royf comments on How Much Evidence Does It Take? - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 September 2007 04:06AM

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Comment author: royf 28 May 2012 05:16:34AM *  3 points [-]

131,115,985 to 1 [...] this amount of evidence would only be enough to give you an even chance of winning the lottery.

The number of false bleeps is distributed almost exactly Poisson with . The important figure is not the expected number of bleeps (, which is indeed 2). It's the expected probability that a random bleep is the true one, . At the moment I can't find an analytic solution (and a short search suggests none is known), but a computation shows the result is around 63.2%, much better than 50%. Similarly, with 14 boxes (arguably "28 bits of evidence"), the chance of winning is about 79.1% on average, much better than .