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Yeah, what matters is the contents of the initial set of families over which we determine probability.

"A man has two children, and one is a son born on a Tuesday. What is the probability that the other child is also a son?"

If the man is randomly chosen from the set of all families the answer is 1/2.

If the man is randomly chosen from the set of all families with a son born on a Tuesday then the answer is 13/27.

The reason for the difference is that a boy/girl family has a 1/7 chance that the boy was born on a Tuesday whereas the boy/boy family has only a 13/49 chance.

B G (7/49 probability of a Tuesday boy)

G B (7/49 probability of a Tuesday boy)

B B (13/49 probability of a Tuesday boy)

13 / (7 + 7 + 13) = 13/27



>If the man is randomly chosen from the set of all families the answer is 1/2.

By assumption, the man has a son born on Tuesday, so this is hardly relevant.

If A is a subset of B, then choosing x uniformly at random from A given that x is in B is the same as choosing uniformly at random from B.


I agree but set B is not a uniformly chosen subset of A in this case. That is the core of the trick. The rule for choosing B is intuitively uniform but actually slightly favours families with a girl and a boy over those with two boys.




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