Oscar_Cunningham comments on Bayes' rule =/= Bayesian inference - Less Wrong

37 Post author: neq1 16 September 2010 06:34AM

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

Comments (70)

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

Comment author: TobyBartels 16 September 2010 06:04:33PM 2 points [-]

The frequency with which a coin comes up heads isn't a probability, no matter how much it looks like one.

Pedantry alert: This is not technically true, although it's still a very important point.

Every frequency is the probability of something; in this case, the frequency with which the coin comes up heads is the probability, given that you pick one of the times that the coin is flipped, that coin comes up heads that time.

But this is not the same thing as the probability that the coin comes up heads the next time that you flip it, which is what you are more likely to be interested in (and which people are liable to uselessly claim is "either 1 or 0, but I don't know which").

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 17 September 2010 11:57:20AM 1 point [-]

Thanks, this clears some things up for me.

Comment author: TobyBartels 17 September 2010 11:41:55PM 0 points [-]

You're welcome!