I don’t follow your latest argument against thirders. You claim that the denominator
#(heads & monday) + #(tails & monday) + #(tails & tuesday)
counts events that are not mutually exclusive. I don’t see this. They look mutually exclusive to me—heads is exclusive of tails, and monday is exclusive of tuesday, Could you elaborate this argument? Where does exclusivity fail? Are you saying tails&monday is not distinct from tails&tuesday, or all three overlap, or something else?
You also assert that the denominator is not determined by n. (I assume by n you mean replications of the SB experiment, where each replication has a randomly varying number of awakenings. That’s true in a way—particular values that you will see in particular replications will vary, because the denominator is a random variable with a definite distribution (Bernoulli, in fact). But that’s not a problem when computing expected values for random processes in general; they often have perfectly definite and easily computed expected values. Are you arguing that this makes that ratio undefined, or problematic in some way? I can tell easily what this ratio converges to, but you won’t like it.
I’d quibble about calling it an assumption. The 1⁄3 solution notes that this is the ratio of observations upon awakening of heads to the total number of observations, which is one of the problematic facts about the experimental setup. The 1⁄3 solution assumes that this is relevant to what we should mean by “credence”, and makes an argument that this is a justification for the claim that Sleeping Beauty’s credence should be 1⁄3.
Your argument is, I take it, that these counts of observations are irrelevant, or at best biased. Something else should be counted, or should be counted differently. The disagreement seems to center on the denominator; it should count not awakenings, but coin-tosses. Then there is a difference in the definition of the relevant events and the probabilities that get calculated from them.
Thirders: An event is an awakening.
The question asks about # awakenings with heads / total awakenings.
This ratio is an estimate of a fraction that can be used to predict frequencies of something of interest.
Halfers: An event is a coin-toss.
The question asks about # tosses with heads / total tosses.
This ratio is an estimate of a fraction which is universally agreed to be a probability, and can be used to predict frequencies of something of interest.
Did I get that right? Is this a fair description?
I think a key difference between halfers and thirders is that for thirders, the occurrence of an awakening constitutes evidence of the current state of the system that’s being asked about—whether the coin shows heads or tails, because the frequency with which the state of the system is asked about (or, equivalently, an observation is made) is influenced by the current state of the system. To ward off certain objections, it is of no consequence whether this influence is deterministic, probabilistic or mixed in nature, the mere fact that it exists can and should be exploited. I don’t think there’s disagreement that it exists, but there is over how it’s relevant.
Halfers deny that any new evidence becomes available on awakening, because the operation of the process is completely known ahead of time. (Alternatively, if any new evidence could be said to become available, it cannot be exploited.) From what I can tell, and my understanding is surely imperfect, there is some kind of cognitive dissonance about what kinds of things can constitute evidence in some epistomological theory, such that drawing a distinction between the actual occurrence of an event and the knowledge that at least one such event will surely occur is illegitimate for halfers. Is this a fair description?
That’s as may be, but it doesn’t help Sleeping Beauty in her quandary. If you think this example helps to prove your point, I think it helps to prove the opposite. Although she knows, in this variation, that a randomly selected person will be tested, the random person selection process is not accessible to her, only the opportunity to know that one of three possible test results has been collected. She knows very well, given a randomly selected person (resp. a coin toss), what the probability they are male is (resp. the given coin toss came Heads). She isn’t being asked about that conditional probability. (Or maybe you think she is? Please clarify.) To follow your analogy, upon being awakened, she’s informed that a test result has been collected from an unknown person, and now, given that a test result has been collected, what are the chances it cames from a male?
Clearly the selection process for asking Sleeping Beauty questions is biased. If bias had not been introduced by an extra awakening on Tuesday, the problem would collapse into triviality. The puzzle asks how this sampling bias should affect Sleeping Beauty’s calculations of what to answer on awakening, if at all. One of the reasons for doing statistical analysis of sampling schemes is to quantify how the mechanism that’s introducing bias changes the expected values of observations. In the SB case, the biased selection process is a mixture of random and deterministic mechanisms. Untangling the random from the deterministic parts is difficult enough for the participants in this discussion—they can’t even agree on a forking path diagram! Untangling it for Sleeping Beauty while she’s in the experiment is epistemically impossible. She has no basis whatsoever inside the game for saying, “this one is randomly different from the last one” versus “this one is deterministically identical to the last one, therefore this one doesn’t count.”
The same considerations apply to the case of the cancer test. Let me elaborate on your scenario to see if I understand it, and let me know if I’m mischaracterizing the test protocol in any material way. There is a test for a disease condition. Every person knows they have a 50% chance going in of testing positive for the disease. We’ll stipulate that the repeatability of the test is perfect, though in real life this is achieved only within epsilon of certainty. (Btw, here’s where the continuity argument enters in: how crucial is the assumption of absolute certainty versus near certainty? What hinges on that?) In this protocol, if the initial test result is positive, then the test is repeated k times (k=2 or 10, or whatever you deem necessary), either with a new sample or from an aliquot of the original sample, I don’t think it matters which. Here the repetition is because of the obstinacy of the head of the test lab and their predilection for amnesia drugs; in real life the reasons would be something like the very high cost in anguish and/or money of a false positive, however unlikely. You, as a recorder of test results, see a certain number of test samples come through the lab. The identities of the samples are encrypted, so your epistemic state with regard to any particular test result is identical to that for any other test sample and its result.
So now the question comes down to this: upon any particular awakening, how is the test subject’s epistemic state at any particular awakening significantly different from the lab tech’s epistemic state regarding any particular test sample? There is a one-to-one correspondence between test samples being evaluated and questions to the patient about their prognosis. Should they give the same answer, or is there a reason why they should give different answers? Just as with the patient, the lab tech knows that any randomly chosen individual has a 50% chance of of giving a positive test result, but does she give the same answer to that question as to a different question: given that she has a particular sample in her hands, what is the probability that the person it belongs to will test positive? She knows that she has k times as many samples in her lab that will test positive than otherwise, but she has no way of knowing whether the sample in her hands is an initial sample or a replicate. It seems to me that halfers might be claiming these two questions are the same question, while thirders claim that they are different questions with different answers. Is this a fair description? If not, please clarify.
What you say is true for any outside observers, and for Sleeping Beauty after the experiment is over and the logbooks analyzed. But while Sleeping Beauty is in the experiment, this option is simply not available to her. The scenario has been carefully constructed to make this so, that’s what makes it an interesting problem. The whole point of the amnesia drug in the SB setup (or downloadable avatars, or forking universes, random passersby, whatever) is that she has NO justification nor even a method for NOT treating any of her awakenings as separate variables, because the information that could allow her to do this is unavailable to her. By construction—and this is the defining feature of Sleeping Beauty—all Sleeping Beauty’s awakenings are epistemically indistinguishable. She has no choice but to treat them all identically.
This phenomenon is a common occurrence in queueing systems where there’s a very definite and well-understood difference between omniscient “outside observers” and epistemically indistinguishable “arriving customers”, who can have different values for the probability of observing the system in state X, where the system is executing a well-defined random process, or even a combination random-deterministic process.