Comment by charcombination on Introducing bayescalc.io · 2023-07-28T10:43:32.257Z · LW · GW

I came across your site from a comment you made on the discussion about the UAP Disclosure Act. Since my comment focuses mostly on the general usage of the tool and the application of Bayes, I'll post it here.

The design is very nice and the tool itself is very intuitive. It would be nice if every evidence element had a button to remove it, currently this is only possible for the last one.


For someone not too familiar with the practical application of Bayes, I'm wondering how to rate the probability for evidence when it is not known. In your example, you give "not aliens" a probability of 99.999999% - and the probability that politicians would take this seriously in such a world 5%. This seems like a reasonable guess for the time before they took it seriously. Now they do, so it happened in a world where aliens (presumably) certainly don't exist. Could I not very well reason that it's therefore also 50% - 90% likely to happen? How do I choose this number - intuition, base rates?