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DanArmak comments on "Stupid" questions thread - Less Wrong Discussion

40 Post author: gothgirl420666 13 July 2013 02:42AM

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Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 July 2013 11:31:10AM 4 points [-]

How do people construct priors? Is it worth trying to figure out how to construct better priors?

Comment author: jmmcd 13 July 2013 09:41:33PM 2 points [-]

I don't think it's useful to think about constructing priors in the abstract. If you think about concrete examples, you see lots of cases where a reasonable prior is easy to find (eg coin-tossing, and the typical breast-cancer diagnostic test example). That must leave some concrete examples where good priors are hard to find. What are they?