4 ms·

I guess you never took stat 101.

dheera 5y ago
Personal attacks not appreciated. No statistics class I took said that a coin with sides A and C can give you a B, or that you could "expect" 0.5 from a bimodal distribution with a delta function at 0 and a delta function at 1. The mean value may be 0.5 but it's not something you would expect to actually happen; if you wanted to maximize the probability that your prediction is correct you'd be better off picking 0 or 1.
- Daishiman 5y ago
  You're making an entire thread about defending your position against using a term of art the way it's used by professional and academics all over the world. Judging by every reply you're getting, everyone know what they mean when they talk about the expected value of a probability distribution. Just drop it.
- kortilla 5y ago
  It’s not a personal attack. “Expected value” is a very basic term of art introduced in stats 101. It’s like having a huge argument about a physics problem claiming “force” isn’t mass times acceleration because nobody is “forcing” you to do anything. Back to your 0 or 1 example. 0.5 is the meaningful value to know over any kind of large sampling because that is what matters for “expected value”. It tells me what I should expect overall if I play 1000 times. What you want is called the “mode”. Given a single instance of an event, what is the most frequent value.
  - dheera 5y ago
    > “Expected value” is a very basic term of art introduced in stats 101. I already know that. My point is it's shitty terminology, even though it's somehow become a standard. Stats 101 also does NOT tell you to "expect" the expected value to happen. GGGGGP however seems to actually use the value to formulate a strategy, and that's where I'm pointing out that this entire formulation of using stats to approach this problem is flawed. You don't have enough chances at the game such that the mean is a meaningful number to consider. That's also why I always refer to it as the mean even if other people call it "expected value". I hate the term with a passion and I will not yield to the wise guys who wrote the books. Honestly I'd rather not have this discussion in English because this isn't a problem in many other languages. In many languages mean is not called "expected" anything.

Personal attacks not appreciated. No statistics class I took said that a coin with sides A and C can give you a B, or that you could "expect" 0.5 from a bimodal distribution with a delta function at 0 and a delta function at 1. The mean value may be 0.5 but it's not something you would expect to actually happen; if you wanted to maximize the probability that your prediction is correct you'd be better off picking 0 or 1.

Daishiman 5y ago
You're making an entire thread about defending your position against using a term of art the way it's used by professional and academics all over the world. Judging by every reply you're getting, everyone know what they mean when they talk about the expected value of a probability distribution. Just drop it.
kortilla 5y ago
It’s not a personal attack. “Expected value” is a very basic term of art introduced in stats 101. It’s like having a huge argument about a physics problem claiming “force” isn’t mass times acceleration because nobody is “forcing” you to do anything. Back to your 0 or 1 example. 0.5 is the meaningful value to know over any kind of large sampling because that is what matters for “expected value”. It tells me what I should expect overall if I play 1000 times. What you want is called the “mode”. Given a single instance of an event, what is the most frequent value.
- dheera 5y ago
  > “Expected value” is a very basic term of art introduced in stats 101. I already know that. My point is it's shitty terminology, even though it's somehow become a standard. Stats 101 also does NOT tell you to "expect" the expected value to happen. GGGGGP however seems to actually use the value to formulate a strategy, and that's where I'm pointing out that this entire formulation of using stats to approach this problem is flawed. You don't have enough chances at the game such that the mean is a meaningful number to consider. That's also why I always refer to it as the mean even if other people call it "expected value". I hate the term with a passion and I will not yield to the wise guys who wrote the books. Honestly I'd rather not have this discussion in English because this isn't a problem in many other languages. In many languages mean is not called "expected" anything.