Natural law? In December of 2002, I'd been sermonizing in a habitual IRC channels about what seemed to me like a very straightforward idea: How words, like all other useful forms of thought, are secretly a disguised form of Bayesian inference. I thought I was explaining clearly, and yet there was one fellow, it seemed, who didn't get it. This worried me, because this was someone who'd been very enthusiastic about my Bayesian sermons up to that point. He'd gone around telling people that Bayes was "the secret of the universe", a phrase I'd been known to use. So I went into a private IRC conversation to clear up the sticking point. And he still didn't get it. I took a step back and explained the immediate prerequisites, which I had thought would be obvious - He didn't understand my explanation of the prerequisites. In desperation, I recursed all the way back to Bayes's Theorem, the ultimate foundation stone of - He didn't know how to apply Bayes's Theorem to update the probability that a fruit is a banana, after it is observed to be yellow. He kept mixing up p(b-y) and p(y-b). http://lesswrong.com/lw/ki/double_illusion_of_transparency/ Shamelessly ripped out of wasoxygen and I's conversation last night. Also, since I've never typed probability notation on hubski before, I didn't realize until now that it ruins the quote markup. Of course it does.I have also noticed that some of the most enthusiastic supporters and doubters cannot describe the technology very well.
My first true foray into Bayes For Everyone was writing An Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning, still one of my most popular works. This is the Intuitive Explanation's origin story.