This week, I noticed that a medical textbook (Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine) explicitly described Bayes Theorem in the first pages of a chapter about diagnostic tests. It went on to describe how strongly you should update your beliefs based on various symptoms/tests (e.g. “Presence of daytime headache” means you should update __this hard__ towards having a sleep problem but if you don’t have a headache, you should update __different amount__ in the other direction).
I thought it was neat that this type of thinking is being used in medicine’s textbook orthodoxy.
This week, I noticed that a medical textbook (Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine) explicitly described Bayes Theorem in the first pages of a chapter about diagnostic tests. It went on to describe how strongly you should update your beliefs based on various symptoms/tests (e.g. “Presence of daytime headache” means you should update __this hard__ towards having a sleep problem but if you don’t have a headache, you should update __different amount__ in the other direction).
I thought it was neat that this type of thinking is being used in medicine’s textbook orthodoxy.