Although the LK-99 excitement has cooled off, this post stands as an excellent demonstration of why and how Bayesian reasoning is helpful: when faced with surprising or confusing phenomena, understanding how to partition your model of reality such that new evidence would provide the largest updates, is quite valuable. Even if the questions you construct are themselves confused or based on invalid premises, they’re often confused in a much more legible way, such that domain experts can do a much better job of pointing to that and saying something like “actually, there’s a third alternative”, or “A wouldn’t imply B in any situation, so this provides no evidence”.
Curated.
Although the LK-99 excitement has cooled off, this post stands as an excellent demonstration of why and how Bayesian reasoning is helpful: when faced with surprising or confusing phenomena, understanding how to partition your model of reality such that new evidence would provide the largest updates, is quite valuable. Even if the questions you construct are themselves confused or based on invalid premises, they’re often confused in a much more legible way, such that domain experts can do a much better job of pointing to that and saying something like “actually, there’s a third alternative”, or “A wouldn’t imply B in any situation, so this provides no evidence”.