[HN Gopher] Are two heads better than one?
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       Are two heads better than one?
        
       Author : evakhoury
       Score  : 59 points
       Date   : 2026-01-13 16:22 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (eieio.games)
 (TXT) w3m dump (eieio.games)
        
       | millipede wrote:
       | Why not unconditionally trust Bob?
        
         | zahlman wrote:
         | You can, but trivially that strategy is also no better than
         | unconditionally trusting Alice.
        
       | gweinberg wrote:
       | Bob isn't giving you any actionable information. If Alice and Bob
       | agree, you're more confident than you were before, but you're
       | still going to be trusting Alice. If they disagree you're down to
       | 50% confidence, but you still might as well trust Alice.
        
       | sambaumann wrote:
       | I paused and wrote out all the probabilities and saw no way to
       | improve beyond 80% - I scrolled down hoping to be proven wrong!
        
         | eieio wrote:
         | (I'm the author)
         | 
         | I think there's an annoying thing where by saying "hey, here's
         | this neat problem, what's the answer" I've made you much more
         | likely to actually get the answer!
         | 
         | What I really wanted to do was transfer the experience of
         | writing a simulation for a related problem, observing this
         | result, assuming I had a bug in my code, and then being
         | delighted when I did the math. But unfortunately I don't know
         | how to transfer that experience over the internet :(
         | 
         | (to be clear, I'm totally happy you wrote out the probabilities
         | and got it right! Just expressing something I was thinking
         | about back when I wrote this blog)
        
       | layer8 wrote:
       | This gives me an idea of how to implement isEven() and isOdd()
       | probabilistically.
        
       | pavon wrote:
       | It depends on what you are doing with the guess. If it is just a
       | question of how frequently you are right or wrong the second
       | person doesn't help. But if you are, for example, betting on your
       | guess the second person improves your odds of coming out ahead
       | significantly, since you can put down a higher wager when they
       | agree than when they disagree.
        
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       (page generated 2026-01-13 23:00 UTC)