Douglas_Knight comments on Too good to be true - Less Wrong

24 Post author: PhilGoetz 11 July 2014 08:16PM

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Comment author: dvasya 11 July 2014 10:56:12PM 2 points [-]

Well, perhaps a bit too simple. Consider this. You set your confidence level at 95% and start throwing a coin. You observe 100 tails out of 100. You publish a report saying "the coin has tails on both sides at a 95% confidence level" because that's what you chose during design. Then 99 other researchers repeat your experiment with the same coin, arriving at the same 95%-confidence conclusion. But you would expect to see about 5 reports claiming otherwise! The paradox is resolved when somebody comes up with a trick using a mirror to observe both sides of the coin at once, finally concluding that the coin is two-tailed with a 100% confidence.

What was the mistake?

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 12 July 2014 08:07:25PM 3 points [-]

I don't know if the original post was changed, but it explicitly addresses this point:

Note: This does not apply in the same way to reviews that show a link between X and Y