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Imagine you are kidnapped and knocked unconscious. Then you wake up in a prison cell by yourself. You are now wearing a prison uniform with a label that says "p
by wcoenen 4y ago
Imagine you are kidnapped and knocked unconscious. Then you wake up in a prison cell by yourself. You are now wearing a prison uniform with a label that says "prisoner N", where N is some number.
Would it really be "trickery with probabilities" to say that there is only a one-in-thousand chance that the total number of prisoners is more than 1000*N? And that the real number of total prisoners is probably much closer to N?
- 317070 4y agoYes to the first question! The distribution representing my beliefs in such a scenario would not have a finite variance. Given the question, are you aware of the Pareto distribution? Nassim Taleb has great work explaining fat-tail distributions. (I do have strong priors on various things, such as the size of the human population and the sizes of large prisons, which I ignore here as they break the metaphore)