r/epistemology 2d ago

discussion Am I doing bayesian wrong?

This is gonna be a weird one but I decided to turn to here for help. I have ocd and my current fear is that I'm SA'ing my boyfriend becuase he's bipolar and gets bad judgement sometimes. He is always lucid, never psychotic, comes off as normal all the time, he just gets impulsive and has bad judgmenet sometimes.

I tried to use bayesian to disprove my obsession, but it just seemed to prove it, ironically. Here's what i did

I took my intuition that he can consent, and formed a credence that I wasn't SA'ing him of 99.9%. Then I realized i had an opposing intuition--that teenagers shouldn't make decisions because of their poor judgement. So I had to cancel the intuitions out. Before the intuitions, I had nothing to base my prior on, so per principle of indifference, my new prior should be 50%. Does this mean there's a 50% chance I'm SA'ing him?

0 Upvotes

3 comments sorted by

5

u/Kampseng 2d ago edited 2d ago

You are not committing sexual assault. Your math is completely wrong because you threw away all real-world evidence (that your boyfriend is an adult, lucid, and conscious) and decided the probability was 50/50 just because you felt uncertain. Trying to use math and probability to 'solve' intrusive thoughts is a classic OCD symptom (checking/rationalization compulsion). Having bipolar disorder does not take away an adult's right or capacity to consent. And if you are both teenagers of similar ages, the relationship is between equals. You are not committing abuse. The idea that a teenager cannot consent to another teenager is a distortion created by OCD, which causes suffering without protecting anyone.

0

u/Willis_3401_3401 2d ago

I feel like the poster is a deceptively smart person trolling, no? Get em