• Floey@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    This is a ridiculous argument when taken to the extreme. Say you have three bags. Bag A contains 100 blue marbles. Bag B contains 99 blue marbles and 1 red marble. Bag C contains 100 red marbles. You reach into a random bag and draw a red marble. You’ve only eliminated bag A. Would you say it is a 50-50 whether you are left with a bag now containing 99 blue marbles or 99 red marbles? No, the fact that you drew a red marble tells you something about the composition of the bag you drew from. The odds that you drew out of bag B is 1/101, the total number of red marbles in bag B divided by the total number of red marbles across all bags. The odds that you are dealing with bag C is 100x that.

    Now let’s say you have 4 bags. BB, BR, BR, and RR. You draw an R. There is a 50% chance you are dealing with bag 2 or 3 because together they contain 2 out of 4 R. There is also a 50% chance you are dealing with bag 4. So it is equally likely that you draw either color of marble if you take the remaining marble out of the bag you randomly selected despite there being twice as many BR bags as RR bags.