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ciphergoth comments on binomial variance problem - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: nerfhammer 06 April 2012 10:59PM

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Comment author: ciphergoth 07 April 2012 07:53:39AM *  0 points [-]

SPOILER ALERT: solution presented here. Rot-13 would be immensely painful, so I'll just present some facts from which an LW reader can piece together a solution. The probability of drawing 11 blue balls followed by 9 green balls from an urn that's 45% blue is 7.0567033E-7. If the urn is 65% blue it's 6.8969856E-7. The log-likelihood-ratio is 0.099425348 decibans. So for practical purposes the answer is "my best guess is still 50/50" but the posterior probability is really 0.50572313. If you draw 100 rather than 20 it's 0.52858571.

I think even if it were a real-life problem I would have correctly guessed, without doing arithmetic, which class had more evidence; but I was sort of spoilered by knowing that the answer has to be the "counterintuitive" one.

ETA: another way to do the sums is that each boy provides 1.5970084 decibans of evidence for program A, and each girl 1.9629465 for program B.

Comment author: faul_sname 07 April 2012 08:04:03AM 0 points [-]

If you look at girls in addition to boys, it's no longer quite so counterintuitive.