Because MATH, that's why.

[theweaselking]

You roll two fair 6-sided dice.

One of them is a 6.

What are the odds that the other is also a six?

[Poll #1770498]

Comments

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

That is exactly the question I asked. Two dice rolled, at least one six produced, odds of two sixes?

There is no other valid way to read the puzzle. There is a very easy and clearly-wrong-on-examination way to MISREAD the puzzle, that plays off a lot of people's ignorance of how statistics work in the same way that Monty Hall and pairs of puppies and similar things do - but it's still clearly wrong, because it makes an unwarranted assumption that adds information that isn't in the puzzle.

[boxcat.livejournal.com]

No, this isn't remotely the same as Monty Hall.

MH is about people's general inability to understand the connection between probability and information and how that can lead to what look like counter-intuitive conclusions.

I read through your post several times.

Each time, I thought: "Hm, he's setting something up here, what is it."

Each time, I considered whether there was another way that the post could be interpreted. Each time, I concluded that "one of them" was intended to mean to "a specific die instance".

So, from my perspective, either you were planning all along on a stupid linguistic trick of the type ciphergoth referred to, or you didn't communicate your intent clearly.

I suspect the vast majority of the 78.1% of people who voted for 1/6 reasoned similarly.

Judging by your responses to the rest of this thread, I'm guessing that the odds of you coming clean / admitting your screw-up are < 1/6.

So, for all the good it'll do, have one last piece of free advice:

If you genuinely, honestly think that you've communicated unambiguously in the original post, then for fuck's sake go and buy a book (or two) on communication techniques. Because you have a serious boning over something far more important (a job or relationship) than an LJ poll in your future if you don't fix that shit.