Seems like under that system, some headaches would just go away on their own, without symptoms of cold appearing later, which would mean the probability of cancer goes up. The patient panics, gets checked for cancer (since a recurring headache would hardly be the only symptom), no such disease is found, so there apparently has to be a new category for non-cancer, non-cold headaches.
So usually, the evidence soup has pieces that don’t conform to a theory, and if the stakes are high enough, people will go looking for them and maybe use the BR for it.
Yes, the example is a bit misleading. My purpose is to observe rationality in a field where data is unavailable, scarce or inconclusive. So use the example as a loose analogy for the purpose of communicating the point.
[I think that] where data are unavailable, you cannot really constrain your expectations of them. You can build models, even, perhaps, assign weights within them, but there is no basis to choose between one model and another, and every number of models you find ‘satisfying’ remains arbitrary.
(This is why I don’t argue about religion, for example.)
Seems like under that system, some headaches would just go away on their own, without symptoms of cold appearing later, which would mean the probability of cancer goes up. The patient panics, gets checked for cancer (since a recurring headache would hardly be the only symptom), no such disease is found, so there apparently has to be a new category for non-cancer, non-cold headaches.
So usually, the evidence soup has pieces that don’t conform to a theory, and if the stakes are high enough, people will go looking for them and maybe use the BR for it.
Yes, the example is a bit misleading. My purpose is to observe rationality in a field where data is unavailable, scarce or inconclusive. So use the example as a loose analogy for the purpose of communicating the point.
[I think that] where data are unavailable, you cannot really constrain your expectations of them. You can build models, even, perhaps, assign weights within them, but there is no basis to choose between one model and another, and every number of models you find ‘satisfying’ remains arbitrary.
(This is why I don’t argue about religion, for example.)