Maybe a nitpick, but the driver’s license posterior of 95% seems too high. (Or at least the claim isn’t stated precisely.) I’d have less than a 95% success rate at guessing the exact name string that appears on someone’s driver’s license. Maybe there’s a middle name between the “Mark” and the “Xu”, maybe the driver’s license says “Marc” or “Marcus”, etc.
I think you can get to 95% with a phone number or a wifi password or similar, so this is probably just a nitpick.
In the specific scenario of “Mark Xu asks to bet me about the name on his driver’s license”, my confidence drops immediately because I start questioning his motives for offering such a weird bet.
Well, yes, if you interpret a lot of thought experiments literally, the proper response is more like “I think I’m having a stroke or that I overdosed on potent psychoactive substances or am asphyxiating.” than anything ‘in the spirit’ of the experiments.
But it gets old fast to describe (yet again) how you’d answer any question posed to you by Omega with “You’re a figment of my imagination.” or whatever.
Also many people with East Asian birth names go by some Anglicized given name informally, enough that I’m fairly sure randomly selected “Mark Xu”s in the US will have well below 95% at “has a driver’s license that says “Mark Xu”
Maybe a nitpick, but the driver’s license posterior of 95% seems too high. (Or at least the claim isn’t stated precisely.) I’d have less than a 95% success rate at guessing the exact name string that appears on someone’s driver’s license. Maybe there’s a middle name between the “Mark” and the “Xu”, maybe the driver’s license says “Marc” or “Marcus”, etc.
I think you can get to 95% with a phone number or a wifi password or similar, so this is probably just a nitpick.
In the specific scenario of “Mark Xu asks to bet me about the name on his driver’s license”, my confidence drops immediately because I start questioning his motives for offering such a weird bet.
Well, yes, if you interpret a lot of thought experiments literally, the proper response is more like “I think I’m having a stroke or that I overdosed on potent psychoactive substances or am asphyxiating.” than anything ‘in the spirit’ of the experiments.
But it gets old fast to describe (yet again) how you’d answer any question posed to you by Omega with “You’re a figment of my imagination.” or whatever.
Also many people with East Asian birth names go by some Anglicized given name informally, enough that I’m fairly sure randomly selected “Mark Xu”s in the US will have well below 95% at “has a driver’s license that says “Mark Xu”
I also bet that if you just said “Mark Xu” there’d be a high rate of not knowing how the last name was spelled.
Yeah, I agree 95% is a bit high.