“Coltheart et al pretend that the prior is 1⁄100, but this implies that there is a base rate of your spouse being an imposter one out of every hundred times you see her (or perhaps one out of every hundred people has a fake spouse) either of which is preposterous.”
What if their prior on not feeling anything upon seeing their wife is 0? What if most of the reason for reasonable people’s prior on this being much lower it is low status, instrumentally bad, etc, but their rational sincere thinking about it prior is close to 50/50? I notice you called the idea preposterous and something reasonable people wouldn’t take seriously which are both quite status-ey. So if their aversion to instrumentally bad ideas and/or their aversion to ideas people will think them crazy for gets switched off they can easily get the wrong answer. Perhaps a fear of being of being fooled, or a fight or flight paranoia spiral could be what makes them think so.
Similarly, I think Coltheart’s criticism described here was flawed because it made the prior too specific. How often do you see a person at a distance or facing away and you “recognize” them as a loved one, but then the person comes closer or turns around and you realize you were wrong? It’s not often, but it happens enough that we all know that feeling of sudden non-recognition. I often see it in children who come up to me expecting to find their father. The likelihood ratio of priors doesn’t have to be for “my wife” versus “an imposter”, but could be for “my wife” versus “not my wife”. If that is the case, then the brain-damaged person uses the imposter theory to explain the general “not my wife” endogenous evidence.
“Coltheart et al pretend that the prior is 1⁄100, but this implies that there is a base rate of your spouse being an imposter one out of every hundred times you see her (or perhaps one out of every hundred people has a fake spouse) either of which is preposterous.”
What if their prior on not feeling anything upon seeing their wife is 0? What if most of the reason for reasonable people’s prior on this being much lower it is low status, instrumentally bad, etc, but their rational sincere thinking about it prior is close to 50/50? I notice you called the idea preposterous and something reasonable people wouldn’t take seriously which are both quite status-ey. So if their aversion to instrumentally bad ideas and/or their aversion to ideas people will think them crazy for gets switched off they can easily get the wrong answer. Perhaps a fear of being of being fooled, or a fight or flight paranoia spiral could be what makes them think so.
I have no idea if any of that is true.
Similarly, I think Coltheart’s criticism described here was flawed because it made the prior too specific. How often do you see a person at a distance or facing away and you “recognize” them as a loved one, but then the person comes closer or turns around and you realize you were wrong? It’s not often, but it happens enough that we all know that feeling of sudden non-recognition. I often see it in children who come up to me expecting to find their father. The likelihood ratio of priors doesn’t have to be for “my wife” versus “an imposter”, but could be for “my wife” versus “not my wife”. If that is the case, then the brain-damaged person uses the imposter theory to explain the general “not my wife” endogenous evidence.