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kgwgk 7 hours ago

There are a few good explanations already (also less good and very bad) so I give a simple example:

You throw a coin five times and I predict the result correctly each time.

#1 You say that I have precognition powers, because the probability that I don’t is less than 5%

#2 You say that I have precognition powers, because if I didn’t the probability that I would have got the outcomes right is less than 5%

#2 is a bad logical conclusion but it’s based on the right interpretation (while #1 is completely wrong): it’s more likely that I was lucky because precognition is very implausible to start with.

jonahx 35 minutes ago | parent [-]

Dead on again.

What this and your other comment make clear is that once you start talking about the probability that X is true, especially in the context of hypothesis testing, you've moved (usually unwittingly) into a Bayesian framing, and you better make your priors explicit.