You may be right. But is there no better methology for estimating priors than to say "surely this prior must be in the single digit percentages". It seems very method-less.
The method is "set your prior probability equal to society's judgement of its probability". For anything where society as a whole has an opinion at all, it's a better approximation than any other one-piece-of-evidence method around, and is thus a great way to set your priors.
After the terrorist attacks at Charlie Hebdo, conspiracy theories quickly arose about who was behind the attacks.
People who are critical to the west easily swallow such theories while pro-vest people just as easily find them ridiculous.
I guess we can agree that the most rational response would be to enter a state of aporia until sufficient evidence is at hand.
Yet very few people do so. People are guided by their previous understanding of the world, when judging new information. It sounds like a fine Bayesian approach for getting through life, but for real scientific knowledge, we can't rely on *prior* reasonings (even though these might involve Bayesian reasoning). Real science works by investigating evidence.
So, how do we characterise the human tendency to jump to conclusions that have simply been supplied by their sense of normativity. Is their a previously described bias that covers this case?