I’m sure that many of you here have read Quantum Computing Since Democritus. In the chapter on the anthropic principle the author presents the Dice Room scenario as a metaphor for human extinction. The Dice Room scenario is this:
1. You are in a world with a very, very large population (potentially unbounded.)
2. There is a madman who kidnaps 10 people and puts them in a room.
3. The madman rolls two dice. If they come up snake eyes (both ones) then he murders everyone.
4. Otherwise he releases everyone, then goes out and kidnaps 10 times as many people as before, and returns to step 3.
The question is this: if you are one of the people kidnapped at some point, what is your probability of dying? Assume you don’t know how many rounds of kidnappings have preceded yours.
As a metaphor for human extinction, think of the population of this world as being all humans who ever have or ever may live, each batch of kidnap victims as a generation of humanity, and rolling snake eyes as an extinction event.
The book gives two arguments, which are both purported to be examples of Bayesian reasoning:
1. The “proximate risk” argument says that your probability of dying is just the prior probability that the madman rolls snake eyes for your batch of kidnap victims -- 1⁄36.
2. The “proportion murdered” argument says that about 9⁄10 of all people who ever go into the Dice Room die, so your probability of dying is about 9⁄10.
Obviously this is a problem. Different decompositions of a problem should give the same answer, as long as they’re based on the same information.
I claim that the “proportion murdered” argument is wrong. Here’s why. Let pi(t) be the prior probability that you are in batch t of kidnap victims. The proportion murdered argument relies on the property that pi(t) increases exponentially with t: pi(t+1) = 10 * pi(t). If the madman murders at step t, then your probability of being in batch t is
pi(t) / SUM(u: 1 ⇐ u ⇐ t: pi(u))
and, if pi(u+1) = 10 * pi(u) for all u < t, then this does indeed work out to about 9⁄10. But the values pi(t) must sum to 1; thus they cannot increase indefinitely, and in fact it must be that pi(t) → 0 as t → infinity. This is where the “proportion murdered” argument falls apart.
The Dice Room, Human Extinction, and Consistency of Bayesian Probability Theory
I’m sure that many of you here have read Quantum Computing Since Democritus. In the chapter on the anthropic principle the author presents the Dice Room scenario as a metaphor for human extinction. The Dice Room scenario is this:
1. You are in a world with a very, very large population (potentially unbounded.)
2. There is a madman who kidnaps 10 people and puts them in a room.
3. The madman rolls two dice. If they come up snake eyes (both ones) then he murders everyone.
4. Otherwise he releases everyone, then goes out and kidnaps 10 times as many people as before, and returns to step 3.
The question is this: if you are one of the people kidnapped at some point, what is your probability of dying? Assume you don’t know how many rounds of kidnappings have preceded yours.
As a metaphor for human extinction, think of the population of this world as being all humans who ever have or ever may live, each batch of kidnap victims as a generation of humanity, and rolling snake eyes as an extinction event.
The book gives two arguments, which are both purported to be examples of Bayesian reasoning:
1. The “proximate risk” argument says that your probability of dying is just the prior probability that the madman rolls snake eyes for your batch of kidnap victims -- 1⁄36.
2. The “proportion murdered” argument says that about 9⁄10 of all people who ever go into the Dice Room die, so your probability of dying is about 9⁄10.
Obviously this is a problem. Different decompositions of a problem should give the same answer, as long as they’re based on the same information.
I claim that the “proportion murdered” argument is wrong. Here’s why. Let pi(t) be the prior probability that you are in batch t of kidnap victims. The proportion murdered argument relies on the property that pi(t) increases exponentially with t: pi(t+1) = 10 * pi(t). If the madman murders at step t, then your probability of being in batch t is
pi(t) / SUM(u: 1 ⇐ u ⇐ t: pi(u))
and, if pi(u+1) = 10 * pi(u) for all u < t, then this does indeed work out to about 9⁄10. But the values pi(t) must sum to 1; thus they cannot increase indefinitely, and in fact it must be that pi(t) → 0 as t → infinity. This is where the “proportion murdered” argument falls apart.
For a more detailed analysis, take a look at
http://bayesium.com/doomsday-and-the-dice-room-murders/
This forum has a lot of very smart people who would be well-qualified to comment on that analysis, and I would appreciate hearing your opinions.