Help! Can a mod please fix the coding in my last post. Thanks.
magellan01 i will add this. If you covered my eyes and asked me to guess what the victim looked like based on your stats, I would of course pick the blue one… but and this is something that Hentor as been pounding home, probability and credibility aren’t the same thing.
Meaning if I uncover my eyes and see an red woman there, telling me she was raped, I don’t look at my statistics and reduce my believe of her claim. Not .00001; even if there was a blue one next to her, who said she was raped too.
I have answered it and you don’t have to choose. That’s a limitation you’ve placed upon yourself, despite being asked and told you don’t have to.
Thank you for answering. A couple things. I think we are using credibility two different ways. I think you (and Hentor) are using it to apply to the person, as a commentary on their penchant for truthfulness. I am using it in the logical sense, meaning likelihood of outcome. I make to claims:
Claim A: if I let go of the ball it will fall.
Claim B: If I let go of the ball it will rise.
So, without any other information, Claim A. is more credible.
Now, in this logic problem, why do you think it matters that your eyes are opened or closed. Make beleive you will never see the women, they are in a room down the hall. Why does this matter? Do you not see a contradiction in position with the two different answers you give. Remember, the claims and the givens haven’t changed at all, so how could the same claims and givens result in two different outcomes?
I just previewed and saw this:
It’s a h-y-p-o-t-h-e-t-i-c-a-l. The condition of you having to choose has been placed on you. Can you make a better guess and a worse guess? That is the question. Above you answered “Yes”, than “No” when you open your eyes. Do you not find this logically inconsistent?
Yes it’s logic and probability, unfortunately we are left with a different probability problem than the one you keep proposing.
The probability problem is to determine, when an event is reported, what is the probability that the report is accurate.
The probability of an accurate report is accurate reports/total number of reports.
We have exactly ZERO information regarding either of these numbers from either situation.
No, actually I don’t want to introduce more information. What you want to do is develop statistics from the general population and then apply it to a different population. Don’t do that.
What you could conclude from your statistics is that if you were going to sample the population, you would have to have large numbers of reds relative to the number of blues to increase the likelihood that you’ve sampled a red victim of rape. Or that if you have called together a bunch of rape victims, if you were to randomly draw one out, she would be more likely to be blue than red. But say that you had a room with 100 rape victims - 99 blue and 1 red. Say the blue one and a red one stand up and say “I was raped.” Would you say that the blue one was more credible than the blue one? I sure hope not, because you know that they have all been raped.
But you don’t have a randomly drawn representative of the general population. You have two self-selected Gorks claiming rape. Since you’ve been given no statistics about this population, you can make no statement about their relative credibility.
Do you understand that the population for which you are giving statistics and the population about which you are trying to compare credibility are two different things? Do you understand that the general population is a different set of people than the population of people claiming rape? Do you understand that the rate of rapes will differ dramatically between those two populations?
Short and sweet. Nicely done.
None of this matters. You still want to entertain information we do not have. Why is this so hard? The givens are all we have. The next time you reply try not bringing ANY new information in, that just skirts the question. I agree that the information we are given is piss-poor. I agree that the decision we make with it is piss-poor. I agree more information, particulalry of the type you mention, would be much more valuable and lead to a much better decision. But that does not change the fact, that even withoutit, we can make a better guess and a worse guess. That is all. Not that we would even act on the information, it being so poor, but we could identify the better guess and the worse guess.
[QUOTE=magellan01]
Thank you for answering. A couple things. I think we are using credibility two different ways. I think you (and Hentor) are using it to apply to the person, as a commentary on their penchant for truthfulness. I am using it in the logical sense, meaning likelihood of outcome. I make to claims:
Claim A: if I let go of the ball it will fall.
Claim B: If I let go of the ball it will rise.
So, without any other information, Claim A. is more credible.
Of course there’s more information. It’s called gravity. Do you understand? You keep making hypotheticals based on either the laws of physics or common sense and claim that chosing the only possible answer makes it more credible.
Well, duh.
People don’t work that way.
[quote]
Now, in this logic problem, why do you think it matters that your eyes are opened or closed. Make beleive you will never see the women, they are in a room down the hall. Why does this matter? Do you not see a contradiction in position with the two different answers you give. Remember, the claims and the givens haven’t changed at all, so how could the same claims and givens result in two different outcomes?[/qoute]
Because on is based on a “best” guess and the other is based on having facts. Once I walk into the room and see the victim, the color of her skin, shouldn’t reduce her claim or her credibility…unless there’s something that prevents her from being raped and that’s not a given.
You can have 10 marbles, 9 red and 1 green and I can honestly predict that if you pick one, it’s a red one. probability.
However, if you pull out a green one, that doesn’t mean I should assume you palmed it. credibility
No. We are not asked to assess what the probability of each claim is in some absolute sense. We are simply asked to rank the two. Which claim has the greater possibility of being true. That is it.
For the nine billionth time, it would be nice, better, great to have the info. But not having it doesn’t mean that you can not make a best guess and a worse guess.
How can you make a best or worse gues when you have zero information regarding the ratios involved.
For example:
a/b vs c/d
Which is higher?
We can’t say anything about it, not even a relative claim between the two.
and for the ten billionth time, the information you’re being asked to asses is probability of the “accuracy” not the probability of the event, and therefore you do not have any of the information necessary.
And if it turns out the red Gorkette is telling the truth I will not be surprised. That is not the question. But I won’t repeat it again. You are unable to divorce the benefit of doubt we should give people in the real world and entertain a hypothetical with very limited information. Your desire to always bring it back to a black and white issue is evidence of that. I suggest a course in symbolic logic. Not because ew disagree on the answer, but because you seem unable to suspend reality and think abstractly.
What contradiction? If you’re asking me to give you odds, I chose the blue woman. If you asking me to chose which claim is more credible, they both are; unless there’s a specific reason why a red woman can’t be raped.
Hah! I know a rather tall fellow with a beard, long hat and a taste for brains that will disagree.
Excellent. The problem you construct is analagous to our hypothetical when we do not include the information that for every 1 rape of a red women their are 99 rapes of blue women. When we do not have that information I agree with your conclusion.
But that additional piece of information acts as a common point of reference from which we can conclude certain things. One of those things is that if you hear someone has been raped that she most probably a blue woman. Right?
Another way to ask that same thing is (I’ll simplify what I offered earlier even further):
A being from the planet Gork makes two claim:
Claim 1: a blue woman was raped.
Claim 2: a red woman was raped.
The only other piece of information given to us is that for every red woman raped 99 blue woman are raped. That’s it. You can know nor assume nothing else.
So, all things being equal, which claim is more likely to be true? Or, which claim is more credible? Can you make a better guess and a worse guess as to which one?
Another way to help force the issue, is to add, only one Claim is true. Can you make a better guess and a worse guess as to which one?
If a given event is (much) less likely to have occured than another one, wouldn’t a claim that the less likely event happened also be less likely to be true? Is this not why people who claim to have been taken aboard a UFO are mocked?
Although I 100% agree “a/b c/d which is higher” cannot be determined, and also agree that maybe the (good) arguments for each side here may be getting bogged down in the semantics of the word “credible”…
The reasons why red women are raped less frequently are beside the point. Maybe they’re ugly, or twice the size of the men, or good fighters, or smelly, or are revered as priestesses, or there is only very few of them. Maybe one of these reasons is true. Maybe they all are. None of this matters to our hypothetical. That you cannot comprehend that is becoming less and less surprising.
Jimmy Carter was universally ridiculed once for claiming a bunny rabbit attacked him. This is a world leader, who didn’t even need to talk about it in the first place- it’s not like he was caught doing something wrong- and even still this smart, respected, POTUS, with no reason to lie, makes a wild claim, you just don’t believe it- instead, your opinion of the guy is maybe lowered a bit because of it!
I think you are correct on both counts.