Vaniver comments on Open Thread May 23 - May 29, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Reminiscing over one of my favourite passages from Anathem, I've been enjoying looking through visual, wordless proofs of late. The low-hanging fruit is mostly classical geomety, but a few examples of logical proofs have popped up as well.
This got me wondering if it's possible to communicate the fundamental idea of Bayes' Theorem in an entirely visual format, without written language or symbols needing translation. I'd welcome thoughts from anyone else on this.
Bayes is mostly about conditioning, and so I think you can draw a Venn Diagram that makes it fairly clear.
Thanks! I've been playing around with it for a week or so but can't elegantly find a way to do it that meets my arbitrary standards of elegance and cool design :-)
Becomes easier when using non-circular shapes for Venn-ing, but my efforts look a little hacky.
I prefer a diagram like this with just overlapping circles. And you can kind of see how the portion of the hypothesis that exists in the evidence circle represents it's probability.
Arbital also has some nice visualizations: https://arbital.com/p/bayes_rule_waterfall/?l=1x1 https://arbital.com/p/bayes_rule_proportional/ https://arbital.com/p/bayes_log_odds/ and https://arbital.com/p/bayes_rule_proof/?l=1yd
Fivethirtyeight also made a neat graphic: https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/hobson-theranos-1-rk.png?w=1024&h=767