{ localUrl: '../page/prior_probability.html', arbitalUrl: 'https://arbital.com/p/prior_probability', rawJsonUrl: '../raw/1rm.json', likeableId: '705', likeableType: 'page', myLikeValue: '0', likeCount: '2', dislikeCount: '0', likeScore: '2', individualLikes: [ 'EricBruylant', 'JeanneLai' ], pageId: 'prior_probability', edit: '17', editSummary: '', prevEdit: '16', currentEdit: '17', wasPublished: 'true', type: 'wiki', title: 'Prior probability', clickbait: 'What we believed before seeing the evidence.', textLength: '1659', alias: 'prior_probability', externalUrl: '', sortChildrenBy: 'likes', hasVote: 'false', voteType: '', votesAnonymous: 'false', editCreatorId: 'EricBruylant', editCreatedAt: '2016-08-04 14:27:46', pageCreatorId: 'EliezerYudkowsky', pageCreatedAt: '2016-01-27 04:55:27', seeDomainId: '0', editDomainId: 'AlexeiAndreev', submitToDomainId: '0', isAutosave: 'false', isSnapshot: 'false', isLiveEdit: 'true', isMinorEdit: 'false', indirectTeacher: 'false', todoCount: '0', isEditorComment: 'false', isApprovedComment: 'true', isResolved: 'false', snapshotText: '', anchorContext: '', anchorText: '', anchorOffset: '0', mergedInto: '', isDeleted: 'false', viewCount: '313', text: '"Prior [1rf probability]", "prior [1rb odds]", or just "prior" refers to a state of belief that obtained before seeing a piece of new evidence. Suppose there are two suspects in a murder, Colonel Mustard and Miss Scarlet. After determining that the victim was poisoned, you think Mustard and Scarlet are respectively 25% and 75% likely to have committed the murder. *Before* determining that the victim was poisoned, perhaps, you thought Mustard and Scarlet were equally likely to have committed the murder (50% and 50%). In this case, your "prior probability" of Miss Scarlet committing the murder was 50%, and your "posterior probability" after seeing the evidence was 75%.\n\nThe prior probability of a hypothesis $H$ is often being written with the unconditioned notation $\\mathbb P(H)$, while the posterior after seeing the evidence $e$ is often being denoted by the [1rj conditional probability] $\\mathbb P(H\\mid e).$%%note: [E. T. Jaynes](http://bayes.wustl.edu/) was known to insist on using the explicit notation $\\mathbb P (H\\mid I_0)$ to denote the prior probability of $H$, with $I_0$ denoting the prior, and never trying to write any entirely unconditional probability $\\mathbb P(X)$. Since, said Jaynes, we always have *some* prior information.%% %%knows-requisite([1r6]): This however is a heuristic rather than a law, and might be false inside some complicated problems. If we've already seen $e_0$ and are now updating on $e_1$, then in this new problem the new prior will be $\\mathbb P(H\\mid e_0)$ and the new posterior will be $\\mathbb P(H\\mid e_1 \\wedge e_0).$ %%\n\nFor questions about how priors are "ultimately" determined, see [11w].', metaText: '', isTextLoaded: 'true', isSubscribedToDiscussion: 'false', isSubscribedToUser: 'false', isSubscribedAsMaintainer: 'false', discussionSubscriberCount: '1', maintainerCount: '1', userSubscriberCount: '0', lastVisit: '2016-02-13 14:22:24', hasDraft: 'false', votes: [], voteSummary: [ '0', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0', '0' ], muVoteSummary: '0', voteScaling: '0', currentUserVote: '-2', voteCount: '0', lockedVoteType: '', maxEditEver: '0', redLinkCount: '0', lockedBy: '', lockedUntil: '', nextPageId: '', prevPageId: '', usedAsMastery: 'false', proposalEditNum: '0', permissions: { edit: { has: 'false', reason: 'You don't have domain permission to edit this page' }, proposeEdit: { has: 'true', reason: '' }, delete: { has: 'false', reason: 'You don't have domain permission to delete this page' }, comment: { has: 'false', reason: 'You can't comment in this domain because you are not a member' }, proposeComment: { has: 'true', reason: '' } }, summaries: { Summary: '"Prior [1rf probability]", "prior [1rb odds]", or just "prior" refers to a state of belief that obtained before seeing a piece of new evidence. Suppose there are two suspects in a murder, Colonel Mustard and Miss Scarlet. After determining that the victim was poisoned, you think Mustard and Scarlet are respectively 25% and 75% likely to have committed the murder. *Before* determining that the victim was poisoned, perhaps, you thought Mustard and Scarlet were equally likely to have committed the murder (50% and 50%). In this case, your "prior probability" of Miss Scarlet committing the murder was 50%, and your "posterior probability" after seeing the evidence was 75%.' }, creatorIds: [ 'EliezerYudkowsky', 'EricBruylant', 'NateSoares' ], childIds: [], parentIds: [ 'bayes_reasoning' ], commentIds: [], questionIds: [], tagIds: [ 'needs_summary_meta_tag' ], relatedIds: [], markIds: [], explanations: [ { id: '5861', parentId: 'prior_probability', childId: 'prior_probability', type: 'subject', creatorId: 'AlexeiAndreev', createdAt: '2016-08-02 17:34:30', level: '1', isStrong: 'true', everPublished: 'true' } ], learnMore: [], requirements: [ { id: '5862', parentId: 'conditional_probability', childId: 'prior_probability', type: 'requirement', creatorId: 'AlexeiAndreev', createdAt: '2016-08-02 17:34:49', level: '2', isStrong: 'false', everPublished: 'true' } ], subjects: [ { id: '5861', parentId: 'prior_probability', childId: 'prior_probability', type: 'subject', creatorId: 'AlexeiAndreev', createdAt: 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