the coin is already heads or tails, no matter that I don’t know which it is
it’s worse than that. All you know that the coin has landed. You need further observations to learn more. Maybe it will slip from your hand and fall on the ground. Maybe you will be distracted with reading LW and forget to check. Maybe you don’t remember which side to check, the wrist or the hand side. You can insist that the coin has already landed and therefore it has landed either heads or tails, but that is not a useful supposition until you actually look. Think just a little way back: the coin is about to land, but not quite yet. Is it the same as the coin has landed? Almost, but not quite. what about a little ways further back? The uncertainty about the outcome is even more. So, there is nothing special about the landed coin until you actually look, beyond a certain level of probabilities. A pragmatic approach (I refuse to wade into the ideological debate between militant frequentists and militant Bayesians) would be to use all available information to make the best prediction possible, depending on the question asked.
it’s worse than that. All you know that the coin has landed. You need further observations to learn more. Maybe it will slip from your hand and fall on the ground. Maybe you will be distracted with reading LW and forget to check. Maybe you don’t remember which side to check, the wrist or the hand side. You can insist that the coin has already landed and therefore it has landed either heads or tails, but that is not a useful supposition until you actually look. Think just a little way back: the coin is about to land, but not quite yet. Is it the same as the coin has landed? Almost, but not quite. what about a little ways further back? The uncertainty about the outcome is even more. So, there is nothing special about the landed coin until you actually look, beyond a certain level of probabilities. A pragmatic approach (I refuse to wade into the ideological debate between militant frequentists and militant Bayesians) would be to use all available information to make the best prediction possible, depending on the question asked.