What's the probability that the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898 was accidental?

One could look at the likelihood of spontaneous coal fires and their effects, gather evidence about the activities surrounding the event, essentially trying to narrow down the set of possible states that would lead to the incident and then see what proportion of those states cause the sinking by fire, military action, or something else. But then attaching a number to that seems a dauting task.

	▲	mitthrowaway2 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Attaching a number to it isn't so daunting, if you view that number as a reflection of your own subjective certainty as to the truth of the proposition. There's no other "correct" number; in reality it was either an accident or it wasn't; Nature knows which proposition is true but we don't. Our mission is only to find the figure that minimizes the logarithm of our error, if the truth were at some point to be revealed to us. The more evidence you gather and the more work you put in will get you a better minimum, but there's no reason to be afraid of putting even a rough quantitative number on it before doing that legwork; you'd just be doing it from a state of higher uncertainty, and your stated probability would have to be farther from either confident extreme (0% or 100%) accordingly.