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Topic: Events in what context?
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Subject:   RE: Events in what context?
Author: rabeldin
Date: Sep 3 2005
By defining experiments explicitly, we make the presentation clearer. Even more
important, we can avoid one of the pitfalls of traditional text books as they
discuss "independent events".

Pick up two or three elementary probability text books. Turn to the section on
"independent events". You will find many examples given where the implicit
experiments are independent and the writer has extracted event A from experiment
X and event B from experiment Y. Of course the events are independent.

I will bet that there will be no natural cases of independence of two events
defined in a single experiment, like tossing dice. Each roll of a die is one
experiment. Rolling two dice is composed of two independent experiments.

In summary, we shouldn't leave the definition of the experiment implicit. Its
structure is the context of all the events we deal with and it helps us avoid a
common confusion in elementary probability theory.
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