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by electroly 1154 days ago
It doesn't matter for this hypothetical scheme. It'll always be one or the other outcome, and you will thus look prescient to one half or the other half of the victims. Each day your pool of victims cuts in half but you don't care which half it is. The scheme works regardless of how often the stock actually goes up or down. At the end, there will always be one victim who was given exactly the correct series of predictions by you ahead of time.
1 comments

If the two outcomes don't have equal probability there are no two halves here. In a bull market with everything being green saying that something will go up is not an interesting prediction.
There are two halves because you told half the victims one prediction and the other half the opposite prediction. It does not come from the probability of the outcomes. The probability of the two outcomes doesn't matter at all for this thought experiment's goal: that you can appear to correctly make N yes-or-no predictions in a row to one victim if you have 2^N-1 other victims that you can tell incorrect predictions to. This process guarantees that one of the victims in the pool ends up getting the correct series of predictions.

I'm not sure how else to explain this but please ask again if you feel like this isn't making sense; any failure here is mine, not the thought experiment's. This is an extremely well-known thought experiment. This wasn't thought up by anyone here.