CCC comments on Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions - Less Wrong
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I see how you calculated that, but I think you're looking at the wrong pieces of evidence, and I agree with TheOtherDave.
You have an even split chance of getting the real bullet in play, so let's put that down:
P[bullet] = 0.5 P[¬bullet] = 0.5
Then, given that you DO get the bullet, you have a very high chance of being dead if you don't know how you will die:
P[die | bullet] = 0.99 P[¬die | bullet] = 0.01
Of course, this means that overall, P[die] = 0.495, and P[injury] = 0.005. However, if you already also know that P[¬die] = 1, then...
P[bullet & ¬die] = 0.5 P[¬bullet & ¬die] = 0.5
...because P[bullet] is computed before its causal effects (death or injury) can enter the picture, which means you're left with P[injury] = 0.5 (a hundred times larger than P1!).
Thus, while the first chance of injury is negligible, the chance of injury once you already know that you won't die is massively larger, given that P[injury XOR death | bullet] = 1 (which is implied in the problem statement, I would assume).
Edit: I realize that this makes the assumption that your chances of getting the bullet doesn't correlate with knowing how you will die, but it most clearly exposes the difference between your calculation and other possible calculations. This is not the correct way to calculate the probabilities in real life, since it's much more likely that non-death is achieved by not having the bullet in the first place (or by failing to play Russian Roulette at all), but there's all kinds of parameters you can play with here. All I'm saying is that P2 isn't necessarily at most twice P1, it all depends on the other implicit conditions and priors.
No, that's not right. What we're interested in here, is P[injury|¬die]. Using Bayes' Theroem:
P[injury|¬die] = {P[¬die|injury]*P[injury]}/P[¬die]
Using the figures you assume, and recalling that "injury" refers only to non-fatal injury (hence P[¬die|injury]==1):
P[injury|¬die] = {1*0.005}/0.505 = 1/101 = approx. 0.00990099
The chances of injury are then not quite double what they would have been without death-immunity. This is reasonably low, because the prior odds of survival at all are reasonably high (0.505) - had the experiment been riskier, such that there was only a 0.01% chance of survival overall, then the chance of injury in the death-immunity case would be correspondingly higher.
(We also have not yet taken into account the effect of the first player - in such a game of Russian Roulette, he who shoots first has a higher prior probability of death).
Thanks for the full Bayes Theorem breakdown.
I agree that this is how it should be reasoned ideally, which I only realized after first posting the grandparent. See other comments and the edit for how I arrived at the 50/50 reasoning. If you know the answer for the bottom/last question in this comment, I'd be interested to know.