nshepperd 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: [deleted] 31 August 2011 09:51:03PM *  3 points [-]

I can't speak for the rest of your post, but

We can answer the question without knowing anything more about b, than that it is not 1/2. For any 0<=b1<1/2, since we have no other information, b=b1 and b=1-b1 must be treated as equally likely. Regardless of what the distribution of b1 is, this makes the probability the coin landed on heads 1/2.

is pretty clearly wrong. (In fact, it looks a lot like you're establishing a prior distribution, and that's uniquely a Bayesian feature.) The probability of an event (the result of the flip is surely an event, though I can't tell if you're claiming to the contrary or not) to a frequentist is the limit of the proportion of times the event occurred in independent trials as the number of trials tends to infinity. The probability the coin landed on heads is the one thing in the problem statement that can't be 1/2, because we know that the coin is biased. Your calculation above seems mostly ad hoc, as is your introduction of additional random variables elsewhere.

However, I'm not a statistician.

Comment author: nshepperd 01 September 2011 03:51:06AM 0 points [-]

I think they are arguing that the "independent trials" that are happening here are instances of "being given a 'randomly' biased coin and seeing if a single flip turns up heads". But of course the techniques they are using are bayesian, because I'd expect a frequentist to say at this point "well, I don't know who's giving me the coins, how am I supposed to know the probability distribution for the coins?".