Talk:Boy or girl paradox/Archive 3

This is an archive of past discussions about Boy or girl paradox. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

it's exactly half. this is not a paradox but rather a deep misunderstanding of statistics

When i'm told that "the children are not both girls" it's equivalent to being told that "at least one is a boy" which is equivalent to the statement "here is the boy of Mr Jones". the fact is that once we know there is a boy, the probability space is deformed like so:

the BB quadrant is now doubled with probability 0.5. the two other quadrants BG and GB stays the same, 0.25 each. the GG option is zeroed out.

therefore BB is 0.5 and GB+BG=0.5

that's it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.114.39.9 (talk) 09:16, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

Agreed, with the complementation, that the BG and GB events are the same. The whole mental juggling with the 1/3 result is based on considering one event as two. But it is completely irrelevant wich child is the boy wich is the girl, so, again, BG and GB are the same. The whole article should be rewritten, becouse the 1/3 result is based on a wrong assumption.84.0.44.172 (talk) 08:16, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

This goes to the heart of the problem in understanding probability: the need to formulate questions very precisely, which we often don't do in ordinary conversations. Consider 400 two-child families, distributed "perfectly" with 100 BB, 100 BG, 100 GB and 100 GG.

It's easy to confuse two different questions:

At present I have only one child, who is a boy; what is the probability that my next child will be a boy? Answer: (100 BB)/(100 BB + 100 BG) = 1/2.
I have two children, one of whom is a boy; what is the probability that the other is a boy? Answer: (100 BB)/(100 BB + 100 BG + 100 GB) = 1/3.

So if you are going to have two children in total, then if you already have a boy, the probability of ending up with two boys is 1/2; if you have no children yet, the probability is 1/3.

The "paradox" discussed in the article arises because of the difficulty in achieving complete precision in the English language formulation; slightly different interpretations lead to different numerical answers. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:17, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

Approach to second question with infinite series

Since I haven't seen it elsewhere in the discussion or article: There is a way to approach the second question with an infinite series of 'retries' if you will. Given are an infinite number of families to choose from, all equally likely to have any constellation of gender for two children. We pick a family at random. To exclude the possibility of ending without a single boy, we pick another family at random whenever we pick one.

The probability of picking a family with two boys is 1/4 in every round

The probability of picking a family with no boys is also 1/4 in every round, which results in a retry

The probability of arriving at a family with two boys is therefore an infinite sum of : $\sum _{n=1}^{\infty }1/4^{n}$

Which converges on the answer of 1/3

2003:E7:9F36:D901:8C0F:C549:8C7A:B2D7 (talk) 18:13, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

What is the paradox?

While some things in this article are spelled out, what the paradox is is not.Kdammers (talk) 09:33, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

It's called the Boy or Girl paradox by reliable sources. Like the problem itself, I think it's a matter of interpretation what the paradox is or whether it's actually a paradox. In probability theory it's common to say paradox about problems with unintuitive answers, or answers which have a surprising dependence on the interpretation. We have Category:Probability theory paradoxes. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:12, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

Not rigidly logical

This paradox is worded in a way that is cute/interesting. But that wording makes the question an empirical one. The reality is that the sex of a child is not random: the sex of one is related to various factors that in part relate to the sex of siblings but also to other facts such as war, attendants' views on the definition of sex, and various factors related to the mother's condition [Without checking the research, I would guess that health, age, prenatal scans, and substance (ab)use would factor in.]. (Try changing this to a two-coin toss: coins are not equally weighted (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/gamblers-take-note-the-odds-in-a-coin-flip-arent-quite-5050-145465423/?no-ist`) or aerodynamic, so it is unlikely that heads and tails have an exact same chance of turning up even if the starting orientation is controlled for.) The article should at some point make clear that the paradox is a thought experiment assuming "pure" conditions rather than a real-world paradox that may or may not (tend to) coincide in terms of results with the theoretical one. 195.166.150.98 (talk) 09:45, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

Boy or Girl paradox#Common assumptions already states common assumptions like "Each child has the same chance of being male as of being female." It is common for probability problems to do so without mentioning how a real World scenario may differ from the assumptions. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:42, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

True, but maybe it is misleading to list the assumptions with-out indicating that at least some of them are not consistent with the real world? Kdammers (talk) 07:24, 15 September 2019 (UTC)

Unclear?

"Many people argued strongly for both sides" When i first read this, i thought it meant 'there was an individual who argued for both sides; in fact, many people argued that way.' i request that someone re-write the sentence so that it clearly says that 'there were many people arguing for one side and many others arguing for the other side' 9but in a bit more elegant English). Kdammers (talk) 07:34, 15 September 2019 (UTC)

Bar-Hillel and Falk

I think the article is unnecessarily confusing because it isn't always clear (at least to me) which variant of the problem is being discussed. When the article asserts that Bar-Hillel and Falk confirm that there is an ambiguity (which I agree, they do) it isn't made clear that they are initially discussing a different variant to the Gardner problem. Their problem is worded "Mr Smith is the father of two. We meet him walking along the street with a young boy whom he proudly introduces as his son. What is the probability that Mr Smith's other child is also a boy?" When the Bar-Hillel and Falk article refers to Gardner it says "He is not however in disagreement with our analysis. He is merely addressing a different problem."

The Bar-Hillel and Falk article is initially addressing a scenario where one specific child is identified as male (which is, indeed, one side of the ambiguity in the original Gardner formulation) whereas the 1/3 probability is supposed to emerge from a statement about the set of children where saying 'at least one is male' is the equivalent of saying 'it is not the case that the set consists solely of females'? It was for this reason that I changed in the discussion of the second question "and then a random, true statement was made about the gender of one child" to "one specific child". However, I noticed that a little later the article currently says "this is not necessarily the same as reporting the gender of a specific child" so I, reluctantly, reverted my edit.

The Bar-Hillel and Falk article also mentions in passing something that might be usefully considered, namely how newly acquired information changes the probability. New information clearly does change assigned probability. If there are two cards, the Ace of Hearts and the Ace of Spades and I and someone else select one each there is 1/2 probability that I have Ace of Hearts. If the other person shows their card the probability that I have the Ace of Hearts is no longer 1/2. Now imagine three rooms A, B & C. In each room there is a large number of people each of whom have two children with boys and girls distributed in the expected way.

Selecting one person at random from room A the likelihood that they will have two sons is 1/4.
In room B you ask everyone with two daughters to leave. Now selecting someone at random from those remaining the likelihood that they will have two sons is 1/3.
In room C you instruct everyone to select one of their children at random and if it is a boy they should remain but otherwise they should leave. Now selecting one person at random the likelihood that they will have two sons is 1/2.

Returning to room A consider the following cases. In each case the people in the room are instructed to follow a particular procedure.

Case 1. If you are selected then consider whether you have two girls. If you do then say nothing but otherwise say “I have at least one son”. Now if you select someone at random and they utter the magic words we know the situation is the same as in room B and the probability that they have two sons is 1/3
Case 2. If you are selected then choose one of your children at random and if it is a boy say “I have at least one son” otherwise remain silent. This is now the same as room C and if the person speaks the probability that they have two sons is 1/2

There seems to be a view that the relevant ambiguity is whether the gender of one or both children are considered and that the article should make this clear. The above analysis supports that contention. However, consider

Case 3. If you are selected then choose one of your children at random then, if it is a boy say “I have at least one son” otherwise consider your other child and if it is a boy say “I have at least one son” otherwise remain silent. The only people in the room who will not speak are those with two daughters. Everyone else will say the words and 1/3 of them will have two sons.

In case three, the person who speaks may have considered one child or both children when arriving at the “at least one” conclusion.

Philosophyclass HSOG (talk) 00:15, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

When Bar-Hillel and Falk say Gardner is addressing a different problem, they mean in his solution. The actual question he asked is ambigious; it can mean either the one he addressed in his solution, or one like Bar-Hillel and Falk addressed. Gardner himself admitted that he had only considered the one, but that both were possible interpretations.

Probability is a strange discipline in that you must be just as concerned with what didn't happen, as what did. This is a very subtle point; puzzlers who are not mathematicians usually fail to grasp the significance. As a result, they don't include it in the problem statement or solution. As an example, consider the Three Prisoners Problem. Most people only remember that the prisoner asked for a name when they quote Gardner. But Gardner learned from his mistake with the Boy or Gorl Problem, and was very meticulous about establishing how the warden was to choose a name. The warden must flip a coin, even if there is only one name he can give. If this method isn't given, and we make the same assumptions, about why the information in the problem statement was reported, as most people do with "one is a boy," then there are two possibilities where the warden can name prisoner B: The case where A is to be pardoned, and the case where C is. They are equally likely before a name is chosen. So it might seem like prisoner A's chances are 1/2. Yet we know that is wrong. The reason it is wrong, is because if A is to be pardoned, the warden has a 50% chance of naming C instead of B. Even though this didn't happen, it must be accounted for. Doing so reduces the chances that A will be pardoned to half the chances that C will (since there is no choice about who to name in that case), producing the correct answer of 1/3.

The Three Prisoners and Boy or Girl problems are identical except for two details: the number of cases that are possible before the information (three versus four), and whether or not the "didn't happen" information is the parallel case (naming C instead of B, or knowing "one is a girl" instead of "one is a boy"), or the opposite case (naming C instead of B, or knowing "neither is a boy" instead of "one is a boy"). It doesn't matter in the Three Prisoners (or the Monty Hall Problem, or Bertrand's Box paradox) because the two are the same, but it does in the Boy or Girl Paradox. Regardless of how either is implemented, this is the crucial difference between the answers, and the ambiguity in Gardner's problem statement. Gardner assumed his Boy or Girl problem meant the latter, and answered 1/3 which is correct for that assumption. Bar-Hillel and Falk explicitly created the former, and correctly answered 1/2.

The controversy about both is because most people merely count the cases that could produce the observed result, ignoring the "couldn't happen" alternatives. That produces 1/3 for the Boy or Girl Problem, and 1/2 for the Three prisoners. Both are wrong as solutions, but not necessarily as the numeric answers. But because you don't need to recognize how the "didn't happen" information was produced in the Three Prisoners problem, it's importance isn't widely known. But is is important, and whjich is why Doy or Girl is ambiguous. JeffJor (talk) 19:01, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

That Gardner's original statement of the paradox is ambiguous—agreed.

That his 1/3 answer and that of Bar-Hillel and Falk are addressing different interpretations of the supposed paradox—agreed.

However, my reading of the article as it now stands seems to suggest that the distinguishing feature of these two interpretations is whether or not both children were considered when determining that "there is at least one boy", i.e. that if both are considered then the probability is 1/3 but otherwise the probability is 1/2. The purpose of my case three above was to provide a counter-example to this claim. If I have read the article correctly and if case three is an appropriate counter-example then I think the wording of the article should be changed.

Philosophyclass HSOG (talk) 16:59, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

In your case 3, a particular parent may or may not have to bring both children to mind when deciding to speak up. But for a person to always be able to execute the algorithm you devised, that person must know both children's genders. That's what "considered" means in the interpretation difference, and in that respect your case 3 is the same as your case 1. Both are "considering whether you have two girls;" case 3 just does it one child at a time. If the first one you bring to mind is a boy, you don't need to bring the other to mind to answer the question. The algorithm in your case 2, however, can be executed by somebody who only knows one child, or one that knows both. So "consider both" is required to get 1/3, but "consider one only" is not required to get 1/2, so this can't be the complete interpretation difference.

But wording that has been changed did suggest otherwise. It was the result of a common logical fallacy called affirming the consequent: "If A then B" does not allow you to deduce that A is true whenever B is. All you can conclude, about A from B, is that whenever B is false, A must also be false. If gender information is only known about one child (A), then 1/2 is the only possible answer (B). The unknown child's gender is independent of the known child's. But some "affirm the consequent" and say that getting 1/2 as the answer means that you must have information about only one child. That's not true, but it has been called the interpretation difference that leads to 1/2. What is true is that if you get something else besides 1/2, then whoever told you "at least one is a boy" must know the gender(s) of both children.

The problem statement does not say that both were known by whomever told you "At least one is a boy." Since that statement can be made when only one is known, you can't conclude that both were known, nor that 1/3 is the answer. You can conclude that 1/2 is the answer, regardless of how many you know of, if you interpret "you know at least one is a boy" to mean "in general, for a boy+girl family, there is a 1/2 chance that you would know about either child; and in this particular case, you know about one boy." And that really is the interpreation difference. A better set of cases to explain this difference is (1) If either of the two children is a boy, go to the "at least one boy" room. Otherwise, go to the "two girls room;" and (2) Go into any appropriate room, chosen from "At least one boy" and "At least one girl." If all you know about a person is that they ended up in the "at least one boy" room, but not what the other options were, you can't discriminate between these two cases. That's the ambiguity. JeffJor (talk) 17:13, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

At the very end of the discussion of the second question, there was the following statement: "But under that assumption, if he remains silent or says he has a daughter, there is a 100% probability he has two daughters." This supposedly expanded upon the assumption of Mr. Smith reporting the given fact, which already seems debatable and is nowhere explicit within the source material of Barrel-Hill and Falk, which discusses the ambiguity and solutions to differently phrased problems. It never states that such an assumption is necessary in all of the possible ways to phrase the problems, which generate different solutions of 1/2 and 1/3. This could therefore already be deemed a bad explanation of the actual citation, which seems rather clear on its own or warrant a longer section to do the source material justice. However this specific statement makes no sense, it does not fit in the context and appears to want to explain a specific situation, a specific version of the problem with specific assumptions, but this specific setup is never detailed. Instead, out of nowhere it concludes that under this assumption, which, mind you, was described as necessary, it is to be deduced that in a certain case, there is a probability of 1 that Mr. Smith has two daughters, denoted as the case GG. However just a few lines earlier all that was discussed was the case of Mr. Smith walking with a boy, making the GG case the only impossible one. Furthermore if Mr. Smith remains silent, no information is given, which means either assumptions not detailed here must be present or the ambiguity remains and it is impossible to fully resolve the issue, but never can silence, for as far as the problem is described here, lead to one single case having a probability of 1. Because this made no sense in the paragraph, I have removed it, however I actually wanted to report the statement and bring it up for discussion and possibly review, rather than simply delete it. As it made no sense though, also not after reading through the source, I removed it as it seemed simply fallacious, but I hope someone else can either confirm its incorrectness or bring up an argument for leaving it in. In the latter case it could be added back in, however in that case I would strongly suggest fleshing out the paragraph or adding in a separate one to expand upon that, as the way it followed the quote and supposedly further explained the problem did not seem correct and was not clarifying at all. Instead it rather seemed that if the statement was to even be correct at all, which it does not appear to be, then information was missing and this must be a conclusion following a discussion of a different problem description that was never expanded upon in this article.

I do not have access to the Bar-Hillel and Falk paper, so I cannot comment on most of your points. I can well believe, however, that our article's synopsis is not representative of the actual content of their paper. While the material relating to Bar-Hillel and Falk has been in the article for a long time, the phrase "and remain silent otherwise" was added only in May 2019, and the wording prior to your edit, including the deleted sentence, was added even more recently than that. I think it would be a good idea to expand this paragraph to better summarize the actual content of Bar-Hillel and Falk's paper, and to remove any assertions that cannot be attributed to them.

As a counterpoint, I do think the sentence you deleted makes an important observation that maybe should be in the article somewhere, assuming one can find a source for it. The point, as I understand it, is that attempts to realize Question 2 (with answer 1/3) in a "natural" setting, say where Mr. Smith (a parent of two children with independent and equal probabilities for boy and girl) would always say "At least one of my children is a boy" when that was the case, and would say something else otherwise, leads to very unnatural consequences. In this case, the unnatural consequence is the breaking of the symmetry between boys and girls: under the stated assumptions, the statement, "At least one of my children is a boy," leads to the conclusion that the probability of two boys is 1/3, whereas the statement, "At least one of my children is a girl," leads to the conclusion that the probability of two girls is 1. This analysis is correct, given the assumptions, but underlines how unnatural the assumptions are: real people don't talk this way, and even if you imagine them doing so, the consequences are even weirder than you might think. Will Orrick (talk) 14:41, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

I think I understand the point better now, thank you for taking the time for this answer. I will try to see if I have time later to add the sentence back in with the proper explanation and expand the summary of Barrel-Hill and Falk's paper.

Modelling the generative process

There are multiple issues with this section of the article, not the least of which the fact that the entire section contains no references to sources, while sources are so strongly stressed for everything in the article. I am personally not opposed to pieces that serve merely to clarify things for readers, such as this, however it actually seems like this is generally not appreciated as being in the spirit of wikipedia and in accordance with its principles, rules and guidelines. If it is/were to be based on sources and/or serve as clarification of pieces of the rest of the article, then the problem remains that there are issues with the contents. First of all it stresses 'observation' as an important part of the process, however the original problem does not need to be treated as a process in which you observe an event. Rather you are supposed to calculate, having been given information about the events. You are given an event, you do not need to 'observe' it, this makes the whole issue confusing, mainly because $c_{1}=B\lor c_{2}=B$ is difficult to observe. That is the point of the problem, you are given this information as a true proposition, when you start to think of 'observing' it you are changing the problem in a way that leads to something not equivalent to the original and then yields a different result. I know that a lot has been said about the 'ambiguity' of the question, but I would claim that strictly speaking, it is not ambiguous, however it can be interpreted in ways that are faulty, but the opinion of one editor does not decide an article, of course. Still it seems that the ambiguity is overly stressed and nowhere it is made clear enough that there is actually a unique solution, and that it is confusion and misinterpretation, rather than actual ambiguity and the possibility of multiple different interpretations, that lead to the 'alternative' solution. This whole section exemplifies this because of the two 'options' it shows for modelling the generative process, while in what follows I will argue that the second method is in fact erroneous. (Yes, this is not a forum, yes one editor doesn't decide the article, which is why I run it by others first here. There are no sources linked in this section and it seems to me that it is stating something erroneous, so I wanted to say something about it.) First of all, because this is about the logic and mathematics of it, I have a few remarks on the notation. There seems to be some abuse of notation or some mix of notation that doesn't seem to fit with conventional notation for these things. First I noticed the way the logical or is being used in $c_{1}=B\lor c_{2}=B$ to make the statements into events, but there is more. Using $c_{1}$ and $c_{2}$ as random variables that take on the value $B$ still seems ok, but the way they are then logically combined to create the name for an event starts mixing certain notations. The problem is that in predicate logic ' $=$ ' stands for identity, which makes the notation $c_{1}=c_{2}=B$ problematic, because it is not supposed to mean that these are three variables that are in fact the same thing, it just means that the two variables we see have the same value, which is the one shown. In predicate logic saying both children are boys would be written $Bc_{1}\land Bc_{2}$ , in which $c_{1}$ and $c_{2}$ are names that denote specific (different) individuals, child one and child two, and the statement reads that child one is a boy and child two is a boy. However using set theoretical notation seems more appropriate because of the probability setting any way, because this is the way events are actually usually described. Of course, we can be a little creative with the notation and the naming, as long as the point is clear, sure, that would be fine. But if we describe the events with set theoretical notation, everything becomes much clearer. In the notation used here, what the question actually asks is the probability of event $c_{1}=c_{2}=B$ , which could also have been written $c_{1}=B\land c_{2}=B$ , but which predicate logically would be written $Bc_{1}\land Bc_{2}$ and in set theory notation it would be written $Bc_{1}\cap Bc_{2}$ , in which I have chosen to use the notation from predicate logic to name the events, which is a little unconventional, but earlier in the article, and also commonly used in discussions of this problem might I add, the notation $BB$ is used for this event and I think that notation is fine as well and doesn't differ very much from mine. The point is that I write it the way I do to stress the logical relation between two events. It can actually be written out fully, with everything split into basic events that form a partition of the event space, each of which represents a singleton containing an element from the sample space. That gives us $(BG\cup BB)\cap (GB\cup BB)$ , which is of course entirely equal and equivalent to $BB$ . Here I have used notation inspired by the sample space introduced in the 'Common assumptions' part. The point is that the 'given' here can also be translated, giving $(BG\cup BB)\cup (GB\cup BB)$ , which can be rewritten to the shortened $BG\cup GB\cup BB$ . Now the problem becomes, what is $P((BG\cup BB)\cap (GB\cup BB)\mid (BG\cup BB)\cup (GB\cup BB))$ for those who like to see it written out, or more simply $P(BB\mid (BG\cup GB\cup BB))$ , because $BB$ is equal to what is written out more, they are/denote the same event, which was originally written as $c_{1}=c_{2}=B$ in this section. The result is ${\frac {1}{3}}$ , under the assumption that the four basic events are equiprobable, which is assumed in all treatments of the problem because it concerns an abstract, idealised mathematical problem, not actual boys and girls, in which case, as sources of the article state, neither equiprobability nor independence seem to hold. That is at least the solution for the first model, on which I must only still add that 'Discard cases where there is no B' certainly makes it clear that GG is discarded as a possibility, but this is actually entirely unnecessary to achieve the probability of one third, so at the very least that should be removed (together with the problematic language 'observe', which is irrelevant to the actual problem and difficult for what is actually given as information). Now for the second case, I don't have to solve that, as it is easily shown that this does not actually represent the original problem. In the original problem we are given 'at least one of them is a boy', not 'one of the two children was equiprobably selected and observed to be a boy'. The proof that this is not equivalent is in the solution. Observing that one of the two children is a boy does logically imply that at least one of them is a boy, but it is not equivalent, because of the observing and 'how' we came to that, which required a selection process in this particular case. It can easily be seen that it is not equivalent, because the final result is different. The problem with this model or method and the fact it (erroneously, for the original error, although of course correctly for whatever this itself is about) gives one half is that we could just as well be talking about three children, in which the equiprobably picking of one of the two and observing it is now replaced with a third child that is equiprobably selected as being a boy or a girl. We then observe this third child is a boy. Now we ask specifically about child 1 (we could ask about child 2 as well, or instead, this doesn't really matter). The probability that child one is a boy is of course still one half, because the events are assumed independent, we begin from that. The fact that instead of a third child, we randomly (equiprobably) pick one of the two we already have, observe it to be a boy, and then, given that information, ask what the probability is that the other child is a boy, is the same in that both events are independent and that both models are poor translations and models of the actual problem given and give us a result that answers the question the model asks, but not the question we were originally asked in the problem, although we have fooled ourself into heuristically thinking that they are the same. This may all be too much 'original research' for a wikipedia article, but I don't ask much of this is added. I ask simply this: either add sources to this part of the article that specifically state these ways of modelling the different alternative interpretations, or remove it altogether, or leave it for some purpose such as clarifying some things in the article for readers, but then have someone, either me or someone else reading this clean it up, so that it isn't the notational horror that confuses readers into thinking their erroneous interpretation can actually be taken as correct and a model exists for it that correctly leads to their result. Because the model is not a correct interpretation of the sentence, all it does is something that someone might confuse for a correct solution and generate the wrongly thought correct result of one half, while the above model (which in its current state contains unnecessary pieces and problems as well) is the only logically correct translation of what is actually given. Thanks for your time. MathsWolf (talk) 23:43, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

I know I'm saying too much and in a not entirely Wikipedian way, at all times, of brief calm writing and neutrality, abiding all Wikipedia principles. I do try to become a better Wikipedia editor, in the time I have for devoting to that, I like the encyclopaedia, it often gives me good information and I want to help on making sure many others can receive good information as well. In the spirit of that last bit though, I must add a note on 'observation'. 'At least one of them is a boy' can be logically derived from 'There are two children and each child is either a boy or a girl' and 'I have observed one of them and ascertained it is a boy' or 'Mr Smith told me his eldest child is a boy' for example, something like that. However none of these are logically equivalent with the statement 'at least one of them is a boy', even though that can be derived from them, and therefore these statements are not interchangeable in just any context. To show this, imagine you actually 'observe' one of his children to be a girl and then Mr Smith tells you 'my other child is a boy'. The statement 'at least one of them is a boy' holds in this situation, but you have additional information. Given this extra information now, the probability of both children being boys is 0. I add this just to show that you can't just come up with situations in which the statement hold, substitute them as 'information given' and calculate, because you can get very different results based on any arbitrary imagined situation. You have to be careful with such things, with details of problem statements, perhaps that is what should be taken away from this puzzle. I want to be careful and neutral, but in this case the 'ambiguity' and 'alternative interpretation' are plain wrong and I think this should be made clear enough to readers, so that they are not left confused or convinced of wrong results and erroneous ways of interpreting. P.S. Yes, I know a whole piece of the discussion is that 'it matters how the information was obtained', but the point is that it only matters if we are supposed to assume a specific way of obtaining it, which is not necessary and would only add in extra assumptions that likely change the outcome, so my point is: don't make such unnecessary additional assumptions. In that way, the problem is not ambiguous. We could be given a similar but different puzzle, which is phrased specifically so that we are given the way in which this information was obtained, however then the 'given' is something different, the puzzle is actually different, and the result is likely different (one half in many examples given), but it is no longer the original puzzle, nor does the solution method fully correspond to the method that should be used here, because the events (and so the, hopefully well defined, sample space and complete probability space) are different, not because they are different models for different interpretations of the same question, but because they are models for a different question.MathsWolf (talk) 00:14, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Before someone even gets the chance to criticise this, only a short addition: of course methodology matters in statistics. However the question does not mention a method of obtaining the information conveyed in the statement and it does not need to. If we assume the method of sampling one of the two children at random, then we also gain the information 'at least one of the two children is a boy', but in the first question we also have the information 'at least one of the two children is a girl', the difference fades when we realise we can now speak of 'the sampled child is a boy', now we have 'sampled' and 'unsampled' as labels instead of 'oldest' and 'youngest'. This is not just method, but for the probabilistic calculations can be considered 'new, additional information' and of course influences the result. The introduction of the assumption of a specific methodology of obtaining the info 'at least one is a boy' therefore changes the solution by introducing new assumptions that were unnecessary to solve the original problem, much like 'the child was born on a Tuesday' or 'the child is left handed' would be unnecessary additions, yet they change the probability when introduced in the problem and treated strictly mathematically. This only means that introducing a methodology that gives a non-equivalent problem is not a proper way of solving the original problem and one should be careful to introduce or construct a methodology that doesn't mess up your statistics, that is a moral of the story to take away, however it is faulty to claim that 'how the information was obtained is important', because it is only important if you have any knowledge of it that changes the calculations. In the puzzle you do not have this knowledge. The moral here is don't go assuming what you don't need, lest you change the problem you're solving into something not equivalent to what you set out to solve. MathsWolf (talk) 05:53, 17 January 2022 (UTC)