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impossibleforktoday at 1:10 AM0 repliesview on HN

Censored variables are a very real thing and this model is perfectly legtimate. This is how you do maths with conditional probabilities.

It's ad hoc, but so is all maths, and all reasoning.

A man with a paper cut is at D=0.9999 or more. You probably have more noise from variations in sleep or eating or colds. But people don't end up at D=0.17 just randomly. El-Masri was in danger of dying. The fellow was actually tortured.

There's also no censorship in the example of the paper cut. It also isn't possible to infer much from a something like that E[D|some positive condition]=0.9999, so even if there were censorship your example with a small scratch doesn't allow the sort of argument I gave in my previous comment. My previous comment specifically relies that you have a censored sample D~P(D|something that you'd expect would make D large) and then finding that this D is small.