Cyan comments on Dissenting Views - Less Wrong

19 Post author: byrnema 26 May 2009 06:55PM

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Comment author: Cyan 27 May 2009 02:59:51PM 1 point [-]

A prior is a probability assigned without conditioning on evidence.

A prior is a probability distribution assigned prior to conditioning on some specific data. If I learn data1 today and data2 tomorrow, my overnight probability distribution is a posterior relative to data1 and a prior relative to data2.

The reason I nitpick this is because the priors we actually talk about here on LW condition on massive amounts of evidence.

Comment author: timtyler 27 May 2009 04:46:33PM 0 points [-]

More nitpicking: the data doesn't really have to be "specified" - at least, it can be presented in the form of a black box with contents that are not yet known, or perhaps not yet even measured.