mwengler comments on The Cognitive Science of Rationality - Less Wrong

88 Post author: lukeprog 12 September 2011 08:48PM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 11 September 2011 02:59:38PM 2 points [-]

the odds that he had had the disease even given the positive test were a million to one

Should be "one to a million".

Comment author: mwengler 23 September 2011 02:13:01PM 0 points [-]

Biased response: as a native American English speaker I can assure you that "a million to one" is idiomatically correct.

I suspect that the more complete non-idiomatic version would be "a million to one against" and that the "against" is implicit because the idiom is highly established as expressing a very low probability.