It looks like our views have converged. What you wrote above seems to be in agreement with what I wrote here:
What Warren said is consistent with coherent Bayesian updating, even if he was updating on a bizarre prior. It might have been wrong to put a high prior probability on subversive activity, but the probability calculus doesn’t tell you how to pick your prior. All I am saying is that the Warren quote, in and of itself, does not constitute a violation of the rules of the probability calculus.
Maybe Warren committed such a violation earlier on. Maybe that’s how he arrived at such a high prior for the existence of subversive activity. But those earlier steps in his reasoning aren’t laid out before us here, so we can’t point to any specific misapplication of Bayes’s rule, as Eliezer tried to do.
The priors that you use in your calculations look approximately right to me. Warren evidently arrived at different numbers prior to the reasoning that Eliezer quoted, so I agree that he probably made some kind of Bayesian error to get to that point. But I would be hard pressed to say exactly why your numbers seem right to me, so I can’t point to exactly where Warren made his mistake. Whatever his mistake was, it was made prior to the reasoning that Eliezer quoted.
The upshot is that we do not have this nice real-life single-paragraph encapsulation of mathematically fallacious Bayesian reasoning.
It looks like our views have converged. What you wrote above seems to be in agreement with what I wrote here:
The priors that you use in your calculations look approximately right to me. Warren evidently arrived at different numbers prior to the reasoning that Eliezer quoted, so I agree that he probably made some kind of Bayesian error to get to that point. But I would be hard pressed to say exactly why your numbers seem right to me, so I can’t point to exactly where Warren made his mistake. Whatever his mistake was, it was made prior to the reasoning that Eliezer quoted.
The upshot is that we do not have this nice real-life single-paragraph encapsulation of mathematically fallacious Bayesian reasoning.