All of sebmathguy's Comments + Replies

If someone is able to understand 10% as 10%, then this works. But most people don't. This is why CFAR uses the calibration game. People buy lottery tickets with chances to win smaller than one in a million, and put a lot of emotions in them. Imagine that instead you have a quantum event that happens with probability one in a million. Would the same people feel correctly about it? In situations like these, I find Many Worlds useful for correcting my intuitions (even if in the specific situation the analogy is incorrect, because the source of randomness is not quantum, etc.). For example, if I had the lottery ticket, I could imagine million tiny slices of my future, and would notice that in the overwhelming majority of them nothing special happened; so I shouldn't waste my time obsessing about the invisible. Similarly, if a probability of succeeding in something is 10%, a person can just wave their hands and say "whatever, I feel lucky"... or imagine 10 possible futures, with labels: success, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure. (There is no lucky in the Many Worlds; there are just multiple outcomes.) Specifically, for a quantum suicide, imagine a planet-size graveyard, cities and continents filled with graves, and then zoom in to one continent, one country, one city, one street, and amoung the graves find a sole survivor with a gigantic heap of gold saying proudly: "We, the inhabitants of this planet, are so incredibly smart and rich! I am sure all people from other planets envy our huge per capita wealth!" Suddenly it does not feel like a good idea when someone proposes you that your planet should do the same thing.

That's precisely the reason why I gave up and am building my own Bayesian classifier to do ... almost exactly what this post's project will do. Only, mine is meant for strictly personal use and is related to hashing out a diagnosis with the help of a doctor.

Yes, I'm pretty sure this is currently the most significant hurdle to getting people to want to use it (this isn't the '80s!). Adding some kind of browser-based GUI is my current task.

So immediately download it!

I'm fairly confident that you're replying to the wrong person. Look through the earlier posts; I'm quoting this to summarize its author's argument.

The thing is that PTSD is really not that binary, like many mental illnesses, it has a wide range of symptoms and severity levels. What Nancy is talking about is how one death can push one drastically over, skipping much of the middle range where it might be ambiguous if one had symptoms severe enough to be diagnoseable. (Disclaimer, while I've heard the same sort of things NancyLebovitz is talking about, I'm not aware of any studies actually supporting this.)

Oh, I just noticed the problem. When you say p(A or B)=1, that assumes that A and B are disjoint, or equivalently that p(A and B)=0. The theorem you are trying to use when you say p(A or B)=1 is actually: p(A or B)=p(A)+p(B)-p(A and B)

I think that either I have communicated badly, or you are making a big math mistake. (or both) Say we believe A with probability p and B with probability 1-p. (We therefore believe not A with probability 1-p and not B with probability p. You claim that if we learn A and B are equivalent then we should assign probability 1 to A. However, a symmetric argument says that we should also assign probability 1 to not A. (Since not A and not B are equivalent and we assigned probabilities adding up to 1.) This is a contradiction. Is that clear?

I think that when p+q=1, the answer is clearly 1/2 due to symmetry. How did you get p+q?