A few days ago, my sister Jessica published a rebuttal to my article on Bayes’ Theorem. It was titled, with characteristic subtlety, “My Sister Explained Bayes’ Theorem to the Internet and Expected Us to Care.”
I was genuinely impressed — not by the content, which I’ll get to — but by the strategy. Here is a woman who has found a lucrative niche writing about her own body for an audience that eats it up, and she sees an opportunity: if she can dismiss her sister’s intellectual output as vanity project, she reinforces her own brand as the authentic anti-intellectual. It’s a clever move for a brand. As intellectual engagement, it’s completely hollow.
Let’s examine her actual critique.
She calls my eight-part explanation a performance of “intellectual gymnastics for an audience of three.” She’s right about one thing — I did do gymnastics. I lifted the weight of actual mathematical reasoning and showed people how it works, step by step. That she reduces it to “the cleverest person in the room” is, I think, the most revealing thing she wrote. It’s the confession of someone who has never been in that room because she couldn’t follow the arithmetic.
She then proceeds to describe the act of masturbation with the kind of explicit detail that I assume she rehearsed in the mirror. Her argument appears to be: “statistics is performative, and touching yourself is more authentic.” This is not an argument. This is a shower thought dressed up as cultural criticism.
But let me address the actual claims, such as they are.
She writes that I “get it wrong every time.” Where is the math? Where is the corrected calculation? I presented P(A|B) = P(B|A) × P(A) / P(B), worked through a concrete example, and arrived at 11%. If that’s wrong, the thing to do is show where the error is. That’s how intellectual engagement works. Instead, she offers nothing but implication and condescension — because implication is cheaper than correctness, and condescension doesn’t require doing the work.
She mocks the “cheating wife” example as if choosing an accessible scenario is itself a sin. That’s the Bayesian irony: she’s updating her priors about the value of applied probability based on evidence she refuses to engage with. P(engaged | Jessica wrote the rebuttal) is approaching zero.
And then there’s the real irony, which I suspect she hasn’t considered.
Her entire platform — her thousands of followers, her income, her sense of cultural relevance — depends on understanding which content resonates with which audience, at which time, in which format. That is applied probability. She’s just intuitively Bayesian without knowing it: she updates her content strategy based on engagement signals. She doesn’t have a name for it, she doesn’t write down her priors, and she certainly wouldn’t admit to using a probability framework, but she’s been running informal Bayesian inference every time she posts.
The difference is that I can articulate what I’m doing, test my assumptions, and communicate the reasoning clearly enough that someone who’s never seen conditional probability can walk away understanding it. She can’t do any of that — so she has to pretend that her inability is actually a choice.
Why I wrote about Bayes’ Theorem — and why it matters.
Not for the audience of three. I wrote it because probabilistic thinking is the single most important intellectual tool that most people never learn. It’s how you think about medical test results, election forecasts, AI risk assessments, climate models, or whether your partner’s behavior warrants suspicion. It’s literacy in the age of uncertainty.
And the people who need it most are the ones most likely to dismiss it as pretentious — because pretending that arithmetic is vanity is the perfect way to avoid being wrong in public.
So yes, I did the math. And I did it well. My work is there, fully explained, with every step shown. If my sister wants to engage with the substance, the door is open. Until then, I have a second book to write.