army1987 comments on Right for the Wrong Reasons - Less Wrong

14 Post author: katydee 24 January 2013 12:02AM

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Comment author: CronoDAS 24 January 2013 02:20:45AM *  0 points [-]

That suggests a question.

If I flip a fair coin, and it comes up heads, what is the probability of that coin flip, which I already made, having instead been tails? (Approximately) 0, because we've already seen that the coin didn't come up tails, or (approximately) 50%, because it's a fair coin and we have no way of knowing the outcome in advance?

Comment author: [deleted] 25 January 2013 03:27:04AM 5 points [-]

As Jaynes suggested, it's best to view all probabilities as conditional. P(coin came up heads | what i know now) = 1, P(coin came up heads | what i knew before flipping it) = 0.5.