More lessons from the six box toy experiment

Abstract

Following a paper in which the fundamental aspects of probabilistic inference were introduced by means of a toy experiment, details of the analysis of simulated long sequences of extractions are shown here. In fact, the striking performance of probability-based inference and forecasting, compared to those obtained by simple `rules', might impress those practitioners who are usually underwhelmed by the philosophical foundation of the different methods. The analysis of the sequences also shows how the smallness of the probability of what has been actually observed, given the hypotheses of interest, is irrelevant for the purpose of inference.