Unnamed comments on lessmeta - Less Wrong

6 Post author: PlaidX 22 December 2009 05:57PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (30)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Unnamed 23 December 2009 03:33:47AM 4 points [-]

Or, for the approximate answer, just compare the base rate with the false positive rate (multiplying by .9something has small impacts that mostly cancel out). About 1% of people test positive due to having the disease (a bit less, actually), about 5% of people test positive because of an inaccurate test (a bit less, actually), so a person with a positive test has about a 1 in 6 chance of having the disease.