All of bigjeff5's Comments + Replies

This is exactly right. To put it more succinctly: Memory corruption is a known vector for exploitation, therefore any bug that potentially leads to memory corruption also has the potential to be a security vulnerability. Thus memory corruption should be treated with similar care as a security vulnerability.

The reason Person A in scenario 2 has the intuition that Person B is very wrong is because there are dozens, if not hundreds of examples where people claimed no vulnerabilities and were proven wrong. Usually spectacularly so, and often nearly immediately. Consider the fact that the most robust software developed by the most wealthy and highly motivated companies in the world, who employ vast teams of talented software engineers, have monthly patch schedules to fix their constant stream vulnerabilities, and I think it's pretty easy to immediately discount a... (read more)

That was four years ago, but I'm pretty sure I was using hyperbole. Pros don't bluff often, and when they do they are only expecting to break even, but I doubt it's as low as 2% (the bluff will fail half the time).

I'd also put in a caveat that the best hand wins among hands that make it all the way to the river. There are plenty of times where a horrible hand like a 6 2, which is an instant fold if you respect the skills of your fellow players, ends up hitting a straight by the river and being the best hand but obviously didn't win. Certainly more often th... (read more)

Pretty much.

At this point you have to ask what you mean by "theory" and "learning".

The original method of learning was "those that did it right didn't die" - i.e. natural selection. Those that didn't die have a pattern of behavior (thanks to a random mutation) that didn't exist in previous generations, which makes them more successful gene spreaders, which passes that information on to future generations.

There is nothing in there that requires one to ask any questions at all. However, considering that there is information gained based ... (read more)

I see that now, it took a LOT for me to get it for some reason.

Wow.

I've seen that same explanation at least five times and it didn't click until just now. You can't distinguish between the two on tuesday, so you can only count it once for the pair.

Which means the article I said was wrong was absolutely right, and if you were told that, say one boy was born on January 17th, the chances of both being born on the same day are 1-(364/365)^2 (ignoring leap years), which gives a final probability of roughly 49.46% that both are boys.

Thanks for your patience!

ETA: I also think I see where I'm going wrong with the terminology - sampling vs not sampling, but I'm not 100% there yet.

How can that be? There is a 1/7 chance that one of the two is born on Tuesday, and there is a 1/7 chance that the other is born on Tuesday. 1/7 + 1/7 is 2/7.

There is also a 1/49 chance that both are born on tuesday, but how does that subtract from the other two numbers? It doesn't change the probability that either of them are born on Tuesday, and both of those probabilities add.

This statement leads me to believe you are still confused. Do you agree that if I know a family has two kids, I knock on the door and a boy answers and says "I was born on a Tuesday," that the probability of the second kid being a girl is 1/2? And in this case, Tuesday is irrelevant? (This the wikipedia called "sampling")

I agree with this.

Do you agree that if, instead, the parents give you the information "one of my two kids is a boy born on a Tuesday", that this is a different sort of information, information about the s

The answer I'm supporting is based on flat priors, not sampling. I'm saying there are two possible Boy/Boy combinations, not one, and therefore it takes up half the probability space, not 1/3.

Sampling to the "Boy on Tuesday" problem gives roughly 48% (as per the original article), not 50%.

We are simply told that the man has a boy who was born on tuesday. We aren't told how he chose that boy, whether he's older or younger, etc. Therefore we have four possibilites, like I outlined above.

Is my analysis that the possibilities are Boy (Tu) /Girl, G... (read more)

For the record, I'm sure this is frustrating as all getout for you, but this whole argument has really clarified things for me, even though I still think I'm right about which question we are answering.

Many of my arguments in previous posts are wrong (or at least incomplete and a bit naive), and it didn't click until the last post or two.

Like I said, I still think I'm right, but not because my prior analysis was any good. The 1/3 case was a major hole in my reasoning. I'm happily waiting to see if you're going to destroy my latest analysis, but I think it is pretty solid.

Yes, and we are dealing with the second question here.

Is that not what I said before?

We don't have 1000 families with two children, from which we've selected all families that have at least one boy (which gives 1/3 probability). We have one family with two children. Then we are told one of the children is a boy, and given zero other information. The probability that the second is a boy is 1/2, so the probability that both are boys is 1/2.

The possible options for the "Boy born on Tuesday" are not Boy/Girl, Girl/Boy, Boy/Boy. That would be th... (read more)

Yeah, probably the biggest thing I don't like about this particular question is that the answer depends entirely upon unstated assumptions, but at the same time it clearly illustrates how important it is to be specific.

The relevant quote from the Wiki:

The paradox arises because the second assumption is somewhat artificial, and when describing the problem in an actual setting things get a bit sticky. Just how do we know that "at least" one is a boy? One description of the problem states that we look into a window, see only one child and it is a boy. This sounds like the same assumption. However, this one is equivalent to "sampling" the distribution (i.e. removing one child from the urn, ascertaining that it is a boy, then replacing). Let's call the s

Re-read it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_or_Girl_paradox

I know it's not the be all end all, but it's generally reliable on these types of questions, and it gives P = 1/2, so I'm not the one disagreeing with the standard result here.

Do the math yourself, it's pretty clear.

Edit: Reading closer, I should say that both answers are right, and the probability can be either 1/2 or 1/3 depending on your assumptions. However, the problem as stated falls best to me in the 1/2 set of assumptions. You are told one child is a boy and given no other information, so the only probability left for the second child is a 50% chance for boy.

How is it different? In both cases I have two independent coin flips that have absolutely no relation to each other. How does knowing which of the two came up heads make any difference at all for the probability of the other coin?

If it was the first coin that came up heads, TT and TH are off the table and only HH and HT are possible. If the second coin came up heads then HT and TT would be off the table and only TH and HH are possible.

The total probability mass of some combination of T and H (either HT or TH) starts at 50% for both flips combined. On... (read more)

No, it's the exact same question, only the labels are different.

The probability that any one child is boy is 50%. We have been told that one child is a boy, which only leaves two options - HH and HT. If TH were still available, then so would TT be available because the next flip could be revealed to be tails.

Here's the probability in bayesian:

P(BoyBoy) = 0.25 P(Boy) = 0.5 P(Boy|BoyBoy) = 1

P(BoyBoy|Boy) = P(Boy|BoyBoy)*P(BoyBoy)/P(Boy)

P(BoyBoy|Boy)= (1*0.25) / 0.5 = 0.25 / 0.5 = 0.5

P(BoyBoy|Boy) = 0.5

It's exactly the same as the coin flip, because the pro... (read more)

Lets add a time delay to hopefully finally illustrate the point that one coin toss does not inform the other coin toss.

I have two coins. I flip the first one, and it comes up heads. Now I flip the second coin. What are the odds it will come up heads?

The only relevant information is that one of the children is a boy. There is still a 50% chance the second child is a boy and a 50% chance that the second child is a girl. Since you already know that one of the children is a boy, the posterior probability that they are both boys is 50%.

Rephrase it this way:

I have flipped two coins. One of the coins came up heads. What is the probability that both are heads?

Now, to see why Tuesday is irrelevant, I'll re-state it thusly:

I have flipped two coins. One I flipped on a Tuesday and it came up heads. What is ... (read more)

In Boy1Tu/Boy2Tuesday, the boy referred to as BTu in the original statement is boy 1, in Boy2Tu/Boy1Tuesday the boy referred to in the original statement is boy2.

That's why the "born on tuesday" is a red herring, and doesn't add any information. How could it?

I see my mistake, here's an updated breakdown:

Boy1Tu/Boy2Any

Boy1Tu/Boy2Monday Boy1Tu/Boy2Tuesday Boy1Tu/Boy2Wednesday Boy1Tu/Boy2Thursday Boy1Tu/Boy2Friday Boy1Tu/Boy2Saturday Boy1Tu/Boy2Sunday

Then the Boy1Any/Boy2Tu option:

Boy1Monday/Boy2Tu Boy1Tuesday/Boy2Tu Boy1Wednesday/Boy2Tu Boy1Thursday/Boy2Tu Boy1Friday/Boy2Tu Boy1Saturday/Boy2Tu Boy1Sunday/Boy2Tu

See 7 days for each set? They aren't interchangeable even though the label "boy" makes it seem like they are.

Do the Bayesian probabilities instead to verify, it comes out to 50% even.

Which boy did I count twice?

Edit:

BAny/Boy1Tu in the above quote should be Boy2Any/Boy1Tu.

You could re-label boy1 and boy2 to be cat and dog and it won't change the probabilities - that would be CatTu/DogAny.

No, read it again. It's confusing as all getout, which is why they make the mistake, but EACH child can be born on ANY day of the week. The boy on Tuesday is a red herring, he doesn't factor into the probability for what day the second child can be born on at all. The two boys are not the same boys, they are individuals and their probabilities are individual. Re-label them Boy1 and Boy2 to make it clearer:

Here is the breakdown for the Boy1Tu/Boy2Any option:

Boy1Tu/Boy2Monday Boy1Tu/Boy2Tuesday Boy1Tu/Boy2Wednesday Boy1Tu/Boy2Thursday Boy1Tu/Boy2Friday B... (read more)

Just so it's clear, since it didn't seem super clear to me from the other comments, the solution to the Tuesday Boy problem given in that article is a really clever way to get the answer wrong.

The problem is the way they use the Tuesday information to confuse themselves. For some reason not stated in the problem anywhere, they assume that both boys cannot be born on Tuesday. I see no justification for this, as there is no natural justification for this, not even if they were born on the exact same day and not just the same day of the week! Twins exist!... (read more)

I'm talking about probability estimates. The actual probability of what happened is 1, because it is what happened. However, we don't know what happened, that's why we make a probability estimate in the first place!

Forcing yourself to commit to only one of two possibilities in the real world (which is what all of these analogies are supposed to tie back to), when there are a lot of initially low probability possibilities that are initially ignored (and rightly so), seems incredibly foolish.

Also, your analogy doesn't fit brazil84's murder example. What e... (read more)

The probability of both, in that case, plummets, and you should start looking at other explanations. Like, say, that the victim was shot with a rifle at close range, which only leaves a bullet in the body 1% of the time (or whatever).

It might be true that, between two hypotheses one is now more likely to be true than the other, but the probability for both still dropped, and your confidence in your pet hypothesis should still drop right along with its probability of being correct.

So say you have hypothesis X at 60% confidence and hypotheses Y at 40% New ... (read more)

4-step is what preceded 2-step. I say preceded, but it's not like 4-step has gone anywhere. It's still the most common beat pattern for electronic music. It's just a steady beat in 4/4 time with a kick drum on each beat, so it just goes boom boom boom boom with each measure, and it's super easy to dance to.

Techno and house are pretty much exclusively 4-step.

2-step runs at the same/similar speed as 4-step, and is still in 4/4 time, but the drum beat is split up and made more erratic. You'll often have several drum rhythms going on simultaneously. The... (read more)

What else could it be?

The break distance bias found in the papers?

You can't use two pieces of contradictory evidence to support the same argument. If the most highly contested cases still have a chance at success, finding 0% success rate at the furthest distance from the last break (because they are the longest cases and therefore placed last) should not increase your belief that there is no bias at work. It should reduce it. How significantly your belief is reduced depends on just how likely you would see 0% success rates at a high distance from break due only to scheduling, but I can't see any way it could legitimately raise your belief that there is no bias.

I agree that any contested case should be longer than an uncontested, however are there not cases where the prosecution simply doesn't need to go through a lengthy argument to prove their case? Prosecution lays out X, Y, and Z evidence that is definitive, and therefore the prosecution doesn't need to spend a lot of time arguing. Are these types of cases not generally shorter than cases that are contested but more likely to succeed? Or does a lengthy defense attempting to weasel out of the evidence make up for a short prosecution? And are these specific... (read more)

I can certainly buy that, but would there really be zero people who apply even though they don't have much chance of winning? I know a few stubborn people who I would expect to apply anyway even if they didn't have much chance of success. I'd be surprised to find out that the prison system has an insignificant number of people who are like that as well.

Also, do the most highly contested applications (and therefore the longest, and therefore placed last on the docket) really have 0% chance of success? If so, would not those applications be better off not... (read more)

I don't see any reason there wouldn't be the inverse as well. That is, applications which are immediately rejected, and therefore quite short.

I also find it suspicious that the most highly contested applications would also be the least likely to be approved. Presumably these are the ones which are borderline, and require much argument, pro and con, to come to a decision. Immediate rejections wouldn't require long arguments, and neither would immediate acceptances. Under the above hypothesis, both of these types of cases should be early in the session. ... (read more)

Body language coaching doesn't just exist, it's an industry. It is typically associated with public speaking, salesmanship, etc, and there are a lot of places (and books, and online resources, etc) to get training. In fact, one of the linked blogs in the OP, "Paging Dr. NerdLove", is completely dedicated to helping men who are bad at inter-personal communication with women (i.e. socially awkward) get better at it, which includes quite a lot of body language training.

It's reasonably well known that body language comprises a significant portion o... (read more)

The heart of the problem is body language.

It's an actual language that must be learned and spoken, but a lot of people for some reason never learned it, or learned it poorly.

When these people interact with strangers, it's exactly like the guy with a bad understanding of a foreign language who tries to speak it, and instead of saying "Hi, are you friendly? Lets be friends!" he says "Hi, I want swallow your head!"

I hope you can see why people wouldn't like someone who goes around talking like that on a regular basis, and that the problem... (read more)

I'm still not getting the difference. He chose the second box because he deduced the the key must be there based on the assumption that one of the inscriptions was true. There is no equivalence between assuming a key in the second box and deducing a key in the second box based on a false premise.

However, assuming one of the inscriptions is true and assuming a correlation between the inscriptions and the contents of the box seem the same to me. He can't deduce a correlation between them, because the only basis for such a correlation is the existence of t... (read more)

For the inscriptions to be either true or false, they would have to correlate with the contents of the boxes. If he didn't assume this correlation existed, why would he have bothered trying to solve the implied riddle, and then believe upon solving it that he could choose the correct box?

The assumption that one of the inscriptions is true is also the assumption that the contents of the boxes correlate with the truthfulness of the inscriptions. And the key point is that neither inscription need be true, because the contents of the boxes don't correlate wi... (read more)

I think that's basically the point - the argument is technically valid, but it is wrong, and you got there by using "human" wrong in the first place.

Socrates is clearly human, and the definition on hand is "bipedal, featherless, and mortal". If Socrates is mortal, then he is susceptible to hemlock. When Socrates takes hemlock and survives, you can't change the definition of "human" to "bipedal, featherless, not mortal". You're still using the word "human" wrong.

What's telling here is that you don't say &... (read more)

Unlike the jester's riddle, the king never claimed there was any correlation between the contents of the boxes and the inscriptions on those boxes. The jester merely assumed that there was.

It couldn't be that, I was raised among the proletariat. Not much prestige dialect signalling there. (There is some, of course, but nothing like the bourgeoisie.)

I think in my previous post the implication is that I believe the punishment was unwarranted. That is not the case (though I certainly felt that way at the time). I simply felt the reason given for the detention was less important than the experience of realizing that authority figures can be wrong.

It was entirely appropriate for the teacher to give me detention, because I actually was interrupting class when she was trying to teach, and I don't think I was being particularly helpful to the rest of the students. What she was teaching was correct, as f... (read more)

Yes, the point is to be sure you aren't using "Emergence" or "Emergent Phenomena" as stop signs. That you recognize that there is in fact a cause (or causes) for what you are seeing, and if the total seems to be more than the sum of its parts, that there is some mechanism that exists that is amplifying the effects.

Emergence is not an explanation by itself.

The appellate system itself - of which cases involving new DNA evidence are a tiny fraction - is a much more useful measure.

There are a whole lot more exonerations via the appeals process than those driven by DNA evidence alone. This aught to be obvious, and the 0.2% provided by DNA is an extreme lower bound, not the actual rate of error correction.

Case in point, I found an article describing a study on overturning death penalty convictions, and they found that 7% of convictions were overturned on re-trial, and 75% of sentences were reduced from the death... (read more)

The theory that you are familiar with is a little off. What stars can produce is solely a function of size, not generation. Already fused material from a previous star does not allow the new star to fuse more elements. Likewise, the longevity of stars is solely a function of size. It's a balance between the heat of fusion and the pressure of gravity. More matter in the star means more pressure, which means the rate of fusion increases and more elements can be fused, but the fuel is consumed significantly faster.

The smaller a star is the longer it bu... (read more)

Interesting! I hadn't thought about quantum tunneling as a source of uncertainty (mainly because I don't understand it very well - my understanding of QM is very tenuous).

I'm not sure I understand how quantum events could have an appreciable effect on chemical reactions once decoherance has occurred. Could you point me somewhere with more information? It's very possible I misunderstood a sequence, especially the QM sequence.

I could also see giving different estimates for the population of Australia for slightly different versions of your brain, but I would think you would give different estimates given the same neuron configuration and starting conditions extremely rarely (that is, run the test a thousand times on molecul... (read more)

Do neurons operate at the quantum level? I thought they were large enough to have full decoherance throughout the brain, and thus no quantum uncertainty, meaning we could predict this particular version of your brain perfectly if we could account for the state and linkages of every neuron.

Or do neurons leverage quantum coherence in their operation?

Yeesh, that's terrible. It kind of figures that he'd rather mislead a class full of students about the way physics works than own up to his mistake.

It reminds me of an error I had been taught about the way airfoils work that wasn't corrected until I read a flippin comic strip on the subject almost a decade after I graduated high school.

I was stunned, and spent the rest of the afternoon learning how airfoils really work. What makes this particular example so tragic is it leverages another principle of physics that you won't realize doesn't fit if you are ... (read more)

Ad hominem literally means "to the man" or "to the person".

It was most certainly an ad hominem question, but given the framing he probably wasn't intending to discredit the argument with the ad hominem and therefore didn't commit the ad hominem fallacy.

The fallacy is making an ad hominem attack in order to distract from or discredit the argument without addressing the merits of the argument itself. The traits can certainly be related to the argument, and in fact the more closely related the traits are the more effective the fallacy is ... (read more)

I will say that I also had a high school English teacher who would use the wrong word or give a ridiculous interpretation in the hopes that a student would correct him and learn to not always trust authority.

I had a teacher somewhat similar to that my freshman year in high school, except she was a last-minute replacement and was not really an English teacher. Her grammar was atrocious, and I ended up getting detention for correcting her too often (interrupting class or lack of respect or some such was the reason given on the detention). It was probabl... (read more)

Just noticed this comment when I was looking through my messages for an old comment, and I wanted to respond.

It is the word "too" that is important there, and the usage you describe is only used as an affirmative for contradicting a negative statement (at least, that's proper grammar anyway).

For example, if the original statement had been "God must not make a boulder he cannot lift!" and I had responded with "God must too make a boulder he cannot lift!" you would be right, but the original statement is an affirmative statemen... (read more)