From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Mon May 14 2001 - 11:55:49 MDT
On 5/12/2001, Curt Adams wrote:
> >I argue that not all possible priors are rational -- rational priors
> >should be obtained from "uberpriors" via conditioning.
>
>... The assumption
>is outrageously false; it requires that prior differ only due to valid
>reasoning based on the evidence of the beliefs themselves. Human
>uninformed beliefs are caused by developmental, genetic, and memetic
>processes that have essentially nothing to do with the truth of such
>things in the real world. The reason my mother and I differ on the
>existence of God has nothing to do with the existence of God.
>In addition, it's an odd "norm", at least for humans. We have the priors
>we have; to change them requires violating Bayesianism.
As I said in my last message, "I was making a *normative* argument about
rational beliefs, not a descriptive model of actual beliefs." If there
are constraints on what beliefs are rational, then upon discovering
that your beliefs violate those constraints, you should want to change
your beliefs to avoid those violations. This sort of change seems
perfectly rational to me, even if it violates a naive Bayesianism.
> >I do *not* assume that everyone has the same uberprior,
> >actually, but I do describe plausible constraints on such uberpriors that
> >imply common priors.
>
>You assume everybody agree on world_state_function/belief_state and
>on probability(belief_state). It's trivial to derive a
>belief-state-independent
>world state function (i.e. a prior) just by averaging
>world_state_function/belief_state
>by probability(belief_state). So you do assume everybody has the same
>uberprior.
I don't follow you. My short paper http://hanson.gmu.edu/priof.pdf
describes uberpriors as q_i, where the i subscript allows different
people to have different uberpriors. I do not require q_i = q_j.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
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