I just came across this word from John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, that nicely capture the thesis of All Debates Are Bravery Debates.
redesisn. a feeling of queasiness while offering someone advice, knowing they might well face a totally different set of constraints and capabilities, any of which might propel them to a wildly different outcome—which makes you wonder if all of your hard-earned wisdom’s fundamentally nonstraferable, like handing someone a gift card in your name that probably expired years ago.
Today I am thankful that Bayes’ Rule is unintuitive.
Much ink has been spilled complaining that Bayes’ Rule can yield surprising results. As anyone who has taken an introductory statistics class knows, it is difficult to solve a problem that requires an application of Bayes’ Rule without plugging values into the formula, at least for a beginner. Eventually, the student of Bayes may gain an intuition for the Rule (perhaps in odds form), but at that point they can be trusted to wield their intuition responsibly because it was won through disciplined practice.
This unintuitiveness is a feature, not a bug because it discourages motivated reasoning. If Bayes’ Rule were more intuitive, it would be simple to back out what P(A), P(B), and P(B|A) must be to justify your preferred posterior belief, and then argue for these quantities. It would also be simple to work backwards to select your prediction A from a favorable hypothesis space. Because Bayes’ Rule is unintuitive, these are challenging moves, and formally updating your beliefs is less vulnerable to motivated reasoning.
I just came across this word from John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, that nicely capture the thesis of All Debates Are Bravery Debates.
Today I am thankful that Bayes’ Rule is unintuitive.
Much ink has been spilled complaining that Bayes’ Rule can yield surprising results. As anyone who has taken an introductory statistics class knows, it is difficult to solve a problem that requires an application of Bayes’ Rule without plugging values into the formula, at least for a beginner. Eventually, the student of Bayes may gain an intuition for the Rule (perhaps in odds form), but at that point they can be trusted to wield their intuition responsibly because it was won through disciplined practice.
This unintuitiveness is a feature, not a bug because it discourages motivated reasoning. If Bayes’ Rule were more intuitive, it would be simple to back out what P(A), P(B), and P(B|A) must be to justify your preferred posterior belief, and then argue for these quantities. It would also be simple to work backwards to select your prediction A from a favorable hypothesis space. Because Bayes’ Rule is unintuitive, these are challenging moves, and formally updating your beliefs is less vulnerable to motivated reasoning.
Happy Thanksgiving!