“Statistical Notes § Dealing With All-Or-Nothing Unreliability of Data”, Gwern2014-07-17 (, , , , , , , , , , ; similar)⁠:

Miscellaneous statistical stuff

Given two disagreeing polls, one small & imprecise but taken at face-value, and the other large & precise but with a high chance of being totally mistaken, what is the right Bayesian model to update on these two datapoints? I give ABC and MCMC implementations of Bayesian inference on this problem and find that the posterior is bimodal with a mean estimate close to the large unreliable poll’s estimate but with wide credible intervals to cover the mode based on the small reliable poll’s estimate.