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A comment on Scientists recreated classic origin-of-life experiment and made a new discovery. Parent comment

Re:Scientists recreated classic origin-of-life experiment an... by csee on Saturday October 30, 2021 @03:00PM (#29051393)
Your statements in this thread have assumed we have no info to work with (as far as estimating p goes) because we have no understanding of the mechanisms behind how life came to be. But this ignores the evidence that we are here, which is info that can be used in a Bayesian framework to estimate p. The fact we exist, as well as information about how many billions of years it took for us to evolve, contains significant information about p.
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Re:Scientists recreated classic origin-of-life experiment an... by pfdietz on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @07:15AM (#29079563)
I still don't understand. We have no useful lower bound on the probability that life arises, so how does Bayesian reasoning bootstrap to any meaningful lower bound?
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Re:Scientists recreated classic origin-of-life experiment an... by csee on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @10:00AM (#29081311)
Who said anything about a lower bound of p? I was talking about a lower bound on N, not a lower bound on p.

Bayesian reasoning (by using the fact that we exist rather than don't exist, as well as other info about our existence, such as how long it took us to evolve) helps us estimate a probability distribution of p, as well as a central tendency estimate.

See e.g. https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2019.2149

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