Hello!

Welcome to the Too Big to Be Small edition of Slate Money, your guide to the Business and Finance News of the week.

I'm Felix Salmon of Axios.

I'm here with Emily Peck of Huffbos.

Hello.

And I'm here with Anna Shamansky of Breaking Views.

Hello.

And we are going to talk about the Reverend Thomas Bays.

We're going to talk about what I consider to be the Bayesian crisis that we're going through right now and what that means. We're going to talk about the stock market, which is going up. Who knew that stocks can go up in a crisis? Well, they have done. They've gone up quite a lot. We're going to talk about why. And of course, as ever, it seems, we're going to talk about the Fed. It's the one conversation that doesn't seem to go away.

They just came out with another $2.3 trillion, including for companies which didn't really have a lot of support up until now.

So we're going to talk about that. All that and the Slate Plus about Zoom coming up on Slate Money.

Okay, the Bayesian crisis.

This is what I've decided I'm calling it because I reckon that if you haven't changed your mind on something, then you haven't really been paying attention.

The Reverend Thomas Bays, I believe, was his name, who basically invented this way of looking at the world, this

sort of probabilistic way of looking at the world, where you have opinions, which are not

certainties, they're just opinions. So you can say, like, I believe something with, you don't

necessarily need to put percentages on them, but for the sake of argument, let's say,

I believe a statement with like 90% probability. And then some new piece of information comes in,

which might make you more inclined to disbelieve that statement. And then the question is,

how much do you wait that new piece of information and what does it do to your priors?

What does it do to that 90%? And so what it might do is it might, you might still believe it,

but it might go down from 90% to say 60% because you have this new piece of information

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