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by btilly 2384 days ago
In Bayes' formula, the absolute probability of the observed outcome does not matter. What matters is the ratio of the observed outcome for a given p to the probability under your prior.

The structure of what might have happened does not affect those ratios. Only what was observed does.

1 comments

> The structure of what might have happened does not affect those ratios. Only what was observed does.

This is true in the sense that you only compute conditional probabilities for the data that was actually observed, not data that could have been observed but wasn't.

However, there's more to it than that; I'll post upthread in a moment with more detail.