Activity

Is anyone familiar with Bayes Theorem?

It’s a better description of how a probability can be found than just adding up summaries of papers. It relies on that established data, and calls it “prior probability”. You find other “priors” that are similar to what you are investigating and the percent of that turned out to be accurate is your “prior”. So your scanning for deer in the woods, sometimes you see something that might be a deer, but you’re wrong, the percent that you’re right is your probability. More important, it forces you to account for what you’re missing, evidence for and evidence against has to always add up to 100%. Once you get the hang of it, you can show how “ignoring the misses” and other rhetorical devices skew the equation. In other words, it’s a formula that works the way we think.