“My goal today is to be better than yesterday so wait until you see what I do "tomorrow."” - Alien Ness

Monday, July 4, 2011

The Reality Check Episode 122

Prosecutor’s Fallacy + Queueing Theory + 2011 Predictions

Part 1:
The prosecutor's fallacy is a fallacy of statistical reasoning made in law where the context which the accused has been brought to court is falsely assumed to be irrelevant to judging how confident a jury can be evidence against them with a statistical measure of doubt. If the defendant was selected from a large group because of the evidence under consideration, then this fact should be included in weighing how incriminating that evidence is. Not doing so is a base rate fallacy. - Wikipedia
The opposite from the prosecutor's fallacy is the defense attorney's fallacy. Let's say that there is 1/1000000 chance of match that the accused is innocent. The prosecutor would say that there's 1/1000000 chance of innocence. But if everyone in a community of 10000000 people is tested, there will be 10 matches even if everyone is innocent. The defense fallacy would say that 10 matches were expected, so that this kind of evidence says that 90% of the chance that the accused is innocent, and has little relevance to the case. 

Part 2: 
I'm sure we all have experienced this queueing trouble. It feels like every time we need to stand in a line for something, the line we stand in always takes the longest. It just frustrates us that it's so unfair when you are just standing there and watching other lines finish. So, is there a better way to do things? There are a few ways to solve this problem. The most popular one is to have just one line, like when we go through customs. We all wait in one line, and the next person will go to the next counter that finishes first, so no matter what the person behind you will always be slower, which is quite fair. But that might cause other problems in some situations, such as supermarkets. There is no way that there will be enough space for all those shopping carts to stay in just one lines, it's quite impossible. That's why there's another method, which is having different lines doing different things. There will be lines with fewer than 5 items, a normal amount, and a large amount of stuff. That way the people that just want to buy a few items can move faster. 

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