Hmm. If I don't even need to do stuff to offend someone - if just possessing accurate priors is sufficient - then I guess I'll go ahead and take the hit. If LW, of all places, begins to punish people for having accurate priors, then as a longtime contributor I feel a sense of duty to introduce a little friction. Throw some sand into the gears. And you should do the same, IMO.
The whole business about stereotypes is about possessing accurate priors, and behaving in a way that reveals them. Which you did.
Of course, I do not suggest that LW should punish people for having accurate priors, and I don't probably disagree with you about offense (or offence?) in general. I actively try to not take offense because of stereotypes. But a lot of users here are doing their best to conceal their priors, e.g. about gender distribution among scientists by diligently balancing the use of male and female characters in their stories. I have no strong opinion about that. I only wanted to emphasise that people take offense from revealing some priors.
During discussion in my previous post, when we touched the subject of human statistical majorities, I had a side-thought. If taking the Less Wrong audience as an example, the statistics say that any given participant is strongly likely to be white, male, atheist, and well, just going by general human statistics, probably heterosexual.
But in my actual interaction, I've taken as a rule not to make any assumptions about the other person. Does it mean, I thought, that I reset my prior probabilities, and consciously choose to discard information? Not relying on implicit assumptions seems the socially right thing to do, I thought; but is it rational?
When I discussed it on IRC, this quote by sh struck me as insightful:
I came up with the following payoff matrix:
In this case, the second option is strictly preferable. In other words, I don't discard the information, but the repercussions to our social interaction in case of an incorrect guess outweigh the benefit from guessing correctly. And it also matters whether either Alice or Bob is an Asker or a Guesser.
One consequence I can think of is that with a sufficiently low p, or if Bob wouldn't be particularly offended by Alice's incorrect guess, taking the guess would be preferable. Now I wonder if we do that a lot in daily life with issues we don't consider controversial ("hmm, are you from my country/state too?"), and if all the "you're overreacting/too sensitive" complaints come from Alice incorrectly assessing a too low-by-absolute-value negative payoff in (0, 1).