komponisto should not be going forward from the background probabilities because he isn’t an experienced investigator with access to the crime scene. he’s just a guy reading about evidence on the internet. a more reasonable prior for him to start with is, ″how often are people convicted of murder when they did not in fact commit a murder?″ (there are actual #s for this, too)
when juries sit around thinking, ″is this person guilty or not?″ they assume the investigators working on the case are competent. they assume, quite rightly, that there must be a damn good reason why reasonable investigators couldnt quickly dismiss a hypothesis with such an insanely low prior probability. lesswrong.com readers should do likewise.
komponisto should not be going forward from the background probabilities because he isn’t an experienced investigator with access to the crime scene. he’s just a guy reading about evidence on the internet. a more reasonable prior for him to start with is, ″how often are people convicted of murder when they did not in fact commit a murder?″ (there are actual #s for this, too)
when juries sit around thinking, ″is this person guilty or not?″ they assume the investigators working on the case are competent. they assume, quite rightly, that there must be a damn good reason why reasonable investigators couldnt quickly dismiss a hypothesis with such an insanely low prior probability. lesswrong.com readers should do likewise.