Peter_de_Blanc comments on Guess Again - Less Wrong

15 Post author: Alicorn 09 August 2009 07:11PM

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Comment author: Peter_de_Blanc 11 August 2009 02:09:12AM 1 point [-]

I think surprise might have to do with the difference between your expected and your actual Bayes score.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 15 August 2009 08:58:58PM *  0 points [-]

And lucky outcome could be defined by the difference between your previous expectation and updated expectation for the actual prize. But in both cases, I think you'd need to work with something like "knowledge about prior reviewed in light of new evidence" (reviewed knowledge about prior, not updated prior=posterior), compared with "knowledge about prior before that".

Comment author: cousin_it 11 August 2009 09:18:30AM 0 points [-]

Then I don't understand why we'd be surprised to see a fair coin fall heads ten times in a row.

Comment author: Peter_de_Blanc 13 August 2009 09:08:16PM *  3 points [-]

Because you assign the all-heads sequence a probability significantly higher than 2^-10, so your Bayes score is higher than you expected. Surprise!

Edit: I didn't notice that you said the coin is fair. Well, I'll bite the bullet and claim that if you really assign a probability of 1 to the coin being fair, then you won't feel surprised no matter how many times it comes up heads.

Comment author: orthonormal 15 August 2009 09:10:42PM 1 point [-]

Agree. In practice, I'd bet that our pattern-seeking minds really do put more weight on simple fixed-coin hypotheses than we're consciously aware of; after only three heads in a row, such a hypothesis would pop into my head (though I'd consciously dismiss it), and after three or four more heads, I'd start to consciously consider it.