nyralech comments on Priors as Mathematical Objects - Less Wrong

24 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 April 2007 03:24AM

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Comment author: roland 06 August 2015 05:14:36AM 0 points [-]

So then this initial probability estimate, 0.5, is not repeat not a "prior".

This really confuses me. Considering the Universe in your example, which consists only of the urn with the balls, wouldn't one of the prior hypotheses(e.g. case 2) be a prior and have all the necessary information to compute the lookup table?

In other words aren't the three following equivalent in the urn-with-balls universe?

  1. Hypothesis 2 + bayesian updating
  2. Python program 2
  3. The lookup table generated from program 2 + Procedure for calculating conditional probability(e.g. if you want to know the probability that the third ball is red, given that the first two balls drawn were white.)
Comment author: nyralech 06 August 2015 05:55:46PM 0 points [-]

Unless I am misunderstanding you, yes, that's precisely the point.

I don't understand why you are confused, though. None of these are, after all, numbers in (0,1), which would not contain any information as to how you would go about doing your updates given more evidence.

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