You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

endoself comments on Irrationality Game II - Less Wrong Discussion

13 [deleted] 03 July 2012 06:50PM

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

Comments (380)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: endoself 06 July 2012 01:22:02AM 2 points [-]

In more mathematical settings, you can successfully condition on events with probability 0 (for instance, if (X,Y) follow a bivariate normal distribution, you might want to know the probability distribution of Y given X=x).

You can't really do this, since the answer depends on how you take the limit. You can find a limit of conditional probabilities, but saying "the probability distribution of Y given X=x" is ambiguous. This is known as the Borel-Kolmogorov paradox.

Comment author: Kindly 06 July 2012 01:29:19AM 2 points [-]

Oops. Right, I knew there were some problems here, but I thought the way I defined it I was safe. I guess not. Thanks for keeping me honest!