It’s a gold standard—true Bayesian reasoning is actually pretty much impossible in practice. But you can get a lot of mileage off of the simple approximation: “What’s my current belief, how unlikely is this evidence, oh hey I should/shouldn’t change my mind now.”
Putting numbers on things forces you to be more objective about the evidence, and also lets you catch things like “Wait, this evidence is pretty good—it’s got an odds ratio of a hundred to one—but my prior should be so low that I still shouldn’t believe it.”
It’s a gold standard—true Bayesian reasoning is actually pretty much impossible in practice. But you can get a lot of mileage off of the simple approximation: “What’s my current belief, how unlikely is this evidence, oh hey I should/shouldn’t change my mind now.”
Putting numbers on things forces you to be more objective about the evidence, and also lets you catch things like “Wait, this evidence is pretty good—it’s got an odds ratio of a hundred to one—but my prior should be so low that I still shouldn’t believe it.”