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Comment by Scott Alexander

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Nobody – not the statisticians, not Nate Silver, certainly not me – tries to do full Bayesian reasoning on fuzzy real-world problems. They'd be too hard to model. You'd make some philosophical mistake converting the situation into numbers, then end up much worse off than if you'd tried normal human intuition.
AI Verified (Mar 28, 2024)
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Bayesian analysis is the right framework for settling the COVID-19 origins question
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AI Verified In context, this quote is part of the source’s setup of Rootclaim’s Bayesian approach to the COVID-19 origins debate, and it explicitly argues that doing full Bayesian reasoning on fuzzy real-world problems is too hard to model and can be worse than ordinary intuition. That directly bears on whether Bayesian analysis is the right framework for settling the COVID-19 origins question, and it makes a stance on the complete statement readily determinable. ([astralcodexten.com](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim?hide_intro_popup=true)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 3mo ago
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AI Verified Against: the quote rejects using "full Bayesian reasoning" on fuzzy real-world problems like COVID origins, saying they are too hard to model and can leave you "much worse off" than normal intuition. In the article’s later context, the author adds that this kind of heroic Bayesian analysis for the debate "doesn't work" because there is too much evidence to quantify well. ([astralcodexten.com](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 3mo ago

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AI Verified The source URL is fetchable and contains the quote text in the body of the article; the page header identifies the post as “Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate” by Scott Alexander and dates it Mar 28, 2024. The submitted wording matches the source aside from normal punctuation normalization (dash/apostrophe style). ([astralcodexten.com](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim?hide_intro_popup=true)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 3mo ago
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Jonathan Jonathan Rootclaim blog author Andrew T. Levin Andrew T. Levin Economist, Professor at Dartmouth College and NBER Research Associate OpenAI OpenAI AI research organization Yoshua Bengio Yoshua Bengio AI Pioneer, Turing Award winner Demis Hassabis Demis Hassabis Nobel laureate, AI Researcher and CEO of DeepMind Anthropic Anthropic AI safety research company Richard H. Ebright Richard H. Ebright Molecular biologist, Rutgers University; Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Chris Lehane Chris Lehane OpenAI chief global affairs officer Meta Meta Social media and AI company