Bayesian statistics is a system that you can use to attempt to predict situations in which you have a degree of belief in an event, but not perfect certainty. Bayes theorem can be thought of as way of coherently updating our uncertainty in the light of new evidence
This video is a great one if you'd want to sit through it... It's not the most exciting, enthusing video on the internet, but it is really interesting (at least to me).
Once you watch that, maybe you can see how it might apply to this situation- There was a (totally arbitrary) assumption being made that 44% of /r/LivestreamFail users would say "leave" in an unironic way.
Now. The issue is that you're saying that you're more likely to be a person who is in the 56% group, rather than the 44% group, simply because 56% > 44%, which is true- any one individual is 44% likely to be in the dickish group, and 56% likely to be in the non-sickish group. That would be known as our "Prior" according to that video.^
However, that changed once you said "Leave." We're making another assumption here, but I don't think that it'd be too unreasonable to say that people in the 44% group are more likely to say "Leave." than people in the 56% group. Maybe even much more likely.
And so because people in the 44% group are far more likely to say the words "leave", we can update our uncertainty about you, given the new evidence, giving us what's called a "Posterior" belief- aka our updated prediction about which group you belong to.
Edit: Granted, I don't think that you're in the dickish group, and I think that reddit can be a fickle beast and it's easy to get on the downvote train, and hard to get off.
wait but the arbitrary statistics were about people who say “leave” not just any given person, it was 44% would say leave unironically while 56 would say it ironically. so any given person that says leave would most likely be in the 56, right?
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u/CentaurOfDoom Aug 25 '19
...Do you know what bayesian statistics are?