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tim comments on XKCD - Frequentist vs. Bayesians - Less Wrong Discussion

18 Post author: brilee 09 November 2012 05:25AM

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Comment author: JonathanLivengood 11 November 2012 05:30:12AM 3 points [-]

I don't see how this applies to ciphergoth's example. In the example under consideration, the person offering you the bet cannot make money, and the person offered the bet cannot lose money. The question is, "For which of two events would you like to be paid some set amount of money, say $5, in case it occurs?" One of the events is that a fair coin flip comes up heads. The other is an ordinary one-off occurrence, like the election of Obama in 2012 or the sun exploding tomorrow.

The goal is to elicit the degree of belief that the person has in the one-off event. If the person takes the one-off event when given a choice like this, then we want to say (or de Finetti wanted to say, anyway) that the person's prior is greater than 1/2. If the person says, "I don't care, let me flip a coin," like ciphergoth's interlocutor did, then we want to say that the person has a prior equal to 1/2. There are still lots of problems, since (among other things) in the usual personalist story, degrees of belief have to be infinitely precise -- corresponding to a single real number -- and it is not clear that when a person says, "Oh, just flip a coin," the person has a degree of belief equal to 1/2, as opposed to an interval-valued degree of belief centered on 1/2 or something like that.

But anyway, I don't see how your point makes contact with ciphergoth's.

Comment author: lmm 12 November 2012 07:43:06AM 0 points [-]

The person offering the bet still (presumably) wants to minimize their loss, so they would be more likely to offer it if the unknown occurrence was impossible than if it was certain.