= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Benito comments on "Stupid" questions thread - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (850)
To what degree does everyone here literally calculate numerical outcomes and make decisions based on those outcomes for everyday decisions using Bayesian probability? Sometimes I can't tell if when people say they are 'updating priors' they are literally doing a calculation and literally have a new number stored somewhere in their head that they keep track of constantly.
If anyone does this could you elaborate more on how you do this? Do you have a book/spreadsheet full of different beliefs with different probabilities? Can you just keep track of it all in your mind? Or calculating probabilities like this only something people do for bigger life problems?
Can you give me a tip for how to start? Is there a set of core beliefs everyone should come up with priors for to start? I was going to apologize if this was a stupid question, but I suppose it should by definition be one if it is in this thread.
I only literally do an expected outcome calculation when I care more about having numbers than I do about their validity, or when I have unusually good data and need rigor. Most of the time the uncertainties in your problem formulation will dominate any advantage you might get from doing actual Bayesian updates.
The advantage of the Bayesian mindset is that it gives you a rough idea of how evidence should affect your subjective probability estimate for a scenario, and how pieces of evidence of different strengths interact with each other. You do need to work through a reasonable number of examples to get a feel for how that works, but once you have that intuition you rarely need to do the math.