An alternative explanation of will-power is hyperbolic discounting. Your time discount function is not exponential, and therefore not dynamically consistent. So you can simultaneously (i) prefer gaining short-term pleasure on the expense of long-term goals (e.g. play games instead of studying) and (ii) take actions to prevent future-you from doing the same (e.g. go to rehab).
This seems simpler, but it doesn’t explain why the same drugs that cause/prevent weird beliefs should add/deplete will-power.
“How to weight evidence vs. the prior” is not a free parameter in Bayesianism. What you can have is some parameter controlling the prior itself (so that the prior can be less or more confident about certain things). I guess we can speculate that there are some parameters in the prior and some parameters in the reward function s.t. various drugs affect both of them simultaneously, and maybe there’s a planning-as-inference explanation for why the two are entangled.
I mean, there is something of a free parameter which is how strong your prior is over ‘hypotheses’ vs how much of a likelihood ratio you get from observing ‘evidence’ if there’s a difference between hypotheses and evidence, and you can set your prior joint distribution over hypotheses and evidence however you want.
Maybe this is what you meant by “What you can have is some parameter controlling the prior itself (so that the prior can be less or more confident about certain things).”
Yes, I think we are talking about the same thing. If you change your distribution over hypotheses, or the distribution over evidence implied by each hypothesis, then it means you’re changing the prior.
An alternative explanation of will-power is hyperbolic discounting. Your time discount function is not exponential, and therefore not dynamically consistent. So you can simultaneously (i) prefer gaining short-term pleasure on the expense of long-term goals (e.g. play games instead of studying) and (ii) take actions to prevent future-you from doing the same (e.g. go to rehab).
This seems simpler, but it doesn’t explain why the same drugs that cause/prevent weird beliefs should add/deplete will-power.
“How to weight evidence vs. the prior” is not a free parameter in Bayesianism. What you can have is some parameter controlling the prior itself (so that the prior can be less or more confident about certain things). I guess we can speculate that there are some parameters in the prior and some parameters in the reward function s.t. various drugs affect both of them simultaneously, and maybe there’s a planning-as-inference explanation for why the two are entangled.
I mean, there is something of a free parameter which is how strong your prior is over ‘hypotheses’ vs how much of a likelihood ratio you get from observing ‘evidence’ if there’s a difference between hypotheses and evidence, and you can set your prior joint distribution over hypotheses and evidence however you want.
Maybe this is what you meant by “What you can have is some parameter controlling the prior itself (so that the prior can be less or more confident about certain things).”
Yes, I think we are talking about the same thing. If you change your distribution over hypotheses, or the distribution over evidence implied by each hypothesis, then it means you’re changing the prior.