= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Brilliand comments on Conjunction Fallacy - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (46)
There's also a linguistic issue here. The English "and" doesn't simply mean mathematical set theoretical conjunction in everyday speech. Indeed, without using words like "given" or "suppose" or a long phrase such as "if we already know that", we can't easily linguistically differentiate between P(Y | X) and P(Y, X).
"How likely is it that X happens and then Y happens?", "How likely is it that Y happens after X happened?", "How likely is it that event Y would follow event X?". All these are ambiguous in everyday speech. We aren't sure whether X has hypothetically already been observed or it's a free variable, too.
In my experience, the english "and" can also be interpreted as separating two statements that should be evaluated (and given credit for being right/wrong) separately. Under that interpretation, someone who says "A and B" where A is true and B is false is considered half-right, which is better than just saying "B" and being entirely wrong.
Though, looking back at the original question, it doesn't appear to use the word "and", so problems with that word specifically aren't very relevant to this article.