Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Rationality Quotes January 2013 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: katydee 02 January 2013 05:23PM

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Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 16 January 2013 11:19:48PM *  6 points [-]

And thus, you should expect 99% of underdogs to lose and 99% of overdogs to win. If all you know is that a dog won, you should be 99% confident the dog was an overdog.

Second statement assumes that the base rate of underdogs and overdogs is the same. In practice I would expect there to be far more underdogs than overdogs.

Comment author: Kindly 16 January 2013 11:54:12PM 1 point [-]

Good point. I was thinking of underdog and overdog as relative, binary terms -- in any contest, one of two dogs is the underdog, and the other is the overdog. If that's not the case, we can expect to see underdogs beating other underdogs, for instance, or an overdog being up against ten underdogs and losing to one of them.

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