Single Comment

Piece Values[Subject Thread] [Add Response]

H. G. Muller wrote on Tue, May 13, 2008 04:57 PM UTC:

Is this story meant to illustrate that you have no clue as to how to
calculate statistical significance? Or perhaps that you don't know what
it is at all?

The observation of a single tails event rules out the null hypothesis that
the lottery was fair (i.e. that the probability for this to happen was
0.000,000,01) with a confidence of 99.999,999%.

Be careful, though, that this only describes the case where the winning
android was somehow special or singled out in advance. If the other
participants to the lottery were 100 million other cheating androids, it
would not be remarkable in anyway that one of them won. The null
hypothesis that the lottery was fair predicted a 100% probability for
that.

But, unfortunately for you, it doesn't work for lotteries with only 2
tickets. Then you can rule the null hypothesis that the lottery was fair
(and hence the probability 0.5) with a confidence of 50%. And 50%
confidence means that in 50% of the cases your conclusion is correct, and
in the other 50% of the cases not. In other words, a confidence level of
50% is a completely blind, uninformed random guess.