+Maybe another anecdote from a few years later is informative about the thought process. In the early 'tens, while [slumming in community college](/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/#back-to-school), I took the "Calculus III" course from a really great professor who respected my intellectual autonomy, and, as it happens, the man had a very distinctive voice. I'm not even sure how to describe it in terms of lower-level precepts, but you know it when you hear it. And I wondered, on the basis of his voice, whether he was gay.
+
+At this point in my ideological evolution, I _did_ have a concept of Bayesian reasoning as normative ideal. But I thought to myself, well, base rates: _most_ people aren't gay, and the professor's voice isn't _enough_ evidence to overcome that prior; he's probably not gay.
+
+Looking back, there's nothing wrong with the _form_ of my reasoning—[base rate neglect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy) is in fact a thing—but I suspect I was _quantitatively_ in the wrong?
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+If 3% of men are gay, you "only" need log<sub>2</sub>(97/3) ≈ 5 bits of evidence to think that someone probably is.