Hacker News Reader

The confidence we have that the relevant scientific prescriptions are true.

Oh, prescriptions, that makes a lot more sense. As you rightly point out, science is not prescriptive, only descriptive.

That’s an odd use of notation. Typically P(A|B) is used to denote probabilities of outcomes.

P(A|B) denotes the probability of A, given B: out of all the "possible worlds" where B is true, in what proportion is A true?

P(B) denotes the probability of B given no additional constraints: it's the same as saying P(B|true).