While I have a sort of vague sense of disagreement with this comment, I voted it up, because I would be very interested in an example of Bayesian reasoning applied to the real world without having a truckload of given probabilities to work with. In particular, I don’t know how one would take into account D_Alex’s 80% while also taking into account more specific factors.
I had the same reaction. I’m strongly inclined toward the OP’s position, but if you’re going to excoriate everyone else for failing to “jettison [their] intuitive feelings in favor of cold, hard, abstract calculation”, you should provide the actual cold, hard, abstract calculations supporting your own position.
if you’re going to excoriate everyone else for failing to “jettison [their] intuitive feelings in favor of cold, hard, abstract calculation”, you should provide the actual cold, hard, abstract calculations supporting your own position.
I should have pointed this out earlier, but for the record: “cold, hard, abstract calculation” referred to the willingness to ignore quantitatively weak evidence even though it “feels important” to you; it did not refer to some specific back-of-the-envelope application of Bayes’ Theorem.
(And “excoriate” is definitely not the right word here, at least with regard to the LW community.)
While I have a sort of vague sense of disagreement with this comment, I voted it up, because I would be very interested in an example of Bayesian reasoning applied to the real world without having a truckload of given probabilities to work with. In particular, I don’t know how one would take into account D_Alex’s 80% while also taking into account more specific factors.
I had the same reaction. I’m strongly inclined toward the OP’s position, but if you’re going to excoriate everyone else for failing to “jettison [their] intuitive feelings in favor of cold, hard, abstract calculation”, you should provide the actual cold, hard, abstract calculations supporting your own position.
I should have pointed this out earlier, but for the record: “cold, hard, abstract calculation” referred to the willingness to ignore quantitatively weak evidence even though it “feels important” to you; it did not refer to some specific back-of-the-envelope application of Bayes’ Theorem.
(And “excoriate” is definitely not the right word here, at least with regard to the LW community.)