| I immediately modelled the problem like you did, then I thought of this interesting variation: "I have two children, Michael and Alex. Michael is a boy. What's the probability of both being boys?" If you make a truth table with names as columns, you clearly have only two possibilities for Michael=1. However if you pick older/younger again you're back to 3 possible states. I think the answer is still 1/3, but it's a trickier one to reason about immediately. It seems the question adds information by naming the children, but there's a hidden statement in the form "at least one of them is Michael", which invalidates a truth table with names as columns. I can only conclude that birth order is an underlying property of the entity. A strict, real differentiator as much as sex is. Names aren't, so names don't add information in this case. Is there a term for that? Or am I just wrong? |
In your variant you need additional assumptions. Will the person always tell you the sex and name of the eldest? Or the names of the boys?
“Michael is a boy” is not really different from “the youngest is a boy”. The probability of both being boys depends on why are you being told that.
[1] Depending in the context the assumption may not be appropriate (a extreme example may be China).