The outside view should in theory have input into how fragile we can build our inference chains. In practice it is likely very hard to establish a base rate due to the issue you bring up of not knowing where to carve. “Steps of uniform likelihood” isn’t exactly an operation we can apply to a data set on past results. If we’re stuck with expert judgement, that limits how many cases we can evaluate and how confident we can be in the results. Still better than nothing though.
The outside view should in theory have input into how fragile we can build our inference chains. In practice it is likely very hard to establish a base rate due to the issue you bring up of not knowing where to carve. “Steps of uniform likelihood” isn’t exactly an operation we can apply to a data set on past results. If we’re stuck with expert judgement, that limits how many cases we can evaluate and how confident we can be in the results. Still better than nothing though.