More than the prior, I find the sampling process to be nonsensical. Why would we expect to run across the objects in the world uniformly at random? Seeing ravens is highly correlated with being outside, looking at the sky, etc, so why wouldn’t seeing white ravens have similar but much narrower requirements, like being on a specific island? Adding something along these lines to our model should make the bayesian evidence gained by observing either black ravens or non-black non-ravens quickly go to 0.
Many years ago, I was repeatedly amused when reading texts that talked about rare “black swan” events. Where I lived there were hundreds of swans living on the river, and every single one was black.
Getting back to the original point: a uniform distribution is superficially the simplest model, so should be associated with the lowest complexity penalty. However after gathering broader evidence, you see that this doesn’t hold for anything else, so why should you expect it to hold for ravens?
Especially once you get down into gears-level models like inheritance, one should already expect that if there are both black ravens and white ravens, they are more likely to be geographically separated than intermingled.
More than the prior, I find the sampling process to be nonsensical. Why would we expect to run across the objects in the world uniformly at random? Seeing ravens is highly correlated with being outside, looking at the sky, etc, so why wouldn’t seeing white ravens have similar but much narrower requirements, like being on a specific island? Adding something along these lines to our model should make the bayesian evidence gained by observing either black ravens or non-black non-ravens quickly go to 0.
Many years ago, I was repeatedly amused when reading texts that talked about rare “black swan” events. Where I lived there were hundreds of swans living on the river, and every single one was black.
Getting back to the original point: a uniform distribution is superficially the simplest model, so should be associated with the lowest complexity penalty. However after gathering broader evidence, you see that this doesn’t hold for anything else, so why should you expect it to hold for ravens?
Especially once you get down into gears-level models like inheritance, one should already expect that if there are both black ravens and white ravens, they are more likely to be geographically separated than intermingled.