Just from a casual look, the cancer diagnosis modeling is flawed. > the doctor would need to consider the overall incidence rate of cancer among similar women

Just from a casual look, the cancer diagnosis modeling is flawed. > the doctor would need to consider the overall incidence rate of cancer among similar women with similar symptoms, not including the result of the mammogram That's a bad assumption. Mammogram is a radiology tool to investigate tissue. It's not a randomizing element as it's fundamental to arriving at the thesis, which is then correlated from MULTIPLE vectors. > a similar patient finds a lump it turns out to be benign A manual inspection is not the same. In good faith, let's assume they are the same for no reason but to argue about how not to do medicine as some precept for "Base rates are effectively random". Turns out, Base rates are not random guesses. What's interesting about Bayesian Theory is we use it all the time and then observe and collect statistical data about the outcomes, after making assumptions (like a specific Base rate) and use back propagation to correct until models fit measurable events. This is why, tests often have caveats about efficacy. Base rate is sometimes, reasonably, unknown because there is no additional correlation. This doesn't indict Base rates wherein the vast majority of cases, there are multiple vectors (or new vectors are generated) that show this process is reliable (beyond a few dice rolls). There have also been cases where there is no corroboration from new measures and the deduction is the that original measure and Base rate were random. It's a lot of hand waving from a classic troll. Why? Probably for students who want to feel like they have "discovered" how the establishment is ignorant.