Your post is all about what you want. What are you offering in exchange?

I'm looking for an academic/science/technology enthusiast to cofound my new website with me.

Website is already built and nearing launch. I am looking for someone who can serve as an adviser and contribute directly to site content (I will explain the content in more detail to serious candidates). This will require knowing a lot about science, and a lot about how scientists think. He/she needs to be interested in new technologies and current events. From international affairs, economic policy, politics and ethical issues to cryptocurrency, biotech, physics and artificial intelligence- my ideal candidate will be a huge geek when it comes to these areas. I'm looking for an all around informed person who likes to research issues.

Ideally, you'll have experience in academia and/or science/tech.

I don't imagine this being a ton of work at first, it's just work that I need someone else to focus on. There will be equity. Message me if interested.

A friend of mine recently succumbed to using the base rate fallacy in a line of argumentation. I tried to explain that it was a base rate fallacy, but he just replied that the base rate is actually pretty high. The argument was him basically saying something equivalent to "If I had a disease that had a 1 in a million chance of survival and I survived it, it's not because I was the 1 in a million, it's because it was due to god's intervention". So I tried to point out that either his (subjective) base rate is wrong or his (subjective) conditional probability is wrong. Here's the math that I used, let me know if I did anything wrong:

Let's assume that the prior probability for aliens is 99%. The probability of surviving the disease given that aliens cured it is 100%. And of course, the probability of surviving the disease at all is 1 out of a million, or 0.0001%.

• Pr(Aliens | Survived) = Pr(Survived | Aliens) x Pr(Aliens) / Pr(Survived)
• Pr(Aliens | Survived) = 100% x 99% / 0.0001%
• Pr(Aliens | Survived) = 1.00 * .99 / .000001
• Pr(Aliens | Survived) = .99 / .000001
• Pr(Aliens | Survived) = 990,000 or 99,000,000%

There's a 99,000,000% chance that aliens exist!! But... this is probability theory, and here probabilities can only add up to 100%. Meaning that if we end up with some result that is over 100% or under 0% something in our numbers is wrong.

The Total Probability Theorem is the denominator for Bayes Theorem. In this aliens instance, that is the probability of surviving the disease without alien intervention, which is 1 out of a million. The Total Probability Theorem, meaning 1 out of a million in this case, is also equal to Pr(Survived | Aliens) x Pr(Aliens) + Pr(Survived | Some Other Cause) x Pr(Some Other Cause):

• 1 in a million = Pr(Survived | Aliens) x Pr(Aliens) + Pr(Survived | Some Other Cause) x Pr(Some Other Cause)
• 0.0001% = 100% x 99% + ??? x 1%
• 0.0001% = 99% + 1%*???

If we want to find ???, in this case it would be Pr(Survived | Some Other Cause), we need to solve for ??? just like we would in any basic algebra course to find x. In this case, our formula is 0.000001 = 0.99 + 0.01x.

If we solve for x, it is -98.999, or -9899%. Meaning that Pr(Survived | Some Other Cause) is -9899%. Again, a number that is outside the range of allowable probabilistic values. This means that there is something wrong with our input. Either the 1 in a million is wrong, the base rate of alien existence being 99% is wrong, or the 100% conditional probability that you would survive your 1 in a million disease due to alien intervention is wrong. The 1 in a million is already set, so either the base rate or conditional probabilities are wrong. And this is why that sort of "I could only have beaten the odds on this disease due to aliens" (or magic, or alternative medicine, or homeopathy, or Chthulu, or...) reasoning is wrong.

Again, remember the base rate. And you can't cheat by trying to jack up the base rate or you'll skew some other data unintentionally. Probability is like mass; it has to be conserved.