phone until the end, but let’s ignore that.).
Are you saying that she has no good way to reason mathematically about that question? Suppose they told her “I’ll pay you a hundred bucks if it turns out you’re right, and it costs you nothing to be wrong, please just give me your best guess”. Are you saying there’s no way for her to make a good guess? If you’re not saying that, then since probabilities are more basic than utilities, shouldn’t she also have a credence?
Good question. First of all, as we are talking about betting I recommend you read the next post, where I explore it in more details, especially if you are not fluent in expected utility calculations.
Secondly, we can’t ignore the breach of the protocol. You see, if anything breaks the symmetry between awakening, the experiment changes in a substantial manner. See Rare Event Sleeping Beauty, where probability that the coin is Heads can actually be 1⁄3.
But we can make a similar situation without breaking the symmetry. Suppose that on every awakening a researcher comes to the room and proposes the Beauty to bet on which day it currently is. At which odds should the Beauty take the bet?
This is essentially the same betting scheme as ice-cream stand, which I deal with in the end of the previous comment.
I tried to formalize the three cases you list in the previous comment. The first one was indeed easy. The second one looks “obvious” from symmetry considerations but actually formalizing seems harder than expected. I don’t know how to do it. I don’t yet see why the second should be possible while the third is impossible.
The second one looks “obvious” from symmetry considerations but actually formalizing seems harder than expected.
Exactly! I’m glad that you actually engaged with the problem.
The first step is to realize that here “today” can’t mean “Monday xor Tuesday” because such event never happens. On every iteration of experiment both Monday and Tuesday are realized. So we can’t say that the participant knows that they are awakened on Monday xor Tuesday.
Can we say that participant knows that they are awakened on Monday or Tuesday? Sure. As a matter of fact:
P(Monday or Tuesday) = 1
P(Heads|Monday or Tuesday) = P(Heads) = 1⁄2
This works, here probability that the coin is Heads in this iteration of the experiment happens to be the same as what our intuition is telling us P(Heads|Today) is supposed to be, however we still can’t define “Today is Monday”:
P(Monday|Monday or Tuesday) = P(Monday) = 1
Which doesn’t fit our intuition.
How can this be? How can we have a seeminglly well-defined probability for “Today the coin is Heads” but not for “Today is Monday”? Either “Today” is well-defined or it’s not, right? Take some time to think about it.
What do we actually mean when we say that on an awakening the participant supposed to believe that the coin is Heads with 50% probability? Is it really about this day in particular? Or is it about something else?
The answer is: we actually mean, that on any day of the experiment be it Monday or Tuesday the participant is supposed to believe that the coin is Heads with 50% probability. We can not formally specify “Today” in this problem but there is a clever, almost cheating way to specify “Anyday” without breaking anything.
This is not easy. It requires a way to define P(A|B), when P(B) itself is undefined which is unconventional. But, moreover, it requires symmetry. P(Heads|Monday) has to be equal to P(Heads|Tuesday) only then we have a coherent P(Heads|Anyday).
This makes me uncomfortable. From the perspective of sleeping beauty, who just woke up, the statement “today is Monday” is either true or false (she just doesn’t know which one). Yet you claim she can’t meaningfully assign it a probability. This feels wrong, and yet, if I try to claim that the probability is, say, 2⁄3, then you will ask me “in what sample space?” and I don’t know the answer.
What seems clear is that the sample space is not the usual sleeping beauty sample space; it has to run metaphorically “skew” to it somehow.
If the question were “did the coin land on heads” then it’s clear that this is question is of the form “what world am I in?”. Namely, “am I in a world where the coin landed on heads, or not?”
Likewise if we ask “does a Tuesday awakening happen?”… that maps easily to question about the coin, so it’s safe.
But there should be a way to ask about today as well, I think. Let’s try something naive first and see where it breaks.
P(today is Monday | heads) = 100% is fine.
(Or is that tails? I keep forgetting.)
P(today is Monday | tails) = 50% is fine too.
(Or maybe it’s not? Maybe this is where I’m going working? Needs a bit of work but I suspect I could formalize that one if I had to.)
But if those are both fine, we should be able to combine them, like so:
heads and tails are mutually exclusive and one of them must happen, so:
P(today is Monday) =
P(heads) • P(today is Monday | heads) +
P(tails) • P(today is Monday | tails) =
0.5 + .25 = 0.75
Okay, I was expecting to get 2⁄3 here. Odd. More to the point, this felt like cheating and I can’t put my finger on why.
maybe need to think more later
This makes me uncomfortable. From the perspective of sleeping beauty, who just woke up, the statement “today is Monday” is either true or false (she just doesn’t know which one). Yet you claim she can’t meaningfully assign it a probability. This feels wrong, and yet, if I try to claim that the probability is, say, 2⁄3, then you will ask me “in what sample space?” and I don’t know the answer.
Where does the feeling of wrongness come from? Were you under impression that probability theory promised us to always assign some measure to any statement in natural language? It just so happens that most of the time we can construct an appropriate probability space. But the actual rule is about whether or not we can construct a probability space, not whether or not something is a statement in natural language.
Is it really so surprising that a person who is experiencing amnesia and the repetetion of the same experience, while being fully aware of the procedure can’t meaningfully assign credence to “this is the first time I have this experience”? Don’t you think there has to be some kind of problems with Beauty’s knowledge state? The situation whre due to memory erasure the Beauty loses the ability to coherently reason about some statements makes much more sense than the alternative proposed by thirdism—according to which the Beauty becomes more confident in the state of the coin than she would’ve been if she didn’t have her memory erased.
Another intuition pump is that “today is Monday” is not actually True xor False from the perspective of the Beauty. From her perspective it’s True xor (True and False). This is because on Tails, the Beauty isn’t reasoning just for some one awakening—she is reasoning for both of them at the same time. When she awakens the first time the statement “today is Monday” is True, and when she awakens the second time the same statement is False. So the statement “today is Monday” doesn’t have stable truth value throughout the whole iteration of probability experiment. Suppose that Beauty really does not want to make false statements. Deciding to say outloud “Today is Monday”, leads to making a false statement in 100% of iterations of experiemnt when the coin is Tails.
P(today is Monday | heads) = 100% is fine. (Or is that tails? I keep forgetting.) P(today is Monday | tails) = 50% is fine too. (Or maybe it’s not? Maybe this is where I’m going working? Needs a bit of work but I suspect I could formalize that one if I had to.) But if those are both fine, we should be able to combine them, like so: heads and tails are mutually exclusive and one of them must happen, so: P(today is Monday) = P(heads) • P(today is Monday | heads) + P(tails) • P(today is Monday | tails) = 0.5 + .25 = 0.75 Okay, I was expecting to get 2⁄3 here. Odd. More to the point, this felt like cheating and I can’t put my finger on why. maybe need to think more later
Here you are describing Lewis’s model which is appropriate for Single Awakening Problem. There the Beauty is awakened on Monday if the coin is Heads, and if the coin is Tails, she is awakened either on Monday or on Tuesday (not both). It’s easy to see that 75% of awakening in such experiment indeed happen on Monday.
It’s very good that you notice this feeling of cheating. This is a very important virtue. This is what helped me construct the correct model and solve the problem in the first place—I couldn’t accept any other—they all were somewhat off.
I think, you feel this way, because you’ve started solving the problem from the wrong end, started arguing with math, instead of accepting it. You noticed that you can’t define “Today is Monday” normally so you just assumed as an axiom that you can.
But as soon as you assume that “Today is Monday” is a coherent event with a stable truth value throughout the experiment, you inevitably start talking about a different problem, where it’s indeed the case. Where there is only one awakening in any iteration of probability experiment and so you can formally construct a sample space where “Today is Monday” is an elementary mutually exclusive outcome. There is no way around it. Either you model the problem as it is, and then “Today is Monday” is not a coherent event, or you assume that it is coherent and then you are modelling some other problem.
Ah, so I’ve reinvented the Lewis model. And I suppose that means I’ve inherited its problem where being told that today is Monday makes me think the coin is most likely heads. Oops. And I was just about to claim that there are no contradictions. Sigh.
Okay, I’m starting to understand your claim. To assign a number to P(today is Monday) we basically have two choices. We could just Make Stuff Up and say that it’s 53% or whatever. Or we could at least attempt to do Actual Math. And if our attempt at actual math is coherent enough, then there’s an implicit probability model lurking there, which we can then try to reverse engineer, similar to how you found the Lewis model lurking just beneath the surface of my attempt at math. And once the model is in hand, we can start deriving consequences from it, and Io and behold, before long we have a contradiction, like the Lewis model claiming we can predict the result of a coin flip that hasn’t even happened yet just because we know today is Monday.
And I see now why I personally find the Lewis model so tempting… I was trying to find “small” perturbations of the experiment where “today is Monday” clearly has a well defined probability. But I kept trying use Rare Events to do it, and these change the problem even if the Rare Event is not Observed. (Like, “supposing that my house gets hit by a tornado tomorrow, what is the probability that today is Monday” is fine. Come to think of it, that doesn’t follow Lewis model. Whatever, it’s still fine.)
As for why I find this uncomfortable: I knew that not any string of English words gets a probability, but I was naïve enough to think that all statements that are either true or false get one. And in particular I was hoping they this sequence of posts which kept saying “don’t worry about anthropics, just be careful with the basics and you’ll get the right answer” would show how to answer all possible variations of these “sleep study” questions… instead it turns out that it answers half the questions (the half that ask about the coin) while the other half is shown to be hopeless… and the reason why it’s hopeless really does seem to have an anthropics flavor to it.
I knew that not any string of English words gets a probability, but I was naïve enough to think that all statements that are either true or false get one.
Well, I think this one is actually correct. But, as I said in the previous comment, the statement “Today is Monday” doesn’t actually have a coherent truth value throughout the probability experiment. It’s not either True or False. It’s either True or True and False at the same time!
I was hoping they this sequence of posts which kept saying “don’t worry about anthropics, just be careful with the basics and you’ll get the right answer” would show how to answer all possible variations of these “sleep study” questions… instead it turns out that it answers half the questions (the half that ask about the coin) while the other half is shown to be hopeless… and the reason why it’s hopeless really does seem to have an anthropics flavor to it.
We can answer every coherently formulated question. Everything that is formally defined has an answer Being careful with the basics allows to understand which question is coherent and which is not. This is the same principle as with every probability theory problem.
Consider Sleeping-Beauty experiment without memory loss. There, the event Monday xor Tuesday also can’t be said to always happen. And likewise “Today is Monday” also doesn’t have a stable truth value throughout the whole experiment.
Once again, we can’t express Beauty’s uncertainty between the two days using probability theory. We are just not paying attention to it because by the conditions of the experiment, the Beauty is never in such state of uncertainty. If she remembers a previous awakening then it’s Tuesday, if she doesn’t—then it’s Monday.
All the pieces of the issue are already present. The addition of memory loss just makes it’s obvious that there is the problem with our intuition.
Re: no coherent “stable” truth value: indeed. But still… if she wonders out loud “what day is it?” at the very moment she says that, it has an answer. An experimenter who overhears her knows the answer. It seems to me that you “resolve” this tension is that the two of them are technically asking a different question, even though they are using the same words. But still… how surprised should she be if she were to learn that today is Monday? It seems that taking your stance to its conclusion, the answer would be “zero surprise: she knew for sure she would wake up on Monday so no need to be surprised it happened”
And even if she were to learn that the coin landed tails, so she knows that this is just one of a total of two awakenings, she should have zero surprise upon learning the day of the week, since she now knows both awakenings must happen. Which seems to violate conservation of expected evidence, except you already said that the there’s no coherent probabilities here for that particular question, so that’s fine too.
This makes sense, but I’m not used to it. For instance, I’m used to these questions having the same answer:
P(today is Monday)?
P(today is Monday | the sleep lab gets hit by a tornado)
Yet here, the second question is fine (assuming tornadoes are rare enough that we can ignore the chance of two on consecutive days) while the first makes no sense because we can’t even define “today”
It makes sense but it’s very disorienting, like incompleteness theorem level of disorientation or even more
indeed. But still… if she wonders out loud “what day is it?” at the very moment she says that, it has an answer.
There is no “but”. As long as the Beauty is unable to distinguish between Monday and Tuesday awakenings, as long as the decision process which leads her to say the phrase “what day is it” works the same way, from her perspective there is no one “very moment she says that”. On Tails, there are two different moments when she says this, and the answer is different for them. So there is no answer for her
An experimenter who overhears her knows the answer. It seems to me that you “resolve” this tension is that the two of them are technically asking a different question, even though they are using the same words
Yes, you are correct. From the position of the experimenter, who knows which day it is, or who is hired to work only on one random day this is a coherent question with an actual answer. The words we use are the same but mathematical formalism is different.
For an experimenter who knows that it’s Monday the probability that today is Monday is simply:
P(Monday|Monday) = 1
For an experimenter who is hired to work only on one random day it is:
P(Monday|Monday xor Tuesday) = 1⁄2
But still… how surprised should she be if she were to learn that today is Monday? It seems that taking your stance to its conclusion, the answer would be “zero surprise: she knew for sure she would wake up on Monday so no need to be surprised it happened”
And even if she were to learn that the coin landed tails, so she knows that this is just one of a total of two awakenings, she should have zero surprise upon learning the day of the week, since she now knows both awakenings must happen.
Completely correct. Beauty knew that she would be awaken on Monday either way and so she is not surprised. This is a standard thing with non-mutually exclusive events. Consider this:
A coin is tossed and you are put to sleep. On Heads there will be a red ball in your room. On Tails there will be a red and a blue ball in your room. How surprised should you be to find a red ball in your room?
Which seems to violate conservation of expected evidence, except you already said that the there’s no coherent probabilities here for that particular question, so that’s fine too.
The appearance of violation of conservation of expected evidence comes from the belief that awakening on Monday and on Tuesday are mutually exclusive, while they are, in fact sequential.
This makes sense, but I’m not used to it. For instance, I’m used to these questions having the same answer:
P(today is Monday)?
P(today is Monday | the sleep lab gets hit by a tornado)
Yet here, the second question is fine (assuming tornadoes are rare enough that we can ignore the chance of two on consecutive days) while the first makes no sense because we can’t even define “today”
It makes sense but it’s very disorienting, like incompleteness theorem level of disorientation or even more
I completely understand. It is counterintuitive because evolution didn’t prepare us to deal with situations where an experience is repeated the same while we receive memory loss. As I write in the post:
If I forget what is the current day of the week in my regular life, well, it’s only natural to start from a 1⁄7 prior per day and work from there. I can do it because the causal process that leads to me forgetting such information can be roughly modeled as a low probability occurrence which can happen to me at any day.
It wouldn’t be the case, if I was guaranteed to also forget the current day of the week on the next 6 days as well, after I forgot it on the first one. This would be a different causal process, with different properties—causation between forgetting—and it has to be modeled differently. But we do not actually encounter such situations in everyday life, and so our intuition is caught completely flat footed by them.
The whole paradox arises from this issue with our intuition, and just like with incompleteness theorem (thanks for the flattering comparison, btw), what we need to do now is to re-calibrate our intuitions, make it more accustomed to the truth, preserved by the math, instead of trying to fight it.
The tragedy of the whole situation is that people keep thinking that.
Everything is “about philosophy” until you find a better way to formalize it. Here we have a better way to formalize the issue, which you keep ignoring. Let me spell it for you once more:
If a mathematical probabilistic model fits some real world process—then the outcomes it produces has to have the same statistical properties as the outcomes of real world process.
If we agree on this philosophical statement, then we reduced the disagreement to a mathematical question, which I’ve already resolved in the post. If you disagree, then bring up some kind of philosophical argument which we will be able to explore.
I’m not. And frankly, it baffles me that you think that you need to explain that it’s possible to talk about math using natural language, to a person who has been doing it for multiple posts in a row.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiment_(probability_theory)
The more I post about anthropics the clearer it becomes that I should’ve started with posting about probability theory 101. My naive hopes that average LessWrong reader is well familiar with the basics and just confused about more complicated cases are crushed beyond salvation.
This question is vague in a similar manner to what I’ve seen from Lewis’s paper. Let’s specify it, so that we both understand what we are talking about
Did you mean to ask 1. or 2:
Can a probability space at all model some person’s belif in some circumstance at some specific point in time?
Can a probability space always model any person’s belief in any circumstances at any unspecified point in time?
The way I understand it, we agree on 1. but disagree on 2. There are definetely situations where you can correctly model uncertanity about time via probability theory. As a matter of fact, it’s most of the cases. You won’t be able to resolve our disagreement by pointing to such situations—we agree on them.
But you seem to have generalized that it means that probability theory always has to be able to do it. And I disagree. Probability space can model only aspects of reality that can be expressed in terms of it. If you want to express uncertanity between “today is Monday” or “today is Tuesday” you need a probability space for which Monday and Tuesday are mutually exclusive outcomes and it’s possible to design a specific setting—like the one in Sleeping Beauty—where they are not, where on the same trial both Monday and Tuesday are realized and the participant is well aware of it.
No she does not. And it’s easy to see if you actually try to formally specify what is meant here by “today” and what is meant by “today” in regular scenarios. Consider me calling your bluff about being ready to translate to first order logic at any moment.
Let’s make it three different situations:
No-Coin-Toss problem.
Two awakenings with memory loss, regardless of the outcome of the coin.
Regular Sleeping Beauty
Your goal is to formally define “today” using first order logic so that a person participating in such experiments could coherently talk about event “today the coin is Heads”.
My claim is: it’s very easy to do so in 1. It’s a harder, but still doable in 2. And it’s not possible to do so in 3, without contradicting the math of probability theory.
This is not a question about simply probability/credence. It also involves utilities and it’s implicitly assumed that the participant preferes to walk for less distance than more. Essentially you propose a betting scheme where:
P(Monday)U(Monday) = P(Tuesday)U(Tuesday)
According to my model P(Monday) = 1, P(Tuesday) = 1⁄2, so:
2U(Monday) = U(Tuesday), therefore odds are 2:1. As you see, it deals with such situations without any problem.
I said that I can translate the math of probability spaces to first order logic, and I explicitly said that our conversation can NOT be translated to first order logic as proof that it is not about math, rather, it’s about philosophy. Please, reread that part of my previous comment.
That is not what I explained and I suggest you reread that part. Here it is again:
The structure of my argument here is the following:
Math is about concepts in formal systems, therefore an argument about math can be expressed in some simple, formal language
We are having an argument which can’t be translated to a formal system.
Therefore, we are not arguing about math.
Ah yes, clearly, the problem is that I don’t understand basic probability theory. (I’m a bit sad that this conversation happened to take place with my pseudonymous account.) In my previous comment, I explicitily prepared to preempt your confusion about seeing the English word ‘experiment’ with my paragraph (the part of it that you, for some reason, did not quote), and specifically linking a wiki which only contains the mathematical part of ‘probability’, and not philosophical interpretations that are paired with it commonly, but alas, it didn’t matter.
If you are not ready to accept that people have various levels of belief in the statement “Today is Monday” at all times, then I don’t think this conversation can go anywhere, to be honest. This is an extremely basic fact about reality.
EDIT: gears, in the first part you selected i″m answering an accusation of bluffing in a matter-of-fact way, how is that too combative? Also, fell free to chime in at any point it is an open forum after all..
Meta: the notion of writing probability 101 wasn’t addressed to you specifically. It was a release of my accumulated frustration of not-particularly productive arguments with several different people which again and again led to the realizations that the crux of disagreement lies in the most basics, from which you are only one person.
You are confusing to talk to, with your manner to rise seemingly unrelated points and then immediately drop them. And yet you didn’t deserve the full emotional blow that you apparently received and I’m sorry about it.
Writing a probability 101 seems to me as a constructive solution to such situations, anyway. It would provide opportunity to resolve this kinds of disagreements as soon as they arise, instead of having to backtrack to them from a very specific topic. I may still add it to my todo list.
i figured that either you don’t know what “probability experiment” is or you are being confusing on purpose. I prefer to err in the direction of good faith, so the former was my initial hypothesis.
Now, considering that you admit that you you were perfectly aware of what I was talking about, to the point where you specifically tried to cherry pick around it, the latter became more likely. Please don’t do it anymore. Communication is hard as it is. If you know what a well established thing is, but believe it’s wrong—just say so.
Nevertheless, from this exchange, I believe, I now understand that you think that “probability experiment” isn’t a mathematical concept, but a philosophical one. I could just accept this for the sake of the argument, and we would be in a situation where we have a philosophical consensus about an issue, to a point where it’s a part of standard probability theory course that is taught to students, and you are trying to argue against it, which would put quite some burden of proof on your shoulders.
But, as a matter of fact, I don’t see anything preventing us from formally defining “probability experiment”. We already have a probability space. Now we just need a variable going from 1 to infinity for the iteration of probability experiment, and a function which takes sample space and the value of this variable as an input and returns one outcome that is realized in this particular iteration.
Sorry, I misunderstood you.
Also a reminder that you you still haven’t addressed this:
Anyway, are you claiming that it’s impossible to formalize what “today” in “today the coin is Heads” means even in No-Coin-Toss problem? Why are you so certain that people have to have credence in this statement then? Would you then be proven wrong if I indeed formally specify what “Today” means?
Because, as I said, it’s quite easy.
Today = Monday xor Tuesday
P(Today) = P(Monday xor Tuesday) = 1
P(Heads|Today) = P(Heads|Monday xor Tuesday) = P(Heads) = 1⁄3
Likewise we can talk about “Today is Monday”:
P(Monday|Today) = P(Monday|Monday xor Tuesday) = P(Monday) = 1⁄2
Now, do you see, why this method doesn’t work for Two Awakenings Either Way and Sleeping Beauty problems?
In reality people may have all kind of confused beliefs and ill-defined concepts in their heads. But the question of Sleeping Beauty problem is about what the ideal rational agent is supposed to believe. When I say “Beauty does not have such credence” I mean, that an ideal rational agent ought not to. That probability of such event is ill-defined.
As you may’ve noticed I’ve successfully explained the difference in real life beliefs about optimal actions in the ice-cream stand scenario, without using such ill-defined probabilities.
I hope it’s okay if I chime in (or butt in). I’ve been vaguely trying to follow along with this series, albeit without trying too hard to think through whether I agree or disagree with the math. This is the first time that what you’ve written has caused to go “what?!?”
First of all, that can’t possibly be right. Second of all, it goes against everything you’ve been saying for the entire series. Or maybe I’m misunderstanding what you meant. Let me try rephrasing.
(One meta note on this whole series that makes it hard for me to follow sometimes: you use abbreviations like “Monday” as shorthand for “a Monday awakening happens” and expect people to mentally keep track that this is definitely not shorthand for “today is Monday” … I can barely keep track of whether heads means one awakening or two… maybe should have labeled the two sides of the coin ONE and TWO instead is heads and tails)
Suppose someone who has never heard of the experiment happens to call sleeping beauty on her cell phone during the experiment and ask her “hey, my watch died and now I don’t know what day it is; could you tell me whether today is Monday or Tuesday?” (This is probably a breach of protocol and they should have confiscated her phone until the end, but let’s ignore that.).
Are you saying that she has no good way to reason mathematically about that question? Suppose they told her “I’ll pay you a hundred bucks if it turns out you’re right, and it costs you nothing to be wrong, please just give me your best guess”. Are you saying there’s no way for her to make a good guess? If you’re not saying that, then since probabilities are more basic than utilities, shouldn’t she also have a credence?
In fact, let’s try a somewhat ad-hoc and mostly unprincipled way to formalize this. Let’s say there’s a one percent chance per day that her friend forgets what day it is and decides to call her to ask. (One percent sounds like a lot but her friend is pretty weird) Then there’s a 2% chance of it happening if there are two awakenings, and one percent if there’s only one awakening. If there are two awakenings then Monday and Tuesday are equally likely; if there’s only one awakening then it’s definitely Monday. Thus, given that her friend is on the phone, today is more likely to be Monday than Tuesday.
Okay, maybe that’s cheating… I sneaked in a Rare Event. Suppose we make it more common? Suppose her friend forgets what day it is 10% off the time. The logic still goes through: given that her friend is calling, today is more likely to be Monday than Tuesday.
Okay, 10% is still too rare. Let’s try 100%. This seems a bit confusing now. From her friends perspective, Monday is just as good as Tuesday for coming down with amnesia. But from sleeping beauty’s perspective, GIVEN THAT the experiment is not over yet, today is more likely to be Monday than Tuesday. This is true even though she might be woken up both days.
Or is everything I just wrote nonsensical?
I understand that it all may be somewhat counterintuitive. I’ll try to answer whatever questions you have. If you think you have some way to formally define what “Today” means in Sleeping Beauty—feel free to try.
Seems very much in accordance with what I’ve been saying.
Throughout the series I keep repeating the point that all we need to solve anthropics is to follow probability theory where it leads and then there will be no paradoxes. This is exactly what I’m doing here. There is no formal way to define “Today is Monday” in Sleeping Beauty and so I simply accept this, as the math tells me to, and then the “paradox” immediately resolves.
Good question. First of all, as we are talking about betting I recommend you read the next post, where I explore it in more details, especially if you are not fluent in expected utility calculations.
Secondly, we can’t ignore the breach of the protocol. You see, if anything breaks the symmetry between awakening, the experiment changes in a substantial manner. See Rare Event Sleeping Beauty, where probability that the coin is Heads can actually be 1⁄3.
But we can make a similar situation without breaking the symmetry. Suppose that on every awakening a researcher comes to the room and proposes the Beauty to bet on which day it currently is. At which odds should the Beauty take the bet?
This is essentially the same betting scheme as ice-cream stand, which I deal with in the end of the previous comment.
I tried to formalize the three cases you list in the previous comment. The first one was indeed easy. The second one looks “obvious” from symmetry considerations but actually formalizing seems harder than expected. I don’t know how to do it. I don’t yet see why the second should be possible while the third is impossible.
Exactly! I’m glad that you actually engaged with the problem.
The first step is to realize that here “today” can’t mean “Monday xor Tuesday” because such event never happens. On every iteration of experiment both Monday and Tuesday are realized. So we can’t say that the participant knows that they are awakened on Monday xor Tuesday.
Can we say that participant knows that they are awakened on Monday or Tuesday? Sure. As a matter of fact:
P(Monday or Tuesday) = 1
P(Heads|Monday or Tuesday) = P(Heads) = 1⁄2
This works, here probability that the coin is Heads in this iteration of the experiment happens to be the same as what our intuition is telling us P(Heads|Today) is supposed to be, however we still can’t define “Today is Monday”:
P(Monday|Monday or Tuesday) = P(Monday) = 1
Which doesn’t fit our intuition.
How can this be? How can we have a seeminglly well-defined probability for “Today the coin is Heads” but not for “Today is Monday”? Either “Today” is well-defined or it’s not, right? Take some time to think about it.
What do we actually mean when we say that on an awakening the participant supposed to believe that the coin is Heads with 50% probability? Is it really about this day in particular? Or is it about something else?
The answer is: we actually mean, that on any day of the experiment be it Monday or Tuesday the participant is supposed to believe that the coin is Heads with 50% probability. We can not formally specify “Today” in this problem but there is a clever, almost cheating way to specify “Anyday” without breaking anything.
This is not easy. It requires a way to define P(A|B), when P(B) itself is undefined which is unconventional. But, moreover, it requires symmetry. P(Heads|Monday) has to be equal to P(Heads|Tuesday) only then we have a coherent P(Heads|Anyday).
This makes me uncomfortable. From the perspective of sleeping beauty, who just woke up, the statement “today is Monday” is either true or false (she just doesn’t know which one). Yet you claim she can’t meaningfully assign it a probability. This feels wrong, and yet, if I try to claim that the probability is, say, 2⁄3, then you will ask me “in what sample space?” and I don’t know the answer.
What seems clear is that the sample space is not the usual sleeping beauty sample space; it has to run metaphorically “skew” to it somehow.
If the question were “did the coin land on heads” then it’s clear that this is question is of the form “what world am I in?”. Namely, “am I in a world where the coin landed on heads, or not?”
Likewise if we ask “does a Tuesday awakening happen?”… that maps easily to question about the coin, so it’s safe.
But there should be a way to ask about today as well, I think. Let’s try something naive first and see where it breaks. P(today is Monday | heads) = 100% is fine. (Or is that tails? I keep forgetting.) P(today is Monday | tails) = 50% is fine too. (Or maybe it’s not? Maybe this is where I’m going working? Needs a bit of work but I suspect I could formalize that one if I had to.) But if those are both fine, we should be able to combine them, like so: heads and tails are mutually exclusive and one of them must happen, so: P(today is Monday) = P(heads) • P(today is Monday | heads) + P(tails) • P(today is Monday | tails) = 0.5 + .25 = 0.75 Okay, I was expecting to get 2⁄3 here. Odd. More to the point, this felt like cheating and I can’t put my finger on why. maybe need to think more later
Where does the feeling of wrongness come from? Were you under impression that probability theory promised us to always assign some measure to any statement in natural language? It just so happens that most of the time we can construct an appropriate probability space. But the actual rule is about whether or not we can construct a probability space, not whether or not something is a statement in natural language.
Is it really so surprising that a person who is experiencing amnesia and the repetetion of the same experience, while being fully aware of the procedure can’t meaningfully assign credence to “this is the first time I have this experience”? Don’t you think there has to be some kind of problems with Beauty’s knowledge state? The situation whre due to memory erasure the Beauty loses the ability to coherently reason about some statements makes much more sense than the alternative proposed by thirdism—according to which the Beauty becomes more confident in the state of the coin than she would’ve been if she didn’t have her memory erased.
Another intuition pump is that “today is Monday” is not actually True xor False from the perspective of the Beauty. From her perspective it’s True xor (True and False). This is because on Tails, the Beauty isn’t reasoning just for some one awakening—she is reasoning for both of them at the same time. When she awakens the first time the statement “today is Monday” is True, and when she awakens the second time the same statement is False. So the statement “today is Monday” doesn’t have stable truth value throughout the whole iteration of probability experiment. Suppose that Beauty really does not want to make false statements. Deciding to say outloud “Today is Monday”, leads to making a false statement in 100% of iterations of experiemnt when the coin is Tails.
Here you are describing Lewis’s model which is appropriate for Single Awakening Problem. There the Beauty is awakened on Monday if the coin is Heads, and if the coin is Tails, she is awakened either on Monday or on Tuesday (not both). It’s easy to see that 75% of awakening in such experiment indeed happen on Monday.
It’s very good that you notice this feeling of cheating. This is a very important virtue. This is what helped me construct the correct model and solve the problem in the first place—I couldn’t accept any other—they all were somewhat off.
I think, you feel this way, because you’ve started solving the problem from the wrong end, started arguing with math, instead of accepting it. You noticed that you can’t define “Today is Monday” normally so you just assumed as an axiom that you can.
But as soon as you assume that “Today is Monday” is a coherent event with a stable truth value throughout the experiment, you inevitably start talking about a different problem, where it’s indeed the case. Where there is only one awakening in any iteration of probability experiment and so you can formally construct a sample space where “Today is Monday” is an elementary mutually exclusive outcome. There is no way around it. Either you model the problem as it is, and then “Today is Monday” is not a coherent event, or you assume that it is coherent and then you are modelling some other problem.
Ah, so I’ve reinvented the Lewis model. And I suppose that means I’ve inherited its problem where being told that today is Monday makes me think the coin is most likely heads. Oops. And I was just about to claim that there are no contradictions. Sigh.
Okay, I’m starting to understand your claim. To assign a number to P(today is Monday) we basically have two choices. We could just Make Stuff Up and say that it’s 53% or whatever. Or we could at least attempt to do Actual Math. And if our attempt at actual math is coherent enough, then there’s an implicit probability model lurking there, which we can then try to reverse engineer, similar to how you found the Lewis model lurking just beneath the surface of my attempt at math. And once the model is in hand, we can start deriving consequences from it, and Io and behold, before long we have a contradiction, like the Lewis model claiming we can predict the result of a coin flip that hasn’t even happened yet just because we know today is Monday.
And I see now why I personally find the Lewis model so tempting… I was trying to find “small” perturbations of the experiment where “today is Monday” clearly has a well defined probability. But I kept trying use Rare Events to do it, and these change the problem even if the Rare Event is not Observed. (Like, “supposing that my house gets hit by a tornado tomorrow, what is the probability that today is Monday” is fine. Come to think of it, that doesn’t follow Lewis model. Whatever, it’s still fine.)
As for why I find this uncomfortable: I knew that not any string of English words gets a probability, but I was naïve enough to think that all statements that are either true or false get one. And in particular I was hoping they this sequence of posts which kept saying “don’t worry about anthropics, just be careful with the basics and you’ll get the right answer” would show how to answer all possible variations of these “sleep study” questions… instead it turns out that it answers half the questions (the half that ask about the coin) while the other half is shown to be hopeless… and the reason why it’s hopeless really does seem to have an anthropics flavor to it.
Well, I think this one is actually correct. But, as I said in the previous comment, the statement “Today is Monday” doesn’t actually have a coherent truth value throughout the probability experiment. It’s not either True or False. It’s either True or True and False at the same time!
We can answer every coherently formulated question. Everything that is formally defined has an answer Being careful with the basics allows to understand which question is coherent and which is not. This is the same principle as with every probability theory problem.
Consider Sleeping-Beauty experiment without memory loss. There, the event Monday xor Tuesday also can’t be said to always happen. And likewise “Today is Monday” also doesn’t have a stable truth value throughout the whole experiment.
Once again, we can’t express Beauty’s uncertainty between the two days using probability theory. We are just not paying attention to it because by the conditions of the experiment, the Beauty is never in such state of uncertainty. If she remembers a previous awakening then it’s Tuesday, if she doesn’t—then it’s Monday.
All the pieces of the issue are already present. The addition of memory loss just makes it’s obvious that there is the problem with our intuition.
Re: no coherent “stable” truth value: indeed. But still… if she wonders out loud “what day is it?” at the very moment she says that, it has an answer. An experimenter who overhears her knows the answer. It seems to me that you “resolve” this tension is that the two of them are technically asking a different question, even though they are using the same words. But still… how surprised should she be if she were to learn that today is Monday? It seems that taking your stance to its conclusion, the answer would be “zero surprise: she knew for sure she would wake up on Monday so no need to be surprised it happened”
And even if she were to learn that the coin landed tails, so she knows that this is just one of a total of two awakenings, she should have zero surprise upon learning the day of the week, since she now knows both awakenings must happen. Which seems to violate conservation of expected evidence, except you already said that the there’s no coherent probabilities here for that particular question, so that’s fine too.
This makes sense, but I’m not used to it. For instance, I’m used to these questions having the same answer:
P(today is Monday)?
P(today is Monday | the sleep lab gets hit by a tornado)
Yet here, the second question is fine (assuming tornadoes are rare enough that we can ignore the chance of two on consecutive days) while the first makes no sense because we can’t even define “today”
It makes sense but it’s very disorienting, like incompleteness theorem level of disorientation or even more
There is no “but”. As long as the Beauty is unable to distinguish between Monday and Tuesday awakenings, as long as the decision process which leads her to say the phrase “what day is it” works the same way, from her perspective there is no one “very moment she says that”. On Tails, there are two different moments when she says this, and the answer is different for them. So there is no answer for her
Yes, you are correct. From the position of the experimenter, who knows which day it is, or who is hired to work only on one random day this is a coherent question with an actual answer. The words we use are the same but mathematical formalism is different.
For an experimenter who knows that it’s Monday the probability that today is Monday is simply:
P(Monday|Monday) = 1
For an experimenter who is hired to work only on one random day it is:
P(Monday|Monday xor Tuesday) = 1⁄2
Completely correct. Beauty knew that she would be awaken on Monday either way and so she is not surprised. This is a standard thing with non-mutually exclusive events. Consider this:
A coin is tossed and you are put to sleep. On Heads there will be a red ball in your room. On Tails there will be a red and a blue ball in your room. How surprised should you be to find a red ball in your room?
The appearance of violation of conservation of expected evidence comes from the belief that awakening on Monday and on Tuesday are mutually exclusive, while they are, in fact sequential.
I completely understand. It is counterintuitive because evolution didn’t prepare us to deal with situations where an experience is repeated the same while we receive memory loss. As I write in the post:
The whole paradox arises from this issue with our intuition, and just like with incompleteness theorem (thanks for the flattering comparison, btw), what we need to do now is to re-calibrate our intuitions, make it more accustomed to the truth, preserved by the math, instead of trying to fight it.
Thanks :) the recalibration may take a while… my intuition is still fighting ;)