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Old 10-08-2005, 05:22 PM
Bork Bork is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2005
Posts: 3
Default Re: Drawing Randomly from an Infinite Set

Nope, not a homework question.

He stills says that the odd numbers and prime numbers can be put in one to one correspondence, and thinks it follows from this that they are equally likely to be drawn.

I like some of these examples, but while they probably show that he is wrong in his conclusion, they don't pick out the mistake in his reasoning.

You guys propose that there are more general ways to calculate probabilities but you havent shown why his inference is flawed. Here is his inference: things with 1:1 correspondence within a set are equally likely to be drawn from that set.

Simply saying there are different sized infinites doesn't work because you can take every unique odd number and find a unique prime to assign to it. They are still clearly in one to one correspondence, different sized infinites or not.
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