But I doubt you can explain it to middle school students in only 3 min. If I were you, I wouldn’t discuss the theorem itself, just the cancer patient problem. Have the students try to figure out the answer for themselves, and then surprise them with the real answer (and justify it by talking about a population of 1 million people or whatever; your explanation doesn’t have to use probabilities, although the problem statement could).
Actually, you might want to come up with a different example than the standard one so students who happen to encounter the standard one later on will appreciate it. (I was turned off by Eliezer’s Bayesian theorem explanation initially, because it started off by challenging me to solve the standard disease example, which I already knew the trick for.)
This is my favorite explanation of the theorem so far:
http://oscarbonilla.com/2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/
But I doubt you can explain it to middle school students in only 3 min. If I were you, I wouldn’t discuss the theorem itself, just the cancer patient problem. Have the students try to figure out the answer for themselves, and then surprise them with the real answer (and justify it by talking about a population of 1 million people or whatever; your explanation doesn’t have to use probabilities, although the problem statement could).
Actually, you might want to come up with a different example than the standard one so students who happen to encounter the standard one later on will appreciate it. (I was turned off by Eliezer’s Bayesian theorem explanation initially, because it started off by challenging me to solve the standard disease example, which I already knew the trick for.)
Nice one, I like it!
But there’s something I fail to understand: where’s the 9.6% rendered?
“9.6% of the area outside of event A.”—wait, doesn’t that little area outside A represent the women with cancer?
Pretty sure the 9.6% is the section of the green circle that doesn’t overlap with the red circle.