Greetings to all.
I started an MSc that includes a course in statistics. Full disclosure: my bachelor’s had no courses of statics and it is in biology.
So, the professor was trying to explain the Bayes theorem and conditional probability through the following example.
“A friend of yours invites you over. He says he has 2 children. When you go over, a child opens the door for you and it is a boy. What is the probability that the other child is a boy as well.”
The math say the probability the other child is a boy is increased the moment we learn that one of the kids is a boy. Which i cannot wrap my head around, assuming that each birth is a separate event (the fact that a boy was born does not affect the result of the other birth), and the result of each birth can be a boy or a girl with 50/50 chance.
I get that “math says so” but… Could someone please explain? thank you
In: 77
This problem sounds like someone told you “my first child is a boy. What is the probability that my second child is also a boy?”. If that were the case, the information is completely independent from the question and the answer would be one-half.
But what you actually learned was “at least one of my two children is a boy”. That statement gives you “partial* information about *both* children.
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