Jiro comments on Bayes' Theorem Illustrated (My Way) - Less Wrong

126 Post author: komponisto 03 June 2010 04:40AM

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Comment author: bigjeff5 22 December 2013 06:06:39AM *  0 points [-]

The only relevant information is that one of the children is a boy. There is still a 50% chance the second child is a boy and a 50% chance that the second child is a girl. Since you already know that one of the children is a boy, the posterior probability that they are both boys is 50%.

Rephrase it this way:

I have flipped two coins. One of the coins came up heads. What is the probability that both are heads?

Now, to see why Tuesday is irrelevant, I'll re-state it thusly:

I have flipped two coins. One I flipped on a Tuesday and it came up heads. What is the probability that both are heads?

The sex of one child has no influence on the sex of the other child, nor does the day on which either child was born influence the day any other child was born. There is a 1/7 chance that child 1 was born on each day of the week, and there is a 1/7 chance that child 2 was born on each day of the week. There is a 1/49 chance that both children will be born on any given day (1/7*1/7), for a 7/49 or 1/7 chance that both children will be born on the same day. That's your missing 1/7 chance that gets removed inappropriately from the Tuesday/Tuesday scenario.

Comment author: Jiro 22 December 2013 04:39:33PM -1 points [-]

. There is still a 50% chance the second child is a boy and a 50% chance that the second child is a girl.

No there's not. The cases where the second child is a boy and the second child is a girl are not equal probability.

I have flipped two coins. One of the coins came up heads. What is the probability that both are heads?

If you picked "heads" before flipping the coins, then the probability is 1/3. There are three possibilities: HT, TH, and HH, and all of these possibilities are equally likely.

I have flipped two coins. One I flipped on a Tuesday and it came up heads. What is the probability that both are heads?

If you picked "heads" and "Tuesday" before knowing when you would be flipping the coins, and then flipped each coin on a randomly-selected day, and you just stopped if there weren't any heads on Tuesday, then the answer is the same as the answer for boys on Tuesday. If you flipped the coin and then realized it was Tuesday, the Tuesday doesn't affect the result.

The sex of one child has no influence on the sex of the other child, nor does the day on which either child was born influence the day any other child was born.

If you picked the sex first before looking at the children, the sex of one child does influence the sex of the other child because it affects whether you would continue or say "there aren't any of the sex I picked" and the sexes in the cases where you would continue are not equally distributed.