The Raccoon Princess and the Fox Prince: A Bayesian Parable

by baristaGeek • 11 years ago

98 16 11 years ago

amarte• 11 years ago

This was a very fun story to go through! I wonder if this format could be used as an effective way of structuring lessons in school. Each juncture that requires a choice to be made would (ideally) encourage class participation and debate. After a period of discussion, a vote would be taken, a decision would then be made, and the next section of the lesson would begin.

I'm not a teacher, and I know from friends who are that being a good teacher is harder than what I can probably imagine, but I think kids would have fun working through these types of stories.

keenerd4• 11 years ago

[edit; whoops you were talking about the format and I was talking about the material. Oh well, hopefully this is not too out of place.]

It could be made much more approachable by removing the math entirely. If you learned programming before algebra you might have solved it like this:

    from random import random
    from collections import defaultdict
    
    tally = defaultdict(int)
    for i in range(100000):
        thief = ['raccoon', 'fox'][random() < 0.3]
        bear = ['false', 'true'][random() < 0.8]
        hair = ['raccoon', 'fox'][random() < 0.3333333]
        if thief == 'raccoon' and bear == 'true':
            continue
        if thief == 'fox' and bear == 'false':
            continue
        if thief != hair:
            continue
        tally[thief] += 1
    
    print(sorted(tally.items()))

While crude it does give the correct answer, to within 1% or so.

qznc• 11 years ago

Solving a bayesian parable with frequentist methods is heresy. ;)

mcherm• 11 years ago

Your approach made assumptions about independence that may or may not be justified.

ikeboy4• 11 years ago

Look at https://github.com/ksotala/BayesGame (I've also got other links about this in my top-level comment).

ikeboy4• 11 years ago

There's an unsupported assumption here: we don't know that raccoons and fox have the same crime rate. Without data, I'd say that the larger animals probably have a larger rate, so it shifts more in that direction.

spbaar• 11 years ago

That's racist.

ikeboy4• 11 years ago

It's not racist if it's true.

ikeboy4• 11 years ago

In the category of "games involving Bayes": https://github.com/ksotala/BayesGame, with description http://lesswrong.com/lw/lad/bayes_academy_development_report... and http://lesswrong.com/lw/les/bayes_academy_development_report...

takatin• 11 years ago

Her interactive last year on Cognitive Biases is another gem: http://cassandraxia.com/projs/advbiases/

The Raccoon Princess and the Fox Prince: A Bayesian Parable

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