Thank you for this comment. I went through almost exactly the same thing, and might have possibly tabled it at the “I am really confused by this post” stage had I not seen someone well-known in the community struggle with and get through it.
My brain especially refused to read past the line that said “pushing it to 50% is like throwing away information”: Why would throwing away information correspond to the magic number 50%?! Throwing away information brings you closer to maxent, so if true, what is it about the setup that makes 50% the unique solution, independent of the baseline and your estimate? That is, what is the question?
I think it’s this: in a world where people can report the probability for a claim or the negation of it, what is the distribution of probability-reports you’d see?
By banning one side of it as Rafael does, you get it to tend informative. Anyway, this kind of thinking makes it seem like it’s a fact about this flipping trick and not fundamental to probability theory. I wonder if there are more such tricks/actual psychology to adjust for to get a different answer.
Thank you for this comment. I went through almost exactly the same thing, and might have possibly tabled it at the “I am really confused by this post” stage had I not seen someone well-known in the community struggle with and get through it.
My brain especially refused to read past the line that said “pushing it to 50% is like throwing away information”: Why would throwing away information correspond to the magic number 50%?! Throwing away information brings you closer to maxent, so if true, what is it about the setup that makes 50% the unique solution, independent of the baseline and your estimate? That is, what is the question?
I think it’s this: in a world where people can report the probability for a claim or the negation of it, what is the distribution of probability-reports you’d see?
By banning one side of it as Rafael does, you get it to tend informative. Anyway, this kind of thinking makes it seem like it’s a fact about this flipping trick and not fundamental to probability theory. I wonder if there are more such tricks/actual psychology to adjust for to get a different answer.