Oscar Bonilla
oscarbonilla.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2009
Oscar Bonilla writes visual explanations of probability puzzles and also posts about programming fonts.
What HN saysCommenters call his Monty Hall write-up the best explanation they've seen and praise his Bayes theorem pictures for making the idea click intuitively.
15HN people shared it
8linked it in comments
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Most-shared posts
- 1Visualizing Bayes Theorem (2009)12 people · 297 points · first shared 2011 · 21 comments on HN
- 2The Monty Hall problem2 people · 2 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 3Programming Fonts1 people · 2 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
jbellis · 2013-12-16
The best explanation I've seen of the Monty Hall problem is still Oscar Bonilla's: http://oscarbonilla.com/2009/05/the-monty-hall-problem/
Houshalter · 2016-03-25
I'm sad that every explanation of MCMC uses complicated symbolic explanations. I was trying to explain it once and came up with a fairly intuitive way to visualize it. Probably that is the way it was first discovered, though who knows.
In words, you can visualize it as doing a random walk around the area of a probability graph. Then it just turns into an explanation of why random walks accurately sample from an area, and the various tricks used in MCMC methods to make random walks more efficient.
Relatedly, bayes theorem makes much more sense when you visualize it, e.g. this post: https://oscarbonilla.com/2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/
njohnson41 · 2016-01-05
Good article.
I'm only a bit disappointed that the author seems not to realize that Bayes' theorem is just a simple consequence of probability theory, and should be attractive not because "maybe the brain is Bayesian", but because it is based on sound set-theoretic and analytic principles. If Bayes' theorem is false, so is probability theory, and so is nearly everything we know about probability.
Edit: Here is a good explanation of the theorem that makes it visually clear how only set theory is involved in deriving it: https://oscarbonilla.com/2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/
otoburb · 2012-07-28
Agreed. I didn't really get Bayes' Theorem intuitively until I saw the pictures in this short blog post which emphasizes the idea you pointed out of 'scaling "universes"':
http://oscarbonilla.com/2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/
lobo_tuerto · 2012-05-27
I really liked and easily understood this explanation of Bayes:
http://oscarbonilla.com/2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/
taliesinb · 2012-03-04
Bayes' rule is quite easy to understand as a Venn diagram, though the linked article doesn't seem to use this fact. But here's a blog-post that does: http://oscarbonilla.com/2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/
InclinedPlane · 2011-09-02
I find this to be an even better explanation: http://oscarbonilla.com/2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/
platz · 2018-10-14