From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Sep 22 1997 - 20:34:21 MDT
Wei Dai wrote:
>
> 1. If the subject's answer to question 3 is a3, then he should be willing
> to accept the following bet after giving his answer: if the coin landed
> up, he loses 1/a3 dollars, else he wins 1/(1-a3) dollars. But if a3<1/2,
> the experimenter has a positive expected profit from running the
> experiment.
You know, I remember a similar argument about what happens when you roll a
pair of dice. By playing with the number of subjects, you could have the
experimenter making a profit on 10:1 odds that a pair of dice would come up
double-sixes. The chance that a die turns double-sixes is still 1:36.
I'm still trying to work out how that applies to your argument. I think we
may need to define a few terms more carefully, like "subject".
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/singularity.html
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/algernon.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.
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