A&B gains more evidence than A from the experiment. It doesn't (and can't) become more probable.
Let's have an example. Someone is flipping a coin repeatedly. The coin is either a fair one or a weighted one that comes up heads 3x as often as tails. (A = "coin is weighted in this way".) The person doing the flipping might be honest, or might be reporting half the tails she flips (i.e., each one randomly with p=1/2) as heads. (B = "person is cheating in this way".)
Let's say that ahead of time you think A and B independently have probability 1/10.
Your experiment consists of getting the (alleged) results of a single coin flip, which you're told was heads.
So. Beforehand the probability of A was 1/10 and that of B was 1/100.
The probability of your observed results is: 1/2 under (not-A,not-B); 3/4 under (not-A,B); 3/4 under (A.not-B); and 7/8 under (A,B).
So the posterior probabilities for the four possibilities are proportional to (81:9:9:1) times (4:6:6:7); that is, to (324:54:54:7). Which means the probability of A has gone up from 10% to about 14%, and the probability of A&B from 1% to about 1.6%.
So you've got more evidence for A&B than for A, which translates (more or less) to a larger relative gain in probability for A&B than for A. But A&B is still less likely.
If you repeat the experiment and keep getting heads, then A&B will always improve more than A alone. But the way this works is that after a long time almost all the probability of A comes from the case where A&B, so that A&B's advantage in increase-in-probability gradually goes away.
So plausibility isn't the only dimension for assessing how "good" a belief is.
A or not A is a certainty. I'm trying to formally understand why that statement tells me nothing about anything.
The motivating practical problem came from this question,
"guess the rule governing the following sequence" 11, 31, 41, 61, 71, 101, 131, ...
I cried, "Ah the sequence is increasing!" With pride I looked into the back of the book and found the answer "primes ending in 1".
I'm trying to zone in on what I did wrong.
If I had said inst...
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