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Lumifer comments on What Bayesianism taught me - LessWrong
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This is actually a really tidy example of Bayesian thinking. People send various types of emails for a variety of reasons. Of those who send penis extension pill emails, there are (vaguely speaking) three possible groups:
People who have invented penile embiggening pills and honestly want to sell them. (I've never confirmed anybody to be in this group, so it may be empty.)
Scammers trying to find a sucker by spamming out millions of emails.
Trolls.
If you see emails offering to "Eml4rge your m3mber!!", this is evidence for the existence of someone from one or more of these groups. Which group do you think is largest? Those spam emails are evidence for all of these, but not such strong evidence for choosing between them.
Don't spam algorithms actually use Bayes rule to filter spam from non-spam, updating when you click "this is spam" or "this is not spam"?
Yes, this is exactly how Paul Graham went about solving the spam problem.