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This web of influence has
interesting ramifications from the perspective of the types of reasoning
patterns that it supports. Consider
George. A priori, we believe that he
is pretty likely to be smart. Evidence
about two classes that he took changes our probabilities only very
slightly. However, we see that most
people who took CS101 got A’s. In
fact, even people who did fairly poorly in other classes got an A in
CS101. Therefore, we believe that
CS101 is probably an easy class. To
get a C in an easy class is unlikely for a smart student, so our probability
that Forrest Gump is smart goes down substantially.
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