You may be right about that. Unless I have flubbed my calculations, if P(estimated chance of rain=.9|rain) = 1.4(P(rain)), then Bayes theorem leaves the updatin

You may be right about that. Unless I have flubbed my calculations, if P(estimated chance of rain=.9|rain) = 1.4(P(rain)), then Bayes theorem leaves the updating at average(.5,.9). Also, an interesting reference about selecting priors: see 2.2 in http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~kass/papers/rules.pdf http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~kass/papers/rules.pdf. Which is not to say that every set of procedures to calculate answers will produce equal errors. There are provably better procedures and provably better answers, given a set of assumptions.