Do you have definitions for these terms?
Some brief searching didn’t help me, but
from the context you do give this is
what I gathered:
Say we are measuring the strength and
weight of the argument,
“Alice tested positive for Foo’s
Disease and therefore has Foo’s Disease”.
The argument’s strength increases as
the test’s false positive rate
decreases.
The argument’s weight increases as
the disease’s base rate (its frequency
in Alices’s demographic group)
decreases.
Is that about right?
Is argument strength completely
independent of base rate?
Is argument weight dependent solely on
base rate?
Argument strength is how much the evidence favors your hypothesis (the proportion of heads to tails when you’re checking if a coin is weighted).
Argument weight is the number of tests that you’ve done. (Have you flipped the coin three times, or one hundred?)
People treat 5 tests, all heads as better evidence of a weighted coin than 1000 tests, 55% heads. The latter is actually more indicitive of a weighted coin (assuming sane priors).
Sorry, I should have made this more clear. I’ll edit the post.
Do you have definitions for these terms? Some brief searching didn’t help me, but from the context you do give this is what I gathered:
Say we are measuring the strength and weight of the argument, “Alice tested positive for Foo’s Disease and therefore has Foo’s Disease”. The argument’s strength increases as the test’s false positive rate decreases. The argument’s weight increases as the disease’s base rate (its frequency in Alices’s demographic group) decreases.
Is that about right?
Is argument strength completely independent of base rate? Is argument weight dependent solely on base rate?
Argument strength is how much the evidence favors your hypothesis (the proportion of heads to tails when you’re checking if a coin is weighted).
Argument weight is the number of tests that you’ve done. (Have you flipped the coin three times, or one hundred?)
People treat 5 tests, all heads as better evidence of a weighted coin than 1000 tests, 55% heads. The latter is actually more indicitive of a weighted coin (assuming sane priors).
Sorry, I should have made this more clear. I’ll edit the post.