Another idea is to do whatever algebra you need to do which is decision-relevant, leaving your priors unspecified, then for each decision you have to make, backpropagate that algebra to a simple and relatively easy-to-answer question about your priors (“Is my prior belief that the plant is toxic greater than 1e-20? If yes, go to the hospital.”)
That makes a lot of sense, but it does require you to know your utility function ahead of time. When this is not the case we might still want to propagate whatever you know about the prior forward to the posterior as a kind of caching operation for use in future decisions.
You don’t necessarily need to know your utility function, just the utility of what is being decided between or a preference ordering may do. (Solving/making progress on a specific problem may be easier than working on an abstract problem.)
Another idea is to do whatever algebra you need to do which is decision-relevant, leaving your priors unspecified, then for each decision you have to make, backpropagate that algebra to a simple and relatively easy-to-answer question about your priors (“Is my prior belief that the plant is toxic greater than 1e-20? If yes, go to the hospital.”)
Anyway, I’m glad to see this kind of post on LW.
That makes a lot of sense, but it does require you to know your utility function ahead of time. When this is not the case we might still want to propagate whatever you know about the prior forward to the posterior as a kind of caching operation for use in future decisions.
You don’t necessarily need to know your utility function, just the utility of what is being decided between or a preference ordering may do. (Solving/making progress on a specific problem may be easier than working on an abstract problem.)