I'm contemplating a discussion post on this topic, but first I'll float it here, since there's a high chance that I'm just being really stupid.

I'm abysmally unsuccessful at using anything like Bayesian reasoning in real life.

I don't think it's because I'm doing anything fundamentally wrong. Maybe what I'm doing wrong is attempting to think of these things in a Bayesian way in the first place.

Let's use a concrete example. I bought a house. My prior probability that any given household appliance or fixture will break and/or need maintenance in a given month is on the order of 5%, obviously with some variability depending on what appliance we're talking about. This prior is an off-the-cuff intuitive figure based on decades of living in houses.

Within a month of buying this house, things immediately start breaking. The dishwasher breaks. Then the garbage disposal. The sump pump fails completely. The humidifier needs repair. The air conditioner unit needs to be entirely replaced. The siding needs to be repainted. A section of fence needs to be replaced. The sprinklers don't work. This is all within roughly the first four months.

So, my prior was garbage, but the real issue for me is that Bayesian reasoning didn't really help me. The dishwasher breaking didn't cause me to shift my Background Probabilistic Breakage Rate much at all. One thing breaking within the first month is allowed for by my prior model. Then the second thing breaks - okay, maybe I need to adjust my BPBR a a bit. Still, there's little reason to expect that several more important things will break in short order. But that's exactly what happened.

There is a causal story that explains everything (apparently) breaking at basically the same time, which is that the previous owners were not taking good care of the house, and various things were already subtly broken and limping along at passable functionality for a long time. The problem is that this causal story only becomes promoted to "hypothesis with significant probability mass" after two or three consecutive major appliance disasters.

What is annoying about all this is that my wife doesn't attempt to use any kind of probabilistic reasoning, and she is basically right all the time. I was saying things like, "I really doubt the garbage disposal is really broken, we just had two other major things replaced, what are the odds that another thing would break so quickly?" and she would reply along the lines of, "I'm pretty sure it's actually broken, and I can't fathom why you keep talking about odds when your odds-based assessments are always wrong," and I'm at the point of agreeing with her. Not to mention that she was the one who suggested the "prior owners didn't maintain the house" hypothesis, while I was still grimly clinging to my initial model, increasingly bewildered by each new disaster.

I am probably a poster child for "doing probabilistic thinking wrong" in some obvious way that I am blind to. Please help me figure out how and where. I have my own thoughts, but I will wait for others to respond so as to avoid anchoring.