Morendil comments on Book Club Update, Chapter 2 of Probability Theory - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Morendil 29 June 2010 12:46AM

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Comment author: taiyo 01 July 2010 05:44:01PM 1 point [-]

K. S. Van Horn gives a few lines describing the derivation in his PT:TLoS errata. I don't understand why he does step 4 there -- it seems to me to be irrelevant. The two main facts which are needed are step 2-3 and step 5, the sum of a geometric series and the Taylor series expansion around y = S(x). Hopefully that is a good hint.

Nitpicking with his errata, 1/(1-z) = 1 + z + O(z^2) for all z is wrong since the interval of convergence for the RHS is (-1,1). This is not important to the problem since the z here will be z = exp(-q) which is less than 1 since q is positive.

Comment author: Morendil 04 July 2010 11:15:05PM 0 points [-]

Is there anything more to getting 2.53 than just rearranging things around? I'm not sure I really understand where we get the left-hand side from.