Probability, Paradox, and the Reasonable Person Principle (opens in new tab)

The thing about the value of money being roughly logarithmic sent me on a google exploration where I ended up on a suggested "logarithmic flat tax plan". The gist is, you figure out how many times the poverty rate you make, take the log-base-10, and multiple by some flat constant that is the same for everyone - the result would be your tax rate. Right now in the US that constant would be around 9, assuming the same tax scheme would apply to companies that make billions in profits like Apple and Exxon.

At first I thought there was a bug in experiment 2b he writes that the sample space should be:

{'BB/?b', 'BB/b?', 'BG/b?', 'GB/?b'}

Because he describes the event as "He is observed at a time when he is accompanied by one of his children, chosen at random."

I thought he also needed to include two more cases:

{'BB/?b', 'BB/b?', 'BG/b?', 'GB/?b', 'GB/g?', 'BG/?g'}

Which again gives us 1/3 probability of both being boys.

but I guess the part that comes after the '/' indicates the observation event.

Great post, I really enjoyed it. Norvig has a knack for modeling these domains in simple, powerful ways.

I've always believed the most common responses to St Petersburg Paradox felt incomplete. The biggest miss is not looking at the other side of the transaction. What's the lowest that the casino offering the game would be willing to charge to play it?

Previously discussed when it was an ipython url instead of a jupyter url: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10327409