saturn comments on Open Thread: November 2009 - Less Wrong
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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.
In the context of most discussions on this site, "confidence" is the probability that a guess is correct. For example:
"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.