My personal view is that if you teach Bayesian reasoning you should teach it as the proper objective way for a rational actor to conduct their daily life, rather than the subjective approach in the column.
There is an objectively right way to think. The beliefs don't come out of thin air, but are themselves the cumulative product of a lifetime of experiences and new information updating your priors. Most of the people that we clearly know are wrong in your examples arrive at their beliefs not based on proper updating.
If you ever want to talk about Bayesian statistics again, try introducing the medical diagnosis problem (or something similar). You know, 1 out of 1000 people in the population have a disease. There is a 1% false positive rate and no false negatives. Someone tests positive, what is the probability they have the disease? Doctors always get this wrong even though its their profession. A problem like this makes people think seriously about how they think.
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, vpFREE Administrator <vpfree3355@...> wrote:
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> Bob Dancer's LV Advisor Column - 1 JAN 2013
>
> "How Do You Convince Somebody?"
>
> http://www.lasvegasadvisor.com/bob_dancer/2013/0101.cfm
>
>
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