Talk:2476: Base Rate

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 00:03, 18 June 2021 by 172.70.35.69 (talk) (false positives example is harder to understand than the thing trying to explain)
Jump to: navigation, search

"Aaaand we're back!"
ProphetZarquon (talk) 17:01, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

What happened? Bischoff (talk) 09:02, 16 June 2021 (UTC)
I missed you! 141.101.98.244 19:18, 15 June 2021 (UTC)
There is this : post, but it does not help much yet... But great to be back live as long as it stays like this --Kynde (talk) 12:08, 16 June 2021 (UTC)
I never realised how much I relied on this site to keep me busy until it went down. Beanie talk 10:29, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

I can't tell if cueball is holding the pointer in his left or right hand 141.101.98.122 21:30, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

If he's facing the audience, it's in his right hand. Barmar (talk) 21:32, 15 June 2021 (UTC)
Typically cueball has a slightly noticeable 'chin' that indicates the direction he is looking (ex: #2471, #2468, #2460(cell 2 he looks at Megan and cell 3 looks away from her) ). So in this case I'd say he is looking to the right with his body facing the audience. --TallJason (talk) 15:52, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

I wonder if we can expect a comic soon about fan sites going offline. Barmar (talk) 21:32, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

I really don't think Randall keeps an eye on this page... --Kynde (talk) 11:36, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

I removed the claim that Cueball was left-handed; I don't think we can tell whether he is or isn't. --172.70.130.82 22:36, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

There's now a claim that he's right-handed, and I don't think that's reliable either. Yes, the "proper" way to do a presentation is to be facing away from the screen, but I've seen a lot of not-very-good presenters. BunsenH (talk) 04:30, 16 June 2021 (UTC)
I’ll bet that about 90% of the not-very-good presenters you’ve seen were right-handed, therefore if Cueball is not very good, he’s probably right-handed.172.69.34.190 04:53, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

Wouldn't cueball be technically correct, despite his logical error? Given a set of people who make base-rate errors, with no other qualifications, and given that 90 percent are right handed, wouldn't that make 90 percent of the people who make base rate errors right handed? 172.69.71.180 13:21, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

The triangle formed between his legs and the floor is isosceles. This would require either that he his stance is perpendicular to the viewer, or else he has non-standard hip geometry. With that premise, if we look at the lines of his arm on the 'right' (from the reader's perspective) the line between his arm and leg are parallel. In order for him to be facing the audience, but yet pointing backwards with his left hand, he would have to either rotate his torso, which would cause the arm/leg lines to be not parallel, or have a missing scapula in his right shoulder (normal human arms can't rotate backwards that far. Alternately, due to the visual placement of the whiteboard, cueball would have to be a very short individual for the base line to show between his biceps, or the board would have to be hung unusually high on the wall. None of that is conclusive, but the most reasonable explanation is that Cueball is left-handed, even if that's bad presentation form.172.69.68.79 15:21, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

Can someone explain here in the comments how, in the explanation, we go from that example of 1% / 5% false-positive rate to a 17% / 83%? 172.69.34.190 17:14, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

Take a population of 10,000 tests. From the premise: 1% (100) are true positives and 99% (9,900) are true negatives, regardless of testing. 5% of those TNs (9900*5% = 495) register positive, falsely. We aren't given a false-negative rate, so assuming all 100 TPs register as positive, correctly. 495+100=595 people showing as positive, but only the 100 TPs actually truly were, which is slightly less than 17% (100/595 = 16.8ish%) who have an accurate positive test, leaving a whopping value of slightly more than 83% of tested-positive individuals who were wrongly identified as positive. 162.158.158.105 18:11, 16 June 2021 (UTC)
Another explanation: the 5% is the answer to "What's the change of having a positive test knowning I'm healthy?" the 83% is the answer to "What's the change of being infected knowing I've got a positive test ?".
The latter answers "What's the chance of not being infected, knowing I have a positive test?", as I'm sure you really meant, but that's otherwise an excellent form of summary. 141.101.99.177 13:33, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

Removed the example from the first paragraph. Preserving it here for future reference/improvement. The example is more complex and harder to understand than the example in the comic.

"For instance, imagine a disease that is present in 1% of the population, for which there is a test with a 5% false-positive rate. This test might be presented as "95% accurate", and so people who receive a positive result from such a test are likely to think they have the disease. However, someone who receives a positive test result has only a 17% chance of actually having the disease; a much more likely reason for the positive result, occurring in 83% of all positive test results, is a false (wrong) positive." 172.70.35.69 00:03, 18 June 2021 (UTC)