Stupid Questions February 2017

Erfeyah

This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.

I intuitively feel a 50-50 chance implies a uniform distribution

Well, imagine a bet on a fair coin flip. That's a 50-50 chance, right? And yet there is no uniform distribution in sight.

So if we can distinguish between

"I know the probabilities involved and they are 50% for X and 50% for Y" and "I don't know".

Could we further distinguish between

a uniform distribution on the 0 to 1 range and "I don't know"?

Let's say a biased coin with unknown probability of landing heads is tossed, p is uniform on (0,1) and "I don't know" means you can't predict better than randomly guessing. So saying p is 50% doesn't matter because it doesn't beat random.

But what if we tossed the coin twice, and I had y... (read more)

0Erfeyah9y

You are obviously right! This is helpful :) Now, just to make sure I got it, does this make sense: the question of gods existence (assuming the term was perfectly defined) is a yes/no question but you are conceptualising the probability that a yes or a no is true. That is why you are using a uniform distribution in a question with a binary answer. It is not representing the answer but your current confidence. Right?