When does the Bertrand paradox apply?

182 Views Asked by At

Link to Wikipedia article on the Bertrand paradox

There's another question asked recently that superficially looks like Bertrand's paradox. Both involve picking random points/chords and then calculating a property. Yet one leads to a not-well-defined situation, while the other apparently has a well-defined answer of 0.25.

Why? How does one tell if a question is well-defined or if Bertrand's paradox will apply?

1

There are 1 best solutions below

0
On BEST ANSWER

The point of Bertrand's paradox is that you must properly specify the probability model for a "random" object in order to get a unique correct answer. In the "other" question you refer to, although the model is not quite explicitly specified there is an obvious choice: $X$ and $Y$ with joint distribution uniform on the square $[0,1]\times[0,1]$. Therefore there is no paradox here. But if somebody wanted, say, $X^2$ and $Y^2$ rather than $X$ and $Y$ to be uniform, they would get a different answer.