Sleeping Beauty as a Mind Killer

Sleeping Beauty—a thought experiment involving a coin flip and induced amnesia—has generated one hundred sixty-one posts on LessWrong, making it an unexpectedly polarizing puzzle. According to one contributor, the problem has become so philosophically contentious that it's lost much of its explanatory value, despite strong appeal to AI safety researchers; by contrast, there are three thousand two hundred posts about superintelligence. Beneath the puzzle's simple premise lies considerable hidden complexity: tangled assumptions about probability, identity, and decision theory that ensure any proposed solution typically addresses only part of the problem. The author compares this intellectual fixation to counting angels on a pin—intricate perhaps, but of questionable practical worth.

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