Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Explainers Shoot High. Aim Low! - Less Wrong

40 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 October 2007 01:13AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (32)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 October 2007 09:14:37PM 2 points [-]

An important transformation of probabilities is the log odds, the logarithm of the odds ratio of the probability, log(p/(1-p)). This has the advantage that you can simply add the log-likelihood to your log-odds prior to get the revised probability. Bayes becomes addition.

In the log odds, 1 comes out as positive infinity and 0 comes out as negative infinity.

Negative and positive infinity are not real numbers, and 0 and 1 are not probabilities.