Talk:Inverse gambler's fallacy

message: The German article links to an article by Bostrom, which proves that the IGF is wrong:
N. Bostrom: Anthropic Bias, Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy. Routledge, 2002,   — Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.200.146.119 (talk) 13:16, 21 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Hint that the assumptions are wrong

message: Changed in the sentence, 
"A rebuttal paper[2] by John Leslie points out a difference between the observation of double sixes and the observation of fine tuning, namely that the former is not necessary (the roll could have come out differently) while the latter is necessary (our universe must support life, which means ex hypothesi that we must see fine tuning). 
in the parenthetical statement, "(the roll could have come out differently)", "differently" to "different". The word is not modifying the "coming out" process, like the dice hitting the backboard harder and coming back farther, but the result. As it was, it's like writing, "I scored lowly on the test." It was awkward at best and I would argue, grammatically incorrect. "Different" describes (the results of) the "roll", doesn't modify anything verbal.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.183.102.137 (talk) 18:19, 25 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Minor grammar correction

message: Should it not be "dice have no memory"?
Gah...
I really don't know.
Acegikmo1 05:14, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  "dice have no memories" 

message: If this is all about a many worlds/creationism debate, it should say so in the intro.  Alternatively, having followed the link from gambler's fallacy, I would have expected it to start with something like:
:You see a pair of fair dice rolled once, and the result is double-sixes. This is a quite improbable result, so you conclude that the dice were probably fixed to always roll six.
That seems a more natural reaction (and inverse) than the rolled many times before position in the article as of now.  Indeed, there are Bayesian arguments why you might be slightly more inclined to believe the dice have a bias than you were before the roll. --Henrygb 18:17, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Cosmogony]] 

message: Here is an argument similar but not equivalent to the one the article discusses.
:Someone brings you a pair of fair dice which he rolled, revealing a result of double-sixes. This is a quite improbable result, so you conclude that the person probably rolled the dice many times before choosing to show them to you.
Logic or fallacy?  (The person makes no claim as to why he brought the dice to you, or whether or not it is his first result.  The diffence is that the dice are not rolled in front of your eyes, so the person may in fact have only come running to you when he got an interesting result.)  -- Milo
:You can't even claim that he rolled them :)
:Anyway, if your observation was not conditional to the dice reading 12, then you cannot make any inferences about past rolls. If he has something to gain from rolling the sixes, then you have reason to suspect your observational status and the outcome are not independent, and can accuse him of cheating with some significant probability :)
:--Andy  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.233.77.207 (talk) 15:50, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Similar reasoning 

message: This article doesn't seem to be written in a style coherant to that of an encyclopedia in places. Would a cleanup be in order? 80.42.209.188 22:05, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I replaced the tag with the rewrite one. It seems to read more like a textbook than an article, therfore it needs a complete rewrite.--Orthologist 21:56, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Encyclopedic style 

message: I agree that this is an unnecesary section of the article but what should we do ? I think that we should create a link to it on a seperate page, because it is of only moderate relevance, not worrth mension on the article it's self. I would like to hear some opinions on this subject. --Bobnessownage
Mmm, there no longer seems to be any discussion of how this relates to a multiverse / world ensemble theory anywhere in Wikipedia that I could find.
The Multiverse idea isn't motivated by fallacious thinking - there's a key difference between this fallacy and the inference to a multiverse. The multiverse case is more like this:
: Someone tells you that he's going to roll a dice a certain number of times (but he doesn't say how many) and if he rolls 6-6 at any point he'll stop and come show them to you. And indeed, he does come and show you a 6-6. So should you conclude that he rolled more than once?
Yes, probably. The point is that 6-6 is the only result you could possibly have seen. Likewise, an apparently fine-tuned universe is the only result you could possibly have seen if you exist to see anything at all.
If we were to select a random universe and look at it, and it turned out that it contained intelligent observers, that wouldn't indicate how many universes there are. But that's not what we're doing. Evercat 23:01, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure where you get 1/20.8. If you want the number of throws until the first success (inclusive), then that would be governed by the geometric distribution, but the expected value of that is simply 1/p = 36 here. What the article talks about is the probability that it took only one throw to get a double six, which is p = 1/36. Since there's the additional twist that what we see is not necessarily the first success but just some success, these values turn into lower and upper bounds, respectively. -- Coffee2theorems (talk) 21:59, 18 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Multiple worlds hypotheses 

message: On a much more mundane level, is there not a fallacy in the John Leslie example.  No doubt a statistician will correct me if I am wrong, but do we not need to use a Bernoulli distribution root(p)(1-p) where p=1/36 for the expected number of throws before a double six is obtained, giving an "at most" of about one in 20.8  not 1/36.  I do not have access to the John Leslie article, so I don't know whether the error is in his article or in the editor's interpretation, but I suspect the former.  Can anyone check?  
Shall I add a note that there is a mathematical error here, to avoid perpetuating the minor fallacy?  Dbfirs (talk) 21:00, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure where you get 1/20.8. If you want the number of throws until the first success (inclusive), then that would be governed by the geometric distribution, but the expected value of that is simply 1/p = 36 here. What the article talks about is the probability that it took only one throw to get a double six, which is p = 1/36. Since there's the additional twist that what we see is not necessarily the first success but just some success, these values turn into lower and upper bounds, respectively. -- Coffee2theorems (talk) 21:59, 18 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Error in article

message: The fallacy is utterly unrelated to the argument from design.
Philosopher number 1 is using a straw man. Philosopher number 2 has come to the wrong conclusion.
Both are incredibly wrong, because they have yet to consistently define a roll in the metaphor.
Thus they are engaging in the fallacy of equivocation. Does a roll represent the process caused by the big bang? Or does a roll indicate a sub-process pertaining to  the big bang?
The other assumption that is being made is that fine-tuning is required for living creatures.
If you don't know what the dice look like or what causes them to roll or how often they roll, (the dice could be misshapen, labeled with negative numbers as well, and there may be one or a million), how can you possibly make any inferences about what the results would normally be?
You can't. Both philosophers should consider becoming lawyers.
Deepstratagem (talk) 13:15, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Not very much can be said, true, but something can be (taken from the external links of Fine-tuned universe). Might even be worth mentioning in the article as another attempt at saying something definite about the problem from a Bayesian viewpoint (or maybe not, it's unfortunately only a web page AFAIK - maybe as statisticians, as opposed to philosophers, the authors considered the subject as a mere curiosity). -- Coffee2theorems (talk) 22:41, 18 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lots of fallacies about the fallacy 

message: I haven't been able to download Hacking's original paper, but does he explicitly say that the inverse gambler's fallacy is a fallacy of a misinterpretation of Bayes theorem? Or, does he just say that it is a fallacy (not explicitly mentioning Bayes)? Right now I find the discussion in the lead, where Bayes theorem is invoked, to be confusing. It almost reads like there is a fundamental problem with Bayes theorem, when I think the point is that a misinterpretation is being applied to Bayes theorem. Can someone help on this? Thanks, Grandma (talk) 16:03, 7 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bayes theorem in the lead 

message: First, the real life examples section has grown into a big, unfocused morass of example, criticism, counter-criticism(?), and further support for the idea. I don't think it's too controversial to suggest parsing things down a bit. Even just adding a 'criticism' section, to just pull that stuff out into its own area would make the article more understandably arranged. I would happily start on this myself, but I'll gladly defer the task to those wiser than I (which is probably most of you) or has alternative ideas on this. I'm on standby on that until/unless it stalls out or someone offers a decent reason not to or an alternative, which I will gladly discuss.
Secondly, the age of the comments on this talk page are insane. 2002 and likely before? Just like the article, this place could use some archiving, or at least a tidy up. Anyone want to tackle that? I'm guessing no, so, anyone care if I work on it? Let me know. I'll wait a while, and clearly this page will too...! Buddy23Lee (talk) 02:04, 17 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Couple things: untangling the bloated 'real life examples' section and cleaning this talk page 

message: For example, if one observes...double sixes, it is wrong to suppose that...the dice have been rolled many times before.
The text ought to explain the reasoning which would lead to such a supposition. It was unclear to me, and I cannot express it in the correct tone. 
One might suppose that the dice had been rolled many times before because—why? Because the "bad luck had all been exhausted by previous rolls"? No, that's not it.
This seems to be the Gambler's fallacy redux, if an observer supposes that the double sixes have appeared because of the influence of past rolls. catsmoke (talk) 18:15, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clarification of "dice had been rolled many times before" needed