I am trying to understand the boy and girl paradox. The paradox states that if a family has two children and one of them is a boy, then the probability of the other being a girl is 2/3. When you write out the set of possible outcomes { bb, bg, gb, gg } it makes a little more sense. My question is why does age/order matter? The two possible outcomes boy/girl and girl/ boy are the same right?
Boy and Girl paradox
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probability
paradoxes
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4@ChristianBlatter It's even more complicated than that, because it depends on how and why you were told this information. (To be more precise, it depends on what the probability that you would be told this information in various situations, even if you assume that you would not be told it if it were false.) – 2012-09-22