Adam Elga

It's not an objection.

It's something I'm taking as a lesson.

And feel free to bring this back in if we get derailed too much.

But I did want to also point out that the plain vanilla Bayesian approach, the thing you sort of first do that's kind of generic –

would seem to favor theories with smaller numbers of parameters too much, more than we actually do in practice.

If you don't have something else going on than a theory with 10 more parameters, that's just a huge space of possibilities.

And unless you have very biased priors to counteract that, those theories are just going to be ruled out from the start.

And it just seems like we don't rule out theories with just one or two more extra parameters in so extreme a way.

So there has to be some other thing going on.

No problem.

I love the problem.

I think it comes from Arno Zuboff, who later published his ideas on related stuff in a very interesting, very wild paper called One Self, two words, One Self, argues that there is only one conscious being.

Very roughly speaking, because otherwise it would be so unlikely that you exist.

It's worth looking at.

It's a wild paper.

But Arno Zuboff, as far as I know, gets the credit for inventing this type of problem.

And it was also independently came in through in the game theory and decision game theory literature.

I learned of it from Robert Stoliker.

And the problem is this.

beauty is put to sleep at the beginning of the experiment on Sunday, and then a fair coin toss is going to determine whether beauty will just be woken up on Monday night, or alternatively, briefly woken up on Monday night, and then put back to sleep and woken up on Tuesday night.