§ 17. The nearest approach to any practical justification of such judgments that I remember to have seen is afforded
by cases of which the following example is a specimen:— “Of 10 cases treated by Lister's method, 7 did well and 3 suffered from blood-poisoning: of 14 treated with ordinary dressings, 9 did well and 5 had blood-poisoning; what are the odds that the success of Lister's method was due to chance?”.[8] Or, to put it into other words, a short experience has shown an actual superiority in one method over the other: what are the chances that an indefinitely long experience, under similar conditions, will confirm this superiority?
The proposer treated this as a ‘bag and balls’ problem, analogous to the following: 10 balls from one bag gave 7 white and 3 black, 14 from another bag gave 9 white and 5 black: what is the chance that the actual ratio of white to black balls was greater in the former than in the latter?—this actual ratio being of course considered a true indication of what would be the ultimate proportions of white and black drawings. This seems to me to be the only reasonable way of treating the problem, if it is to be considered capable of numerical solution at all.
Of course the inevitable assumption has to be made here about the equal prevalence of the different possible kinds of bag,—or, as the supporters of the justice of the calculation would put it, of the obligation to assume the equal à priori likelihood of each kind,—but I think that in this particular example the arbitrariness of the assumption is less than usual. This is because the problem discusses simply a balance between two extremely similar cases, and there is a certain set-off against each other of the objectionable assumptions on each side. Had one set of experiments only been proposed, and had we been asked to evaluate the probability of continued repetition of them confirming their verdict, I should have felt all the scruples I have already mentioned. But here we have got two sets of experiments