prase comments on Probability is in the Mind - Less Wrong

60 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 March 2008 04:08AM

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Comment author: nono 17 February 2011 10:48:59AM 2 points [-]

"Renormalizing leaves us with a 1/3 probability of two boys, and a 2/3 probability of one boy one girl." help me with this one, i'm n00b. If one of the kids is known to be a boy (given information), then doesn't the other one has 50/50 chances to be either a boy or a girl? And then having 50/50 chances for the couple of kids to be either a pair of boys or one boy one girl?

Comment author: prase 17 February 2011 01:20:41PM *  0 points [-]

This sort of problem is often easier to understand when modified to make the probabilities more different. E.g. suppose ten children and information that at least nine of them are boys. The incorrect reasoning leads to 1/2 probability of ten boys, while actually the probability is only 1/11. You can even write a program which generates a sequence of ten binary values, 0 for a boy and 1 for a girl, and then prompts you whenever it encounters at least nine zeros and compare the relative frequencies. If the generated binary numbers are converted to decimals, it means that you generate an integer between 0 and 1023, and get prompted whenever the number is a power of 2, which correspond to 9 boys and 1 girl (10 possible cases), or zero, which corresponds to 10 boys (1 case only).

Such modification works well as an intuition pump in case of the Monty Hall problem, maybe is not so illustrative here. But Monty Hall is isomorphic to this one.