- #71
Stephen Tashi
Science Advisor
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stevendaryl said:. For a specific male, we can come up with different probabilities depending on how much information we have about him. So it's subjective.
Is the fact that people with different information assign different probabilities any more subjective than the situation where two problems in a textbook have different given information and different answers?
Person A with information Y, can claim his assignment of a probability P1 to an event is correct if he does experiments which set conditions as Y and produce results consistent with the value P1. Person B with information "Y and Z" can claim his assignment of a probability P2 to the event is correct if he does experiments which set conditions as "Y and Z" and produce results consistent with P2.
The "subjective" aspect seems to come from the viewpoint of an observer who knows the actual conditions are "Y and Z", and hence regards person A as honest but wrong. Likewise, an observer might know the actual length of the hypoteneuse of a particlular triangle is 10 meters and thus consider people who are working a homework problem where the hypotenuse of a triangle is given to be 8 meters to be honest, but wrong.