On Wed, 20 Oct 1999, Russell Standish wrote: > The measure of Jack Mallah is irrelevant to this situation. The > probability of Jack Mallah seeing Joe Schmoe with a large age is > proportional to Joe Schmoe's measure - because - Joe Schmoe is > independent of Jack Mallah. However, Jack Mallah is clearly not > independent of Jack Mallah, and predictions of the probability of Jack > Mallah seeing a Jack Mallah with large age cannot be made with the > existing assumptions of ASSA. The claim is that RSSA has the > additional assumptions required.
That's total BS. I'll review, although I've said it so many times, how effective probabilities work in the ASSA. You can take this as a definition of ASSA, so you can NOT deny that this is how things would work if the ASSA is true. The only thing you could try, is to claim that the ASSA is false. The effective probability of an observation with characteristic 'X' is (measure of observations with 'X') / (total measure). The conditional effective probability that an observation has characteristic Y, given that it has characteristic X, is p(Y|X) = (measure of observations with X and with Y) / (measure with X). OK, these definitions are true in general. Let's apply them to the situation in question. 'X' = being Jack Mallah and seeing an age for Joe Shmoe and for Jack Mallah, and seeing that Joe also sees both ages and sees that Jack sees both ages. Suppose that objectively (e.g. to a 3rd party) Jack and Joe have their ages drawn from the same type of distribution. (i.e. they are the same species). Case 1: 'Y1' = the age seen for Joe is large. Case 2: 'Y2' = the age seen for Jack is large. Clearly P(Y1|X) = P(Y2|X). - - - - - - - Jacques Mallah ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Graduate Student / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate "I know what no one else knows" - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum My URL: http://pages.nyu.edu/~jqm1584/