20% of patients have Diseasitis. 90% of sick patients and 30% of healthy patients turn a tongue depressor black. You turn a tongue depressor black. What’s the chance you have Diseasitis?
There’s a 4⁄5 chance your socks are in one of your dresser’s 8 drawers. You check 6 drawers at random. What’s the probability they’ll be in the next drawer you check?
The people who adamantly claim they were abducted by aliens do provide some evidence for aliens. They just don’t provide quantitatively enough evidence.
Suppose you flip a coin with an unknown bias 30 times, and see 4 heads and 26 tails. The Rule of Succession says the next flip has a 5⁄32 chance of showing heads.
A “universal prior” is a probability distribution containing _all_ the hypotheses, for some reasonable meaning of “all”. E.g., “every possible computer program that computes probabilities”.
Probability is in the mind, not in the environment. If you don’t know whether a coin came up heads or tails, that’s a fact about you, not a fact about the coin.
“Cromwell’s Rule” says that probabilities of exactly 0 or 1 should never be applied to empirical propositions—there’s always some probability, however tiny, of being mistaken.
Formal definitions, alternate representations, and uses of odds and odds ratios (like a 1 : 2 chance of drawing a red ball vs. green ball from a barrel).
Probability is in the mind, not in the environment. If you don’t know whether a coin came up heads or tails, that’s a fact about you, not a fact about the coin.