This’d be easier to engage with with real examples.
I think this is sort-of right, but I think “prior” is not a clear enough mechanistic description of what’s going on. Like this is a fine abstraction but it doesn’t give me many details to think through towards solutions.
Also, like, pretty much any human knowledge isn’t intrinsically “prior”, you believe things because of your life experience.
One example that you might classify as a prior but I think we can do better: some people have the intuitive sense that a significantly-more-intelligent person can stomp all over less intelligent people.
I think many of these people get the sense from having, say, played a bunch of competitive strategic games, and have a sense of how high skill-ceilings are.
Some people don’t have that experience, instead their reason for the prior is just “it does sure looks like humans stomp all over chimpanzees”, and generalize.
On the other side, some people have life experience where messy finnicky details got in the way of supposedly “intelligent” plans, and they have a stronger salient prior about intelligence being bogged now in finnicky details.
In all those cases I think you can do better than stop at “well their prior is different.”
Or, rather: being enable to do that is a skill issue.
This’d be easier to engage with with real examples.
I think this is sort-of right, but I think “prior” is not a clear enough mechanistic description of what’s going on. Like this is a fine abstraction but it doesn’t give me many details to think through towards solutions.
Also, like, pretty much any human knowledge isn’t intrinsically “prior”, you believe things because of your life experience.
One example that you might classify as a prior but I think we can do better: some people have the intuitive sense that a significantly-more-intelligent person can stomp all over less intelligent people.
I think many of these people get the sense from having, say, played a bunch of competitive strategic games, and have a sense of how high skill-ceilings are.
Some people don’t have that experience, instead their reason for the prior is just “it does sure looks like humans stomp all over chimpanzees”, and generalize.
On the other side, some people have life experience where messy finnicky details got in the way of supposedly “intelligent” plans, and they have a stronger salient prior about intelligence being bogged now in finnicky details.
In all those cases I think you can do better than stop at “well their prior is different.”
Or, rather: being enable to do that is a skill issue.
(See also: Propagating Facts into Aesthetics, which goes into one particular mechanism in more detail)