Human factor in probability

[Lord Antares]

Attitude? Sarcasm?

 

I was actually offering you a compliment that you had made good headway in a broad and difficult subject, without formal training.

 

Sorry. I thought you were being sarcastic about that.

Thanks for the compliment. It means a lot to me.

 

To be fair, you criticized me for using made-up terminology in post #1, whereas you only provided the correct one in post #21, which I thought was a bit unwarranted. I had to make something up to better convery my thoughts.

 

I only used my terminology once after your post but just to connect yours to mine so that it would be clear what I meant. You criticized that as well, hence my comments about the attitude.

I just want to let you know, I have respect for your knowledge, but you need to understand that I need clarification for a lot of things, since I am in no way a mathematician.

 

 

This is a particular shame as this is the only thread with any serious technical content in the first twenty on the current/recent list.

 

I agree with the sentiment that the threads with serious technical content are what makes this forum. So let's leave all of this attitude and approach chit-chat behind and get back to the content. One more thing tho:

 

 

As far as I can tell you have not responded to/ignored all of them.

 

I had to leave for work so I wanted to point a few things out quickly without having time to respond to the real questions.

Ok, so...

 

 

However you had reached an stumbling block, which I identify as mixing up the fundamental difference between before and after the event.

 

Can you elaborate a bit? I did say that it's different if you don't know the result so you give odds. I said that the odds are 1 after the event has happened or if you know for sure that it is going to happen. Is there something wrong with this?

 

 

I did ask if you have a working definition of probability, because this is important, as well as offering many relevant areas/subject heading for discussion.

 

Well, I would define probability as likelihood of an event happening. That's what I considered to be practical odds (again, using my terms just to show what I meant). So, for me, the practical odds of a coin toss or a die roll are 1 in 2 and 1 in 6 respectively.

 

The odds of both are 1 in 1 if either the result has happened or can hypothetically calculate the physics of the coin/die landing after the initial toss/throw. I called these technical odds.

 

From my understanding of your posts, I used the priori approach for the former. The latter, from what you said, shouldn't be really considered probability because you always know the result. Am I understanding you correctly?

 

I will adopt the proper terms but first I need to understand completely what they mean.

 

I am also not sure how the subjective approach works. What is the relevance of assigning the probability of 1 for something you can't be certain will happen? What would the odds of 0.6 mean in the subjective approach? That you're a bit less certain and you also can't know the result? That's what confuses me. Can you elaborate a bit on that?

 

Let me know if I need to answer some other questions

Edited February 21, 2017 by Lord Antares

[studiot]

I am expecting a long telephone conversation with someone in Germany in a couple of minutes but I will expand on the headings I have introduced and explain what I mean later.