cousin_it comments on What Program Are You? - Less Wrong

28 Post author: RobinHanson 12 October 2009 12:29AM

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Comment author: cousin_it 13 October 2009 11:16:00AM *  2 points [-]

"Prior" is like a get out of jail card. Whenever the solution to some problem turns out to conveniently depend on an unknown probability distribution, you can investigate further, or you can say "prior" and stop there. For example, the naive Bayesian answer to game theory would be "just optimize based on your prior over the enemy's actions", which would block the route to discovering Nash equilibria.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 13 October 2009 01:50:56PM 1 point [-]

It's true that it's worthwhile to investigate where priors ought to come from. My point is only that you can still put Bayesianism to work even before you've made such investigations.