Not necessarily true—it’s possible you had an implicit “given that she is straight” at work when you were interpreting evidence. If you conditioned on her being straight it makes perfect sense that you’d have no evidence one way or the other from a blind prior.
(People conditioning on such things is extremely common—for a much less innocuous example, consider what “no thanks, I don’t want to” looks like to someone who is conditioning on “this person wants me to”)
You’re right, actually. This occurred to me when posting the above. I started from “She’s a girl who says she is straight” and then updated down to .9 based on what I learned.
Update- She has a date with a girl next week. So… oops. :-)
Update #2-- And now.… she is in a long-term relationship with a woman.
Feels like I should tie a bow around this, in memory of old Less Wrong. They got married 6 months ago.
Huh, that sure was an interesting series of comments. Thanks for updating this after so many years and providing a tiny bit of data (and humour).
I’ve gone on dates with a couple guys just to check—I’m still pretty definitely straight.
Polls show that about 10% identify as non-straight, so your initial estimate wasn’t bad.
One would hope that dating someone would provide enough evidence to make a better estimate than a blind prior.
Not necessarily true—it’s possible you had an implicit “given that she is straight” at work when you were interpreting evidence. If you conditioned on her being straight it makes perfect sense that you’d have no evidence one way or the other from a blind prior.
(People conditioning on such things is extremely common—for a much less innocuous example, consider what “no thanks, I don’t want to” looks like to someone who is conditioning on “this person wants me to”)
You’re right, actually. This occurred to me when posting the above. I started from “She’s a girl who says she is straight” and then updated down to .9 based on what I learned.