saturn comments on Open Thread: November 2009 - Less Wrong

3 [deleted] 02 November 2009 01:18AM

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Comment author: Yorick_Newsome 08 November 2009 02:46:17AM *  2 points [-]

I'd like to ask a moronic question or two that aren't immediately obvious to me and probably should be. (Please note, my education is very limited, especially procedural knowledge of mathematics/probability.)

If I had to guess what the result of a coin flip would be, what confidence would I place in my guess? 50% because that's the same as the probability or me being correct or 0% because I'm just randomly guessing between 2 outcomes and have no evidence to support either (well I guess there being only 2 outcomes is some kind of evidence)?

Likewise with a lottery. Would I place my confidence level (interval ? I don't know the terminology) of winning at 0% or 1/6,000,000? Or some other number entirely?

If this is something I could easily have figured out with Google or Wikipedia, my apologies. Also if my question is incoherent or flawed please let me know.

Comment author: saturn 08 November 2009 05:48:19PM *  1 point [-]

In the context of most discussions on this site, "confidence" is the probability that a guess is correct. For example:

  • I guess that a flipped coin will land heads. My confidence is 1/2, because I have arbitrarily picked 1 out of 2 possible outcomes.
  • I guess that, when a coin is flipped repeatedly, the ratio of heads will be close to half. My confidence is close to 1, because I know from experience that most coins are fair (and the law of large numbers).

"Confidence interval" is just confidence that something is within a certain range.

You should also be aware that in the context of frequentism (most scientific papers), these terms have different and somewhat confusing technical definitions.