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othercriteria comments on Open Thread April 8 - April 14 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: Tenoke 08 April 2014 11:11AM

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Comment author: othercriteria 08 April 2014 05:07:22PM *  1 point [-]

There's actually some really cool math developed about situations like this one. Large deviation theory describes how occurrences like the 1,000,004 red / 1,000,000 blues one become unlikely at an exponential rate and how, conditioning on them occurring, information about the manner in which they occurred can be deduced. It's a sort of trivial conclusion in this case, but if we accept a principle of maximum entropy, we can be dead certain that any of the 2,000,004 red or blue draws looks marginally like a Bernoulli with 1,000,004:1,000,000 odds. That's just the likeliest way (outside of our setup being mistaken) of observing our extremely unlikely outcome.