Srap Tasmaner

Right, right. (I am actually studying in my spare time, I swear.) If I may take advantage of your patience a bit more ... Suppose I naively approach t...

Fair enough.

I don't think we really need to agonize over the amounts supposedly being money. We could use real numbers and play competitively. The winner is just ...

Thanks. You've told me this before -- and I appreciate your patience. I'll mull it over some more. I think I'm just reluctant to see the simple situat...

I'm still confused. This makes it sound like the switching argument isn't fallacious -- it just makes an unwarranted assumption. So if every value of ...

I'm still working on it. We can also say that P(X = a) + P(X = a/2) <= 1 but other than that, their values can range freely.*** (It is in some sense a...

FWIW, my memory is that @"Jeremiah" only got into the sims & distributions business because everyone was talking about these things and it was his int...

Nothing new here, just checking my understanding. (Or, rather, whether I have shed all my misunderstandings, even recent ones.) Check my math. If I un...

Before looking in your envelope, do you have an expectation of gain from swapping?

I thought putting our ignorance front and center could be a feature rather than a bug. Also if we do attempt to estimate the shape of the problem as a...

One more question: What if we just say that, having observed the value of our envelope to be a, then the expected value of the other is 3X - a for som...

Okay -- this is what I keep forgetting. Before you look, you could say both envelopes have an expected value of m=3X/2 for some X. Once you've looked ...

This is the point of the odds calculation I posted before, right? The observed value of the envelope provides no information that could help you decid...

I do see that. From the player's point of view her uncertainty might as well be modeled as the outcome not yet having been determined and still subjec...

This particular quandary isn't supposed to arise in real life. A bookmaker first estimates the odds, and then the payouts are simply those odds minus ...

Thanks. (There is lots I have yet to learn, so some of this is going right by me -- for now.) I did wonder -- maybe a week ago? it's somewhere in the ...

Yes, and the cutoff can be entirely arbitrary, but the effect will often be tiny. (I spent a few minutes trying to get a feel for how this works and w...

Right? And it's a solid piece of philosophy, to my mind.

Read the article if you haven't before. I just reread it and it is as good as I remember.

It's very hard to judge which politicians are lying to themselves and which are soul-less tools. I'd rather not do more politics, but I wholeheartedly...

@"jkg20" is arguing the same as I did that self-deception is a violation of our norms of rationality, often related to the treatment of evidence, some...

I agree completely and have so argued. All you really have to do to get the ball rolling is designate the value in the envelope. It's the innocent "Le...

Right. The paper Jeremiah linked talks about this too. I was thinking about this on a 6-hour drive a few days ago, and I agree that in general we're t...

Switching is not objectively worse than sticking. It's also not objectively better. Half the time switching is a mistake. Half the time sticking is a ...

If X = 10 and your envelope is worth 10, you have the X envelope. By trading, you gain X. This is the X that matters. For any pair of envelopes, there...

Then you reject 1, because those are two different values of X.

What I don't understand is what your argument is against the alternative analysis. Which of these do you not accept? The envelopes are valued at X and...

I think you're making two assumptions you shouldn't: there is non-zero chance C that the other envelope contains twice the value of your envelope; the...

You may entertain yourself by switching and call that a reason, but there is no expected gain from switching.

If you see £10 then either you stand to gain £10 or you stand to lose £5, but not both. I have two pairs of envelopes A = {5, 10} and B = {10, 20}. I'...

A picture is a fact, and thus part of reality, part of the world.

It still feels to me like we're circling around the difference between P(picking larger) and P(I picked larger | I picked) All of us agree the first i...

But a super special kind of mental phenomena. If you want to pick out some of your beliefs and call them "knowledge", you do that by saying something ...

This is absolutely right. I think the confusion comes when you switch from E(other) = (larger)P(picked smaller) + (smaller)P(picked larger) where the ...

In one sense, yes, because we can say E(N | M=a) = (3*E(p) +1)/2, where p = P(S=a | M=a). But how do we calculate E(p)? I think the player in your exa...

Okay, tell me if I'm doing this wrong. Let S be the smaller of the two values, M be your envelope, and N the other. This is certainly true: \small \be...

I agree with all of those. *** You might have (3) and (4) a little wrong but I can't judge. The McDonnell & Abbott paper makes noises about the player...

One interesting point about the Arbitrary Cutoff strategy is that Never Switch and Always Switch can be seen as the degenerate cases: Never sets the c...

Not all Sometimes Switch strategies produce an expected gain of Y/4. None of them calculate their expected gain using your formula.

If that expected value calculation is correct, then Always Switch should produce the expected gain, shouldn't it? What, in that formula, suggests that...

But that argument, that "calculation", is not based on using any particular strategy. It's just this: E(U)=.5(2Y) + .5(Y/2) Do you believe that the su...

There are Sometimes Switch strategies that work, so far as I can tell. Do you believe that shows that your original argument, which concludes that the...

My first post in this thread three weeks ago: But I still need help with this. Yesterday I posted this and then took it down: \small \begin{align} O(X...

If the game is iterated, so that you can accumulate data about the sample space and its probability distribution, then it's an interesting but complet...

I'm having trouble imagining what the source of this knowledge might be.

(Never mind.)

Absolutely. In fact, since posting it occurs to me that the concept of "lying" belongs to one level -- the person level, where we hold individuals res...

For some purposes we ignore what's going on under the hood. You, the single individual person, are responsible for what you say, and for the consequen...

If you want your qualitative experience to be the foundation of your knowledge, then I think you need to be able to say something like this eventually...

This is a point that should have been made earlier. Beliefs are almost always best thought of as partial, as confidences. You believe you're unlikely ...