

The Raccoon Princess and the Fox Prince: A Bayesian Parable - baristaGeek
http://cassandraxia.com/projs/raccoon/

======
amarte
This was a very fun story to go through! I wonder if this format could be used
as an effective way of structuring lessons in school. Each juncture that
requires a choice to be made would (ideally) encourage class participation and
debate. After a period of discussion, a vote would be taken, a decision would
then be made, and the next section of the lesson would begin.

I'm not a teacher, and I know from friends who are that being a good teacher
is harder than what I can probably imagine, but I think kids would have fun
working through these types of stories.

~~~
keenerd
[edit; whoops you were talking about the format and I was talking about the
material. Oh well, hopefully this is not too out of place.]

It could be made much more approachable by removing the math entirely. If you
learned programming before algebra you might have solved it like this:

    
    
        from random import random
        from collections import defaultdict
        
        tally = defaultdict(int)
        for i in range(100000):
            thief = ['raccoon', 'fox'][random() < 0.3]
            bear = ['false', 'true'][random() < 0.8]
            hair = ['raccoon', 'fox'][random() < 0.3333333]
            if thief == 'raccoon' and bear == 'true':
                continue
            if thief == 'fox' and bear == 'false':
                continue
            if thief != hair:
                continue
            tally[thief] += 1
        
        print(sorted(tally.items()))
    

While crude it does give the correct answer, to within 1% or so.

~~~
qznc
Solving a bayesian parable with frequentist methods is heresy. ;)

~~~
keenerd
I'm reasonably certain no camp would claim the statistical equivalent of
BogoSort as a method. 98% of the loop cycles (and 98% of the random numbers
generated) make no contribution to the result and are thrown away.

------
ikeboy
In the category of "games involving Bayes":
[https://github.com/ksotala/BayesGame](https://github.com/ksotala/BayesGame),
with description
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/lad/bayes_academy_development_report...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/lad/bayes_academy_development_report_1/)
and
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/les/bayes_academy_development_report...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/les/bayes_academy_development_report_2_improved_data/)

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takatin
Her interactive last year on Cognitive Biases is another gem:
[http://cassandraxia.com/projs/advbiases/](http://cassandraxia.com/projs/advbiases/)

------
ikeboy
There's an unsupported assumption here: we don't know that raccoons and fox
have the same crime rate. Without data, I'd say that the larger animals
probably have a larger rate, so it shifts more in that direction.

~~~
spbaar
That's racist.

~~~
ikeboy
It's not racist if it's true.

