Gah!

28 April 2009

Another one of the many perturbing errors in Jeffrey's Subjective Probability, this from §4.1:

If I am sure that it was one of the years from 1951 to 1959, with equal probabilities, then my ex(X) will be 1951
9
+ 1952
9
+ … + 1959
9
, which works out to be 1954.5.
One doesn't even have to do any arithmetic (I didn't) to spot the error; for a sequence of an odd number of equally-spaced integers, the average is the middle-most value, in this case 1955.

Tags: ,

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.