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I just find it hard to imagine Britain as a Republic.

Well, it was at one point, it just wasn't a great success.

More successful than staying a kingdom, though, and that was entirely because of the royals.

Are you saying that the Scots made a mess of running things?

*Innocent face*

No, given that they were forced to start the process of de-Stuarting for the English.

But the Stuarts screwed up big time within, oh, a generation of the counter-revolution of 1660.

Child B.

4 apples. 1 definitely good. The remaining 3 each have a 50% chance of being good. So that is an overall probability of 62.5% of picking a good apple from the bag.

Meanwhile for Child A there is only a 50% probability.

If you take it as pure maths and trust that at least 1 of his apples is good, then you've ruled out the permutation where all 3 are bad and left the other 7 permutations where at least one is good.

I think overall that gives you a 12/21 chance of picking a good apple from child A, so about 57%.

Agreeing on the 62.5% on child B, that still, to me, makes B the better bet.

I think you are right on child A but off on child B. Basically, both children have shown the same thing: they have at least one good apple. That rules out the permutation where all apples are bad. That biases the probability of getting a good apple higher, above the basic 50% of the underlying distribution. The size of that bias goes down as the number of apples goes up. With one apple, the bias is worth 50pp: if you know the one apple in the bag is good then your chance of getting a good apple is 100%. With a million apples in the bag, knowing that at least one is good has no effect because the chances of the bag containing no good apples is zero, and so the bias is effectively zero. So you are better off picking from the bag with fewer apples.

No, I'm sticking to mine. The difference, as I see it, is that child A has confirmed "one of my apples" giving the 7 permutations.

Child B has randomly pulled "one specific apple" that now has 100% chance of being good. Let's suspend that at the point where the apple is out of the bag and consider the probabilities on the 3 remaining apples. Still 50/50 for each of them, no, 8 permutations. Now, put the apple back in - nothing changes, that specific apple remains good, not just "one of my apples".

I don't see what difference it makes that Child B has showed you his good apple, as long as Child A's statement can be assumed to be trustworthy. Once Child B puts his apple back in the bag, you're in the same position as Child A but with one more apple. So the maths become:

Child A: 1 in 3 chance of getting the known good apple, 2 in 3 chance of getting one of the others - which have a 50/50 chance of being good - therefore 1 in 3 plus half of 2 in 3
therefore 1 in 3 plus 1 in 3
therefore a 2 in 3 chance of getting a good apple

Child B: 1 in 4 chance of getting the known good apple, 3 in 4 chance of getting one of the others - which have a 50/50 chance of being good - therefore 1 in 4 plus half of 3 in 4
therefore 1 in 4 plus 1.5 in 4 i.e. 3 in 8
therefore 2 in 8 plus 3 in 8
therefore a 5 in 8 chance of getting a good apple

2 in 3 = 67%, 5 in 8 = 62.5% chance.
Therefore Child A gives you a better chance of a good apple.

But please carry on trying to convince me that the reverse is true, because I'd love to be wrong on this - I really like counterintuitive statistics.

Thing is, B has picked an apple from his bag of 4 *at random* and it was good. A has looked at all 3 and on that basis has made his "at least one is good" statement. There is a difference there, I think, and ProRata's calc adjusts for this.

Unfortunately we're talking about this on a nested thread on which the original wording has been lost!

Instinctively though I don't think that matters. We've got to a starting place where what we know is A: 1 good, 2 unknown and B: 1 good, 3 unknown. We know both come from an (as far as we know) the same population where 50% are good - so it's not like polling where there are differences between the populations.

I still think it's A, but I'm not dug in about this.

TSE dethreaded me again. I must have said something about Yorkshire.

We have been warned:
Zia Yusuf @ZiaYusufUK
·
7h
Reform will transform the civil service from a bloated, failed organisation hostile to the interests of the British people into a lean, performant machine that makes our country proud. 🇬🇧

On the face of it, this doesn't sound like anything to be worried about. What do you see as problematic with it?

This is obvious by now, surely? It's about 97% likely to be pure BS. Reform are an incompetent policy-free slogan machine, hoping that fools will fall for it. I doubt if they even know what they mean themselves by "Civil Service", never mind what it actually means.

We have this exact cycle from Zia himself in Kent County Council. Lots of "we will save X Y and Z". But LTNs to be cut did not exist. Woke waste to be cut did not exist. "DEI jobs" hardly existed.

It was all public information, but the numpties of Reform, including Zia himself, did not do any homework. So then he rifled through last year's local papers and social media, to find some identified savings he could claim to have "identified". And made a serious of fake claims about it. Cue a public faceplant.

So what happens next? Well, in Derbyshire they cut half the adult education centres. They had time for a proper process, but waited until the last minute and tried to do an emergency decision.

But RefUK are such a fuckwit collective that they had to admit their action was unlawful.

Vote for a clown show, and you get a circus. I don't want a circus in my Council or Government.

Haha - you think the last or the current government are competent?

The last one - incompetent. The current one - too early to tell.

You thing a Farage Farrago would be less incompetent?

How did that work out in County Councils?

Far too early to tell.

Hmmmm.

Four months since the May elections.

Reform officials failure to obey the law and follow the rules, even on a basic level, says imo that we have plenty of evidence, without even getting into their attacks on scrutiny.

Just to take one, when the Chief Executive of Warwickshire refused to obey an attempted instruction by the leader of the minority Reform UK group, the minority Council Leader, to take down a flag and informed him of the correct procedure which required consent of the whole Council, his next step was to accuse her of being deliberate Civil Service obstructionism against his aims.

It was BS, but Farage still used it as an example in his conference speech.

Like Trump, they are trying to destroy checks, balances and scrutiny.

I think the poisonous nature of RefUK is out there in letters a mile high.

I'd prefer not to repeatedly call Reform UK politicians liars, but it is what they are.

If Labour and co want to win the next election they need to call Reform out every time they lie until it finally dawns on Reform supporters that they are being tricked by liars

The second bit might be tricky- persuading people that their understanding of the world isn't right is very difficult. And there will be lots of pain and not many thanks for those who try that persuading.

But someone needs to try.

That was why I said continually calling Reform out - because you are going to have to do it multiple times before people pick up on the fact that everything reform says is based on a lie or multiple lies

But that's rational talk, centrist dad talk. There have already been a couple of sensible posters (and Leon) put up the "all the other parties are just as bad" defence. And used it as an attack line against the Uniparty.

It's not that degrees of badness is that complex a concept to grasp. But "you can't judge me because you're not perfect yourself" has always worked as a defence mechanism. Logically, it shouldn't, but it does.