Noah Jackson

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Even though cults would indeed arise even without genuine extraterrestrial encounters, I think that the actual presence of aliens would increase the probability and # of flying saucer cults. Actual alien encounters would likely inspire some # of these sorts of beliefs, making the formation of cults even more probable than in a world without aliens. Essentially, while the baseline probability of cult formation might be high due to "human silliness", the added “signal” from genuine alien events could tip the scales further in favor of cult emergence.

Thus the conditional probability P(cults|aliens) would be greater than P(cults|!aliens).

If these both theories made the same predictions, you'd have to depend on your prior knowledge - your prior, for short - to judge which one was more likely.

Not sure what the commenting standard is for grammar mistakes but... change this to "both these".