Thank you, now I understand what you meant. I concede (again) that using Bayesian analysis the new results do lower the probability that the Higgs exists. Personally I don't subscribe to this point of view since, if the Higgs exists and has a low mass, the most likely chain of events is: Bayesian probability for Higgs existence starts at some subjective value, goes down (with a subjective slope that depends on your priors), then goes up and reaches 1. Not only is it subjective, this just doesn't feel to me like it is describing anything "real"; it seems like we're just playing with numbers. But I guess this is already way off topic for this discussion.
For me the important point to communicate was that the article is, let's say, mostly nonsense. Just consider the title:
> A Higgs Setback: Did Stephen Hawking Just Win the Most Outrageous Bet in Physics History?
Never mind the superlatives. There was no "Higgs setback", and the answer to the question is "No". The article does not leave out the correct details, but I'm quite certain it leaves the layman with the feeling that the Higgs search is all but doomed.
I agree with you about the article being just sensationalistic non-journalism.
About not using a Bayesian approach, though, I don't understand how could you infer the existence or not of the Higgs without it, considering that we can only measure something that is probabilistically correlated to what we want to find.
In other words, what should happen for you to say that we have verified that there is a Higgs boson? I'm pretty confident that it would be some application of Bayes theorem :)
For me the important point to communicate was that the article is, let's say, mostly nonsense. Just consider the title:
> A Higgs Setback: Did Stephen Hawking Just Win the Most Outrageous Bet in Physics History?
Never mind the superlatives. There was no "Higgs setback", and the answer to the question is "No". The article does not leave out the correct details, but I'm quite certain it leaves the layman with the feeling that the Higgs search is all but doomed.